If It's a Genocide, How Can You Be Okay With It?
A strange poll result on Israel gets me thinking.
Editor’s Note: The mass murder at Annunciation School yesterday hit very close to home. The local Catholic community is not large, and I have more than one connection to the shooting (all with at least two degrees of separation, thank God).
However, after thinking carefully about it, I have concluded that there is not one damn thing I can share on this blog without betraying confidences. The only thing I am comfortable saying is that, while most local journalists appear to be doing their earnest best to tell the full story, none of them have come close, at least not yet. (I wonder whether that’s true of all mass shootings. Maybe.)
This article is a polling quickie I started writing on Tuesday. It is surreal to write about polls right now, but, finishing this article tonight is a bit of a coping mechanism for me. I hope you do not mind. If you believe in the efficacy of prayer,1 please pray for the martyred children, for all the other victims and near-victims, for their families, the first responders, the priest, and all others who need our prayers right now.
A recent YouGov poll caught my eye:
The same poll found:
More Americans say that “Israel's attacks on Gaza are unjustified and harm too many innocent Palestinians” (41%) than say that “Israel is justified in its attacks on Gaza as a response to threats from Hamas” (32%).
Taken one at a time, none of these results surprises me very much. It’s been clear for some time that American policy on Israel has exited its “bipartisan consensus” era and entered its “partisan polarization” era, so we would expect to see strong but sharply divided views. That’s just what we do find: sharp partisan divisions over genocide, near-even splits on sympathies, and a fairly close divide over the conduct of the war.2
Taken together, though, this is an odd result.
I very recently explained my own personal views on the Israel-Gaza War (and placed it safely behind a paywall!), so I won’t belabor this post by telling you whether I think it’s a genocide. (I am carefully writing this post so you can’t tell what I think about it.)
Regardless of what I think, 43% of Americans think the Gaza War is a genocide. That’s a clear plurality!3 Many progressive voters are seeing this poll result and asking, hey! If a plurality of Americans think this is a genocide, why are elected Democrats still so dang equivocal about the war? Their premises are sound: Elected Democrats have been increasingly critical of Israel, but, unlike their activist base, few are calling the war genocidal or making open apologiae for Hamas. Why not?
The answer, I think, is captured in the oddness of this result.
If you’d asked me before I read this poll, I would have assumed, without question, that anyone who believes Israel is committing genocide must logically sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis. After all, if a pollster asked you, “Who do you sympathize more with? The Nazi Reich, or Jewish targets of Nazi genocide?” the obviously correct answer is “the Jews.” If a pollster asked you, “Who do you sympathize more with? The Hutus, or the Tutsis?” you would first quickly and surreptitiously Google which side did the genocide (it was the Hutus) and then correctly answer, “the Tutsis.”
It would be really weird to say, “Yes, I believe the Nazis did a Holocaust to the Jews, but I’m not sure which side is worth cheering for. Both sides, man.”
Yet, according to this poll, something like one-quarter of Americans said pretty much exactly that.
43% of Americans believe Israel is conducting a genocide. Yet only 25% of Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians! Around a quarter4 of Americans think something like, “Yes, Israel is genociding Palestine, but, no, I’m not sure which side I’m on.” (Some may have even think, “Yes, Israel is genociding Palestine… but I’m still Team Israel!”)
Something quite like this is true even in the pro-Palestinian Democratic party:
Two-thirds of Democrats believe Israel is committing a genocide…
…but fewer than half of Democrats sympathize with Palestine over Israel.5
Independent and swing voters, needless to say, are even more equivocal.
This is what elected Democrats are picking up on and reacting to: their base thinks that Israel is committing genocide (so the anti-Zionist faction demands clear, harsh sanctions against Israel), but their base is also clearly signaling that it nevertheless has lots of sympathy for Israel (so elected officials are riding the fence).
But why do they think that?
Whatever your own views on whether Israel is conducting a genocide,6 it’s very weird for someone to think there’s a genocide going on and not side clearly with the victims of the genocide over the perpetrators.
I believe the poll. The firm is reputable and the margins are decisive, so the poll is almost certainly telling us what the American public really thinks (within a modest margin for error). It just seems to be the case that about a quarter of Americans believe this very odd thing!
So I got to thinking about possible explanations for it. What would make an American say, “Yes, Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians, but no, I don’t sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis.” and came up with a few ideas:
(a) The Face-Value Explanation: a quarter of Americans are fine with genocide, at least against the Palestinians (Arabphobia?). In fact, they’re not just fine with genocide, they’re confident enough to tell a pollster that they are okay with genocide! There appear to be demonstrably at least a few such people in this sample: 43% said that Israel is committing a genocide, but only 41% said Israel’s attacks are unjustified. Conclusion: 2% of this sample said that genocide is justified (or at least might be)!7
(b) The Equal Weight Explanation: a quarter of Americans think the Palestinians and/or Hamas do so much heinous stuff to Israel and the Jews that, even though Israel is perpetrating (what they see as) an actual genocide, the genocide still pretty much breaks even with the evil stuff Palestinians get up to. Perhaps they place a lot of weight on the (horrible) details of the October 7 massacre, with the rapes and the murdered babies and all that.
(c) The Watered Down Genocide Explanation: for decades, the common understanding of “genocide” was “a program of mass extermination,” akin to what the Nazis did to the Jews (and the gypsies and the gays and so on) or what the Hutus did to the Tutsis. However, the original definition of “genocide” was much broader… and both the academic and legal definitions of “genocide” followed suit. As a result, it is increasingly common to see the “genocide” label attached to things that involved no death camps and sometimes even no massacres.
On the one hand, there are good historical and semantic reasons for doing this. On the other hand, the reason ordinary people recoil so intensely from the word “genocide” is because everyone used to have to read Night by Elie Wiesel in school.8 It’s a word we associate with Auschwitz, and that’s why genocide is so bad.
Perhaps some Americans have started internalizing the broader, academic definition, and so they are more likely to identify something as a “genocide”… but also less likely to treat “genocide” as the moral crime nonpareil, and therefore less likely to unequivocally condemn its perpetrators. This is precisely what critics of the broader, academic definition of “genocide” predicted, so it wouldn’t be shocking to see this actually happening.
(d) The Forced Binary Explanation: a quarter of Americans have deeply conflicting views about Israel and Palestine and are trying to express support or opposition for each side, imperfectly, through polls. When a pollster calls you and asks, “Do you think Israel is committing genocide?” you might think, “No, I don’t think that, but if I say it the pollster and the public will think that means I think everything Israel is doing is fine, and it’s not, and it’s important for people to know that Israel has gone too far, so I’m going to answer ‘yes’ even though I don’t quite believe that.” Then, when given the opportunity to express a more nuanced view in the “which side do you sympathize with?” question, these respondents answered more honestly, with the centrist “both sides” answer. When I get polled (it happens, very occasionally!), I feel this pressure keenly on questions that force a binary, because I know polls have power and that shadowy forces may use my answers against me if they can put me in a particular box. I’m sure other respondents do, too.
(e) The Priming Explanation: it appears from the survey that the “which side do you sympathize with?” question was the very first question respondents were asked about the Israel conflict. The “genocide” question, however, was consistently asked immediately after the question, “Is there a hunger crisis in Gaza?” (Result: Yes +66), which came immediately after the question about whether Israel is justified in its attacks (Result: No +9). It could be that these questions primed respondents to think about the more negative aspects of Israel’s actions, leading them to conclude that Israel is conducting a genocide. If you asked the “sympathy” question after these other questions (rather than before), you might get a different result (or vice versa).
(f) The Lizardman’s Constant: some Americans weren't listening closely9 / were deliberately trolling / are clinically insane, and so gave this bizarre answer for no reason and didn’t really mean it.
There you go! Six hypotheses to explain the strange genocide-neutrality of a quarter of Americans!
I’m even pretty sure I know which is correct.
Are you?
Think about it for a minute, then I’ll tell you what I think the answer is.
…Ready?
The answer is “all of them.”
No, that wasn’t fair. However, this is an important lesson about interpreting polls.
Polls are messy and people are very, very weird. Polls tell you what they said, but they do not and cannot tell you why they said those things. Every individual human is an unstable cauldron of reasons and emotions. They all have their own ways of reasoning to things. If you ever forget this, and impose a single monolithic explanation for why respondents said something in a poll, you flatten a great swath of Americans into one narrow mold.
For example, I think this happens a lot when characterizing Trump voters and Harris voters.
Most Trump voters were not white, male, MAGA diehards. Millions were, enough to give that impression, but there were millions more, too: unhappy Nikki Haley supporters; conservative Hispanic and Black voters who could no longer tolerate the Democrats; and many other factions. Most Harris voters were not young, college-educated feminists. Millions were, enough to give that impression, but there were millions more, too: elderly veterans upset at Trump’s treatment of the military and his contempt for electoral rules; suburban Republicans fed up with Trump beating up on solid conservatives like Brian Kemp (R-GA); and many other factions. You don’t want to flatten either side into their stereotype, or you won’t understand what happened or what’s going to happen.
The roughly 25% of Americans who think that Israel is committing a genocide but aren’t sure which side they support are undoubtedly as diverse a group as any. We have come up with six plausible explanations for them. There is probably some truth in all the explanations. We can’t say exactly how much without more polling, but a good starting point is to assume that all explanations are about equally true:
~4% of Americans are pro-Israeli genocide.
~4% of Americans think the Palestinians do so much terrible stuff that it weighs just as heavily as an Israeli genocide.
~4% of Americans have such a diluted sense of the word “genocide” that they just don’t attach as much moral weight to it anymore as the rest of us still do.
~4% of Americans don’t really think it’s a genocide, but they do think what’s going on is bad and they used the “genocide” question to express their disapproval.
~4% of Americans can be persuaded into believing that Israel is committing a genocide if they are first primed by a question about whether Gaza is starving.
~4% of Americans—the Lizardman’s Constant—erred or answered irrationally.
Some of these may be relatively more important, others less,10 but, in the absence of empirical data, we should probably just treat them all as more or less equal.
