Biden and the Left Fail: 82% of Americans Support Israel; 67% Oppose Hamas Cease-Fire

Joe Biden has spent the past week talking publicly about his attempts to force Israel into a cease-fire with Hamas. He even made that part of his appearance this week on late-night television, and blamed Benjamin Netanyahu for its delay, and warned that Israel risked losing “international support” if it didn’t do more to end the war. 

Netanyahu slapped back at that criticism yesterday, suggesting that it’s Biden who’s out of touch with reality:

“Since the start of the war, I have been leading a diplomatic campaign to block pressure designed to end the war prematurely and to secure strong support for Israel,” said Netanyahu in a video message.

“We have had considerable success. Today, a Harvard-Harris poll was published which shows that 82% of the American public supports Israel, meaning that four out of five U.S. citizens support Israel and not Hamas,” he continued.

And Netanyahu’s correct. A new Harvard/Harris CAPS poll shows 82% of Americans supporting Hamas. More to the point, it also shows that two-thirds of Americans oppose any cease-fire deal that leaves Hamas in place in Gaza, despite pro-Hamas activism in the streets … and the media. 

Let’s take a look at the slides. First up, we have the toplines on overall support and the impression of how Israel is conducting its war, along with age demos on both questions:

Not only do 82% support Israel over Hamas in this poll, but support for Israel never dips below 66% in any age cohort. Two-thirds of Americans think Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties, which is even more consistent across the age demos. The near-consensus support for Israel includes 78% of Democrats, 75% of urban voters, 73% of black voters, and 82% of women. 

In a separate question, 73% of Americans see the October 7 attacks as genocidal, again with consistent majorities or supermajorities in each age demo. Seventy percent of Democrats agree too, as the crosstabs show, as do 72% of urban voters. On yet another question, 73% of Americans also reject the claim that Palestinian grievances justified the October 7 massacres and atrocities. Note too that this question specifies “Palestinian” rather than “Hamas,” too. 

What about the cease-fire? That’s almost as big a political loser as blaming Israel for the war:

Again, not only do two-thirds of Americans oppose Joe Biden’s push for a cease-fire in place, majorities in every age demo do as well. So do 63% of women, 64% of college graduates (!), 53% of black voters, and 70% of women. A similar percentage of Americans support the continued ground invasion (63/37), again with majorities across all age demos. That’s true even with the pollster making an explicit point about 1.2 million Gazans being caught in the crossfire. In fact, once again, this position has majority support in every demo, as can be seen in the crosstabs.

One rarely sees a consensus of this magnitude in American politics, especially in foreign policy. So how did Joe Biden get this so wrong? Incompetence is certainly one compelling answer, but so is political cravenness. Biden has done a slow-motion cave to the radical progressives in the Democrat Party mainly to protect his own hide and to curry favor from the elite in Academia and in the entertainment industry — which is why he ripped Netanyahu and pitched the cease-fire on Seth Meyer’s show.

But this poll demonstrates more than just Biden’s political incompetence; it also demonstrates his political impotence, as well as the impotence of the radical Left on public opinion. Despite nearly five months of angry demonstrations (or perhaps even because of them) and but-akshuallys and Hamas propaganda amplification from the mainstream media, the common sense of the American electorate remains in place. They aren’t siding with the radical Islamists that raped, pillaged, and slaughtered their way across southern Israel, but instead choose to stand with the ally that absorbed 17 years of attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, on the ground and from the air. 

Perhaps Biden will learn a lesson from this survey by the normally friendly-ish Harvard/Harris CAPS poll. But Biden so rarely learns from his own failures, because he largely refuses to acknowledge them in the first place. Other Democrats had better take heed, though, and stop taking their foreign-policy cues from Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar.