There Is More Than One Pro-Israel Position
Being pro-Israel can mean supporting Israel’s existence as a Jewish national home, supporting the policies of the Israeli government currently in power, supporting the settlement movement, opposing Palestinian statehood, supporting American military assistance to Israel, or some combination of those positions. Being pro-Palestinian can mean supporting Palestinian national self-determination, opposing the Israeli occupation, opposing Zionism, supporting a two-state solution, supporting a single democratic state, or embracing arguments far more hostile to Israel’s continued existence. These positions overlap, but they are not synonymous.
That distinction has become increasingly important as American public opinion has changed. It may be especially important for Black Democrats, whose growing sympathy for Palestinians can sometimes make the American debate appear to offer only two choices: defend the Israeli government’s policies or move toward an explicitly anti-Zionist politics.
There is considerably more political territory between those positions.
J Street provides one useful example. The American Jewish organization describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.” It supports Israel as a democratic national home for the Jewish people and recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with American and international law. At the same time, it maintains that Palestinians have an equivalent right to national self-determination, opposes permanent occupation, settlement expansion and annexation, and argues that Israel’s long-term security requires a negotiated political settlement that produces a Palestinian state.
Whether J Street’s prescriptions would work is a different and much harder question. Its importance here is more basic. Its existence demonstrates that “pro-Israel” is not a single ideology. A person can affirm Jewish national self-determination, regard Israel’s security as legitimate, reject Hamas and still oppose the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, continued settlement expansion, permanent occupation and the denial of Palestinian national self-determination.
That is a pro-Israel position many Americans rarely encounter in its complete form.
What the Polling Actually Shows
Changes in public opinion help explain why the distinction matters. Gallup reported in February 2026 that 41 percent of Americans said they sympathized more with Palestinians and 36 percent more with Israelis. The five-point difference was within the survey’s margin of error, so Gallup did not describe it as a statistically significant Palestinian lead. The larger historical finding was nevertheless substantial. From 2001 through 2025, Israelis had consistently held the advantage in Gallup’s measure, usually by much wider margins. Among Democrats in the 2026 survey, 65 percent sympathized more with Palestinians and 17 percent more with Israelis.
Those numbers can easily be interpreted as evidence that Democrats are simply moving from one side of the conflict to the other. Pew Research Center’s May 2026 survey suggests something more complicated. Rather than asking respondents only to choose between Israel and the Palestinians, Pew distinguished among Israeli people, Palestinian people, the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 67 percent expressed a favorable view of the Palestinian people and 43 percent a favorable view of Israeli people. Only 16 percent, however, viewed the Israeli government favorably, while 13 percent viewed Hamas favorably.
Those distinctions matter. They suggest that declining Democratic support for Israel’s government should not automatically be interpreted as hostility toward Israeli people, just as increasing sympathy for Palestinian people should not be interpreted as support for Hamas. The largest divide in the Pew numbers is not simply between Israelis and Palestinians. It is also between peoples and the political institutions or organizations claiming to represent them.
The numbers among Black Protestants are particularly interesting. Pew found that 50 percent viewed Israeli people favorably while 54 percent viewed Palestinian people favorably. The same survey found substantially less favorable views of the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Black Protestants are not interchangeable with Black Americans as a whole, and the data should not be generalized beyond the population Pew surveyed. Even with that limitation, however, the finding complicates the assumption that increasing Black sympathy for Palestinians necessarily requires growing hostility toward Israelis.
Something else may be occurring. Americans may be making distinctions that the political vocabulary of “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestinian” often conceals.
A Country Is Not Its Government
Americans ordinarily understand the difference between a country and the government temporarily administering it. Opposition to an American president is not opposition to the United States, and criticism of an administration’s military or foreign policy does not ordinarily imply a desire to abolish the country itself.
Israel contains the same kinds of political disagreements. Israelis disagree over Netanyahu, settlements, the Gaza war, the conduct of the military, judicial reform, relations between religion and state, Palestinian statehood and the future of the occupied territories. Israeli society includes secular and religious Jews, Haredim, Arab citizens, settlers, opponents of settlements, peace activists, former military officers critical of government policy and families directly affected by October 7 who themselves disagree about what the government should do.
Support for Israel’s continued existence therefore does not logically require support for whichever government holds power in Jerusalem.
J Street builds its politics around precisely that distinction. Its published principles state that American supporters of Israel have a right and responsibility to criticize Israeli government actions when they believe those policies harm Israel’s future, Palestinian rights or American interests. The organization argues that settlement expansion, annexation and prolonged occupation undermine rather than protect Israel’s ability to remain both Jewish and democratic.
That argument is different from the politics associated with Israel’s settlement movement and much of the Israeli right, but the disagreement occurs inside the broad category of support for Israel rather than outside it. J Street’s position begins with Jewish national self-determination and reaches different conclusions about what policies are necessary to preserve it.
Palestinians Are Also More Than Their Government or Armed Movements
The same distinction must be applied to Palestinians. Hamas-led armed groups carried out the October 7, 2023 assault on southern Israel. Human Rights Watch’s extensive investigation found that Hamas’s military wing and other participating Palestinian armed groups intentionally killed civilians, took hostages and committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Recognizing those crimes does not answer the political question posed by millions of Palestinians who are not Hamas. Nor does opposition to Hamas determine whether Palestinians should possess political rights, national self-determination or a state.
This is another area in which the familiar binary becomes inadequate. One can regard Hamas as responsible for grave crimes while also concluding that indefinite Israeli control of Palestinians is not a sustainable political settlement. Conversely, concern for Palestinian civilians and Palestinian political rights does not require minimizing the crimes committed on October 7 or treating Hamas as the legitimate embodiment of Palestinian aspirations.
J Street’s approach again illustrates this intermediate political space. Its proposals call for Gaza to be governed without Hamas exercising armed control while also envisioning Palestinian self-government and an end to indefinite Israeli military rule. Its larger framework ties Israeli security to Palestinian political rights rather than treating the two as mutually exclusive.
Whether such an arrangement can actually be constructed after October 7 and the devastation of Gaza is uncertain. Institutional weakness among Palestinian governing bodies, Israeli security fears, Hamas’s continued role, divisions within Israeli politics and the collapse of trust between the two populations all make implementation extraordinarily difficult. Describing an alternative political framework is much easier than producing the political conditions necessary to achieve it.
The distinction nevertheless remains important. Rejecting Hamas does not require rejecting Palestinian national self-determination, just as supporting Palestinian national self-determination does not require legitimizing Hamas.
The Weight of Two Histories
Black Americans understandably approach this conflict with historical memories of our own. Our history includes enslavement, racial restrictions on where people could live, exclusion from political power, dispossession, discriminatory systems of law and institutions capable of exercising enormous power over communities that possessed little effective control over them. It is not difficult to understand why Palestinian accounts of displacement, military occupation, unequal power and statelessness have become increasingly legible to many Black Americans.
Historical analogy, however, is most useful when it opens inquiry rather than closes it. The history of Jews also includes exile, legal exclusion, expulsions, massacres, pogroms, statelessness and genocide. Modern political Zionism predates the Holocaust. Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 as part of an emerging political movement seeking a secure Jewish national home.
The Holocaust did not create the Jewish connection to the land of Israel or create modern Zionism. It did, however, give catastrophic force to an argument Zionists had already advanced: a vulnerable minority whose security depends ultimately upon the protection of majority populations may discover that such protection can disappear.
For many Jews, Israel therefore represents more than another country’s foreign policy. It represents the restoration of national self-determination after long periods during which Jewish communities often possessed no sovereign power capable of guaranteeing their safety.
Recognizing that history does not resolve the Palestinian history of 1948. Roughly 750,000 Palestinians became refugees during the war surrounding Israel’s creation, and subsequent generations of Palestinians have lived across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere while the Palestinian national question has remained unresolved. Palestinian families possess their own memories of villages, homes, displacement, loss and attachment to the land.
