NEW YORK — What did the polls say before October 7?
That is the first question Americans should ask before allowing today’s shifting public opinion to substitute for facts.
For decades, Americans generally sympathized more with Israel than with its enemies. Gallup’s long-running Middle East polling shows that Americans historically leaned far more toward Israelis than Palestinians, including 48 percent to 11 percent in 2002, 64 percent to 12 percent in 2013, and 54 percent to 31 percent in February 2023, just months before October 7. By February 2026, that had shifted dramatically, with 41 percent sympathizing more with Palestinians and 36 percent with Israelis. Polls moved. The facts did not.
Then came October 7, 2023, not as a spontaneous outburst or isolated terror incident, but as the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history. CSIS reported that about 1,200 people were killed, around 250 were taken hostage, and more than 1,000 Hamas fighters entered southern Israel through nearly 30 breach points in the Gaza barrier. This was not symbolism. It was an invasion, a massacre, and a kidnapping operation carried out with planning, training, and tactical sophistication.
And before the dust had even settled, another front of the war was already underway.
Across campuses, city streets, and social media, the propaganda battle ignited almost immediately. Israel was still reeling from the invasion and hostage crisis when demonstrations and narrative framing were already intensifying. The invaded country was rapidly recast as the primary villain. Context began disappearing. Iran’s long project of surrounding Israel with armed proxies disappeared. Hamas’s declared goal of destroying Israel disappeared. The brutality of October 7 was pushed aside by a narrative wave that moved faster than history and more emotionally than facts.
October 7 was not only a military assault. It was also the opening of a propaganda war. Hamas did not simply launch a massacre and wait for events to unfold. It launched an attack knowing Israel would respond militarily. It knew Gaza’s density would generate devastating images. It knew civilian suffering would dominate headlines. And it understood that many people in the West would react to images before asking harder questions about strategy, responsibility, and intent.
Hamas did not merely attack Israel. It fought in a way designed to shape the world’s reaction to Israel’s response. Human rights organizations and analysts had documented long before this war that Palestinian armed groups launched rockets from or near populated areas in Gaza, endangering their own civilians while also attacking Israeli civilians. That does not erase civilian suffering in Gaza. It does explain why an enemy that embeds itself among civilians should not automatically be rewarded with moral innocence simply because the images that follow are horrifying.
That is why I say October 7 was not only a massacre. It was also a trap.
Hamas knew Israel would strike back. It knew the urban battlefield of Gaza would magnify destruction. It knew many in the international media and on Western campuses would treat the aftermath as proof of Israeli evil rather than first asking why the war was being fought that way. In other words, the military attack and the propaganda attack were linked from the beginning.
The facts begin with Iran.
Iran has spent years building, funding, arming, and backing a ring of proxies around Israel. Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah in Lebanon. Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Houthis. Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. These are not unrelated groups operating in isolation. They are components of a broader axis that shares hatred of Israel and hostility toward the democratic West. Reuters reported in the immediate aftermath of October 7 that the White House said Iran was complicit in the attack, while also stating there was no direct public evidence at that moment that Tehran had ordered or directed the operation itself. That distinction matters. Iran did not need to be proven to have personally pushed every button on October 7 to be central to the war. It spent years building the machinery that made such an attack possible.
This is why the debate cannot honestly be reduced to a week by week fluctuation in polls.
A politician who looks at Israel and says, “The polls are changing, so maybe I should change too,” is not showing wisdom. He or she is showing weakness. Convictions are being outsourced to political weather. Judgment is being shaped by activists, slogans, and intimidation rather than by facts.
And the facts are not hard to see.
For years before October 7, Israel lived under rocket fire from Gaza. Reuters reported on the long burden borne by Sderot and the surrounding area, where residents had lived under years of incoming rockets. Reuters also reported in 2011 that Israel deployed Iron Dome near Sderot as a response to persistent Palestinian shelling, and Britannica notes that after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, rocket fire escalated and helped trigger larger clashes in 2008. Over time the rocket threat grew, and Israel’s answer for years was not to reoccupy Gaza permanently but to defend its civilians through missile defense.
Think about what that means. What other country would absorb years of cross border rocket fire from a neighboring territory and still make missile defense rather than full reoccupation its central answer?
That history matters when people talk as if Israel’s first instinct was always maximum force. It was not. Israel spent years relying heavily on defense and interception, often in partnership with the United States. Even Iron Dome, a defensive system designed to stop rockets aimed at civilians, became controversial in some American political circles. That tells you how distorted the conversation has become.
Gaza’s history also exposes how dishonest the colonial narrative is. After Israel’s War of Independence, Egypt controlled Gaza from 1948 until 1967. Israel captured Gaza and Sinai in the Six Day War. In the Camp David framework, Sinai’s return to Egypt moved forward, while Gaza’s future was folded into the still unresolved Palestinian autonomy question rather than settled as a simple territorial handoff. Then in 2005, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza altogether, removing all Israeli security forces and settlements.