This makes our original odd finding much less odd. It’s not that a quarter of Americans are weirdly chill about genocide. A quarter of Americans likely have a variety of reasons for answering the way they did, which created what is likely an illusion of a huge bloc of Americans that thinks Israel is committing a genocide but are more or less okay with it.
It’s a good thing we didn’t dismiss the poll out-of-hand as soon as we saw that bizarre data point! (Many people would!) Polls are amazing tools, but there are times when you have to think them through to understand what they’re really telling you.11
If you do not believe in the efficacy of prayers, that’s fine, but please do not tell a bunch of grieving Catholics that they’re worthless and mock “thoughts and prayers” to our faces. Most of you are not doing this, and I thank you for your many other kindnesses, but somehow we’ve reached a point in our country where the power of prayer is openly denounced after shootings, and, especially for kids who were killed at prayer, this is profoundly unhelpful for those close to the murders.
We also see a lot of “not-sures” alongside the roughly-even polarized camps. This is because the Israel issue is still in the early stages of polarization. In all probability, this will play out the usual way:
Each camp will incorporate their views into the platform and policy aims of “their” political party.
In both camps, remaining activists who find themselves in the “wrong” political party will leave—or be forced out. (This happened to most pro-life Democrats and most pro-choice Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s, as abortion polarized.)
Once both parties have a unified institutional position on the issue, and incorporate that position into the messaging of their allied media, nearly all the “not-sures” will simply follow the lead of the co-partisans they trust. “After all,” they’ll think, “there’s only two positions on offer. One of those positions is bravely supported by the Good Guys from my party. I like those guys already because they are smart about so many other issues. The other position is supported only by the Evil, Slavering Enemy Party and its villainous minions, who are regularly mocked in the social media I follow. Which side is more likely to be correct?” Obviously, the Good Guys.
Once all the not-sures follow their party’s lead, we end up with one more 50-50 hot-button issue dividing the electorate.
However, if one camp can, somehow, persuade all the not-sures (from both parties) now, before the issue is fully polarized… they could win the issue forever. This transition period is the one time when anything can happen to America’s Israel policy—but probably won’t.
28% say it is not a genocide, and 29% said that they are not sure.
Showing my work: 43% minus 25% equals 18%, which is a little less than one-fifth of Americans. That’s the minimum number of Americans who think this.
However, the true number is likely several points higher. After all, there are undoubtedly some respondents who said they sympathize more with the Palestinians but who do not consider Israeli conduct genocidal (or aren’t sure). We don’t have the raw data or the crosstabs, so we can only guess at the number who gave this “moderate pro-Palestinian” answer.
However, if just 5% of respondents gave the “moderate pro-Palestinian” answer, then, mathematically, 23% of respondents gave the odd “yes it’s genocide but I’m not sure which side I’m on” answer. If 10% of respondents gave the “moderate pro-Palestinian” answer, then 28% gave the “neutral toward genocide” answer. The more “moderate pro-Palestinians” we assume, the more “neutral toward genocide” respondents there have to be for the pollster to have gotten the results it did.
43% of Democrats sympathize more with Palestine. That’s a plurality, but it’s not a majority.
29% sympathize with both sides “about equally,” 18% aren’t sure, and 9% of Democrats sympathize more with Israel. At minimum, 22% of Democrats think there’s a genocide but don’t think it commands their sympathies, and the reality is probably a few points higher than that—very similar to the general population.
Again, I’m deliberately playing my own views close to the chest this time; see my recent piece for my own 10-page moral evaluation of the war.
You can’t brush this off as a margin-of-error problem, because these are two questions within the same poll. Margin-of-error matters when comparing polls to general populations or to other polls, but not when comparing different answers within the same poll for the same population. There were, demonstrably, some actual human beings who actually answered this poll by saying, “Yes, that’s a genocide,” but who did not say, “That genocide is unjustified” when given the opportunity. There may be other reasons for this besides being pro-genocide (see the other items in this list), but it’s still startling.
This was a very good experience, though we read it in eighth grade, which may have been a tad young. Not much silences a class of 30 eighth-graders, but I’ll never forget the slow, almost silent shuffle to Art class right after we finished the book in Literature.
…okay, this time I am repeating myself, but that was a paywalled article, so many of you haven’t heard it before. (Not to mention the rest of the Nativity Eighth Grade War Curriculum.)
Fun fact: I have done this in a phone poll. There’s no easy “wait, go back, I just realized I misunderstood your question” button when dealing with a live interviewer who clearly wants to be finished as much as you do.
I suspect, without direct evidence, that the priming and false-binary explanations are doing a disproportionate amount of the work here. My favorite explanation is “the definition of genocide has been diluted,” because it is elegant and confirms my prior beliefs, but that’s a good reason to doubt that it’s playing an outsized role here; confirmation bias is powerful and wily and we must always be on the lookout against it when analyzing data.
However, don’t “think them through” so much that you talk yourself out of believing what the poll is clearly saying! If I do another of these polling literacy articles, it’ll be about how people misinterpret partisan sampling bias and try to “unskew” polls.