The two histories cannot simply be collapsed into each other. Nor can either be made to disappear by insisting that only one people possesses a legitimate attachment to the same territory.
Jewish historical experience helps explain why calls to abolish Zionism can sound to many Jews less like disagreement over an Israeli government policy and more like a demand that Jews relinquish national self-determination. Palestinian history helps explain why a political order that protects Jewish national self-determination while indefinitely withholding comparable self-determination from Palestinians is experienced as profoundly unjust.
The conflict is difficult in part because both propositions can be understood simultaneously.
Zionism Does Not Answer Every Policy Question
Much of the contemporary argument treats Zionism as though the word itself determines every subsequent political position. Historically and politically, it does not.
At its core, political Zionism concerns Jewish national self-determination and the existence of a Jewish national home. That principle does not, by itself, establish the borders of Israel, determine the status of the West Bank, require settlement expansion, dictate what should happen in Gaza, decide the final status of Jerusalem or preclude Palestinian statehood.
Those questions have divided Zionists for generations.
J Street represents one answer. Its argument is that preserving Israel as both Jewish and democratic ultimately requires ending permanent Israeli control over Palestinians and allowing Palestinian national self-determination in a separate state. Its principles explicitly connect Israel’s long-term survival as a democratic Jewish homeland to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.
Other pro-Israel organizations, Israeli parties and Zionist movements reach different conclusions. Some regard territorial withdrawal as too dangerous. Some support continued settlement. Some reject the feasibility of Palestinian statehood under present conditions. Still others differ over whether a two-state arrangement remains possible at all.
Those disagreements reveal why it is analytically misleading to treat Zionism, Netanyahu, settlement policy and opposition to Palestinian statehood as interchangeable propositions.
The more precise question is not simply whether someone is a Zionist. It is what kind of political order that Zionism is expected to produce for Jews and Palestinians who inhabit the same land.
A Different Debate About Israel
The same distinctions become visible in American arguments about military assistance. J Street supports U.S. security assistance to Israel, but its policy agenda also calls for oversight and enforcement of the American laws governing such assistance. That differs from both a blanket arms embargo and an approach under which support for Israeli security effectively precludes conditions on how American military assistance is used.
This does not make one of these approaches correct merely because it occupies an intermediate position. Political moderation is not evidence of policy effectiveness. A two-state framework can fail. Security guarantees can prove inadequate. Palestinian institutions can fail to govern effectively. Israeli governments can conclude that territorial withdrawal presents unacceptable risks. Palestinians can conclude that the state offered to them lacks meaningful sovereignty. The history of failed negotiations provides ample reason to treat easy optimism with suspicion.
But disagreement about those questions should not obscure the larger point. There is a recognizable pro-Israel politics that supports Jewish national self-determination while also supporting Palestinian national self-determination; that regards Israeli security as legitimate while subjecting Israeli governments to criticism; that condemns Hamas without equating Hamas with Palestinians; and that regards indefinite occupation and settlement expansion as threats rather than necessary expressions of support for Israel.
That position is neither the politics of the Israeli right nor anti-Zionism.
It is one of several competing meanings of “pro-Israel.”
Beyond the Binary
This distinction matters because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed American political attitudes without necessarily changing them in the simple manner our political language suggests. Gallup’s findings show a historic movement in American sympathies. Pew’s findings reveal something more textured: many Americans distinguish Israeli people from the Israeli government and Palestinian people from Hamas.
For Black Americans, that distinction may provide room for a more historically complete conversation. Palestinian suffering does not require indifference to Jewish history. Jewish historical vulnerability does not require indifference to Palestinian dispossession. Condemnation of October 7 need not become a justification for permanent Palestinian statelessness, just as condemnation of suffering in Gaza need not require denying Israel’s legitimacy or dismissing Israeli fears about security.