That is not the behavior of a country desperate to colonize Gaza forever. It is the behavior of a country that did not want Gaza enough to keep sacrificing for it.
The tragedy is that Gaza could have taken that opening and built something productive on its Mediterranean coast. It could have focused on civil society, commerce, tourism, and self government. Instead, Hamas turned Gaza into a launch pad for rockets, terror infrastructure, and permanent war.
The colonial slogan fares no better under scrutiny. The Jewish people are not foreign to the land of Israel. Rome conquered ancient Judea, crushed Jewish revolts, destroyed the Temple, and under Hadrian sought to erase Jewish identity from the land by renaming the province Syria Palaestina and barring Jews from Jerusalem. The land later passed through a succession of empires, including Byzantine, Arab Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. So when activists call modern Israel a colonial implant, they turn history upside down. The Jewish story is not one of colonizing a foreign land. It is one of a people returning to the land from which empires had driven them. In that sense, Zionism is far closer to decolonization than colonialism.
Israel is also not the simplistic “white European colony” described in activist slogans. Modern Israeli society includes Jews descended from communities in Europe, yes, but also from North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, the former Soviet world, and the Americas. The reduction of Israel to “white colonialism” may be emotionally useful for propaganda, but it is historically and demographically false. The Jewish people did not arrive in the land of Israel as strangers to it. They returned to it.
And this matters for another reason.
If Americans misunderstand Israel, they will misunderstand the larger conflict as well. Israel is not just defending itself against a local enemy. It is on the front line against a broader movement rooted in Islamic jihadism and financed, armed, and ideologically driven in large part by the Iranian regime.
This is why the pressure to follow the polls is so dangerous.
Polls can tell us what people feel. They can tell us what narratives are landing. They can tell us how effectively propaganda is working. But they do not determine what is true. They do not determine who invaded whom on October 7. They do not determine whether Iran’s proxy strategy is real. They do not determine whether Hamas glorifies murder, hostage taking, and the use of civilians as shields. And they certainly do not determine whether democratic leaders have the courage to face facts when facts become unpopular.
Real leadership begins where poll reading ends.
A serious leader should ask simple questions. Does he or she understand that Israel is surrounded by Iranian backed proxies committed to its destruction? Does he or she understand that October 7 was both a military attack and a propaganda operation? Does he or she understand that the people shouting loudest are not always the people most grounded in truth? Does he or she understand that standing with Israel does not require indifference to Palestinian suffering, but it does require moral clarity about Hamas, Iran, and the nature of the war?
These are not fringe questions. They are the central questions.
And they matter not only for Israel, but for the United States. Israel has always needed support from both major American parties. If support for Israel becomes the property of only one party, then Israel’s enemies will have won one of their most important strategic victories. They will have turned support for the Jewish state from a broad democratic principle into a partisan wedge.
That is exactly why Americans, especially Democrats, should resist the temptation to bend with the loudest activist winds.
If we truly want to end the cycle of violence between Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah, then we have to go to the source.
October 7 was not just a Hamas war against Israel. It was the opening of a broader Iranian proxy war against Israel. Hamas launched the invasion. Hezbollah joined the fight. The Houthis joined the fight. These are not disconnected actors. They are parts of a larger system built, armed, funded, and encouraged by Tehran.
That is why the real question is not only how to manage each new round of violence. The real question is how to end the regime that keeps fueling it.
When the United States joined Israel in striking Iran during the 2026 war, the conflict was no longer deniable as somebody else’s regional problem. It was exposed for what it is: a wider war driven by a regime whose ambitions go far beyond Gaza. Reuters reported on April 1, 2026, that Trump told Reuters, “We have had full regime change,” and Reuters reported on April 6 that he said Iranians should rise up against their government if a ceasefire were declared.
I am not attacking the people of Iran. Quite the opposite. Many Iranians want freedom. Many want an end to the dictatorship that has brought repression to its own people and war to the region. If we want to stop the cycle of violence at its source, then we should stop pretending the source is only Gaza. The source is the regime in Tehran. Reuters reported this week that Iranian dissidents are still warning the world about executions and repression inside Iran, even after the recent war.
And that is why I remain hopeful that behind the scenes, a larger strategy is still in motion. Because if the world abandons the goal of ending this regime, then we should expect more proxy wars, more bloodshed, more propaganda, and more generations condemned to live under the shadow of the same nightmare.
Do your research.
Study the history.
Look at what the polls said before October 7, and then ask yourself whether facts changed, or whether narratives changed.
Do not let slogans replace understanding.
Do not let propaganda replace history.
And please share that message with others.
Because if we continue letting popularity determine truth, then we will not only fail Israel. We will fail ourselves.
