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Israel and the West’s Future Reputational Problem [1]

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Date: 2024-07

The long-term problem for Israel and its allies is that, though comparable data on global attitudes towards either Israel or the Palestinians is dated, a growing number of countries and people will likely be less sympathetic towards Israel in the future economic order. The last large scale comparison, conducted by Pew Research Center in 2013, indicated that in China, 41% of respondents had an unfavourable and 25% a very unfavourable opinion of Israel. Surveyed in 2007, when asked which side of the conflict they sympathised with, participants in India and Brazil were more sympathetic to Israel (30% and 32%) compared to the Palestinians (20% and 15%). Of the other non-G7 countries near the top of the rankings, opinion was broadly split in Russia and Mexico. But attitudes to Israel are less favourable in other countries moving up. In Indonesia, 68% of respondents sympathised with the Palestinians, with predictable hostility in Turkey, Nigeria and other countries with large Muslim populations.

Israel’s ‘PR problem’ is deepened further by large numbers of younger people holding an unfavourable opinion of the country or its role in the conflict. In the US, a March 2023 Pew survey indicated that 56% of Americans aged 18–29, and 47% aged 30–39 have an unfavourable view of Israel, in contrast to older generations’ more favourable opinions. This trend is replicated in other surveys. In Europe, fewer than half of respondents tend to sympathise with one side in the conflict but, with the exception of Germany which is broadly split, they sympathise more with the Palestinians. And across Europe, younger people are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than older people. In a 2023 survey, 36% of Canadians aged 18–34 and 31% of those aged 35–44 viewed Israel as ‘a state with segregation similar to apartheid’, the most negative option available and the top choice for these age groups in contrast to Canadians above 55 (21% chose that option, and 20% of those above 65).

Future Isolation

For Western countries, support for Israel presents two problems. First, it smacks of double standards and undermines their stated values and policies and approaches to influencing governance outside the West. The sheer level of bombing is antithetical to the principle of minimising civilian casualties. Within a week of the 7 October attacks, the IDF claimed to have dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, more than the US dropped annually against Islamic State in 2014–17. By the end of January 2024, at least half of Gaza’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, together with large swathes of farmland. Nearly 26,000 Palestinians have now been killed in the conflict, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, a data source most international observers recognise as accurate.

It is difficult for Western countries to advocate that other parts of the world need to democratise, uphold human rights, support international law, and so on, when the Israeli government is inflicting this level of destruction, domestically implementing reforms to reduce judicial independence, and restricting rights based on religion/ethnicity (either for security reasons or, in the view of human rights organisations, to the level of apartheid). Moreover, autocratic powers, such as Russia and China, have more closely aligned themselves with the Palestinian position. They are already using Western backing for Israel to challenge the narrative that Western countries genuinely support an equitable, fair and just solution to the current conflict, or, indeed, a reshaping of the global order in accordance with these values.

Second, support for Israel may also undermine Western countries’ national interests, including key commercial relationships. In the coming decades, Western countries will need to forge security, diplomatic and economic relationships in a global economy they will no longer dominate.

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[1] Url: https://my.rusi.org/resource/israel-and-the-wests-future-reputational-problem.html

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