None of this solves the conflict. It does something more modest but necessary: it clarifies the choices before we begin pretending to choose among them.
That is why “pro-Israel” should be treated as a category containing competing political arguments rather than as a complete policy position. The meaningful questions come afterward: what borders should exist, what becomes of the settlements, what political future awaits Gaza, what security arrangements could protect Israelis, what institutions could legitimately govern Palestinians, what happens to Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, how American military assistance should be governed, and whether two national movements can still find a political structure in which neither one’s survival depends upon the permanent subordination of the other.
J Street offers one set of answers. Other Zionists offer others, just as Palestinian political traditions offer competing visions of their own. The next task is not to assume that a position is persuasive because it occupies territory between familiar extremes. It is to examine whether its answers can withstand the questions that have defeated previous attempts at peace.
That is the test that matters. The political map is larger than the binary suggests, but discovering another place on the map is only the beginning.
Notes
- J Street, “Mission & Principles,” accessed September 30, 2026. J Street describes itself as organizing “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans,” supports Israel as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people, recognizes Palestinian national aspirations, and opposes prolonged occupation, annexation, and settlement expansion.
- Benedict Vigers, “Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans’ Middle East Sympathies,” Gallup, February 27, 2026. Gallup found that 41 percent of Americans sympathized more with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis; the five-point difference was not statistically significant. From 2001 through 2025, Israelis had consistently led in Gallup’s measure. Among Democrats in 2026, 65 percent sympathized more with Palestinians and 17 percent with Israelis.
- Pew Research Center, “Wide Partisan Gaps Exist in Americans’ Views of Israeli and Palestinian People and the Israeli Government,” July 9, 2026. The survey was conducted May 4–17, 2026. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 67 percent viewed Palestinian people favorably, 43 percent Israeli people, 16 percent the Israeli government, 33 percent the Palestinian Authority, and 13 percent Hamas.
- Pew Research Center, “Muslims and Religiously Unaffiliated View Palestinians More Favorably Than Other Groups Do,” July 9, 2026. Among Black Protestants, 50 percent expressed a favorable view of Israeli people and 54 percent a favorable view of Palestinian people.
- Human Rights Watch, “October 7 Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes by Hamas-led Groups,” July 17, 2024. Human Rights Watch concluded that Hamas’s military wing and at least four other Palestinian armed groups committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity during the October 7 assault, including intentional killings of civilians and hostage-taking.
- J Street, “Mission & Principles,” accessed September 30, 2026. J Street states that Palestinians, like Jews, possess a right to national self-determination and argues that Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic requires ending permanent control over Palestinians and establishing a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Survivors and the Establishment of the State of Israel,” accessed September 30, 2026. The museum places the emergence of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century and identifies Theodor Herzl and the First Zionist Congress, convened in Basel in 1897, as central to the development of the modern Zionist movement.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Alfred Dreyfus and the ‘Dreyfus Affair,’” accessed September 30, 2026. The museum describes the antisemitism surrounding the Dreyfus Affair and its influence on Theodor Herzl, who published The Jewish State in 1896 and convened the First Zionist Congress the following year.
- United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, “Palestine Refugees,” accessed September 30, 2026. UNRWA defines Palestine refugees as persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1, 1946, and May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict. The agency began operations in 1950 serving approximately 750,000 Palestine refugees.
- United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, “Palestine Refugees: An Unresolved Question at the Time of the Syria Crisis.” UNRWA states that approximately 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes during the 1948 war.
- J Street, “Mission & Principles,” accessed September 30, 2026. J Street distinguishes support for Israel from support for particular Israeli government policies and argues that settlement expansion, annexation, and prolonged occupation threaten Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic.
- J Street, “Why the US Should Place Restrictions on Offensive Arms Transfers to Israel,” September 10, 2025. J Street called for restrictions on certain American offensive weapons transfers or uses in circumstances involving Palestinian displacement, settler violence, annexation, or violations of U.S. law, while continuing to support Israel’s defensive security needs.