Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren The inflamed passions of Americans over Israel and Palestine have presented a political challenge for JOE BIDEN. The president, in speeches, has given voice to the suffering on both sides. And the administration, led by the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and the Office of Public Engagement, has held hundreds of conversations since Oct. 7 with community leaders about the conflict and efforts to get aid to Gaza. But lingering frustrations among Arab-Americans who want Biden to call for a ceasefire threaten his standing in places like Michigan, a key general election battleground. Conversely, he could lose some pro-Israel voters the more he criticizes Prime Minister BENJAMIN NETANYAHU for the carnage in Gaza. Privately, Biden aides and allies insist his response reflects the American mainstream: critical of Israel on certain fronts but largely supportive of its military campaign; pushing for Palestinian rights and religious tolerance while trying to isolate extremists. And now, there is new evidence to bolster the idea that a nuanced approach to this seemingly intractable conflict is more in line with popular opinion than it often seems. JONATHAN SCHULMAN, a political scientist at Northwestern University, along with a team of researchers, surveyed more than 30,000 Americans for a new survey on attitudes toward Israel and Palestine, Jews and Muslims. The results, shared exclusively with West Wing Playbook, show that the loudest, more absolutist activist voices on both sides of the conflict don’t reflect the feelings of the country writ large. “A lot of the discussion of international conflict, you see a lot of sports metaphors — who's winning? Who’s losing? Who are you rooting for? It's really not that simple,” said Schulman. Respondents were asked to use “feeling thermometers” to show how warmly or coldly they felt, on a scale of zero to 100. The larger sample size, which included people from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., helped the research team to, among other things, break up age groups by religious and political associations and have greater confidence about the divides. Across all demographic groups, respondents rated Jews more positively than Israel — and Muslims more positively than Palestine, although the margins differed based on age, religion and political identification. Younger Americans, for instance, were less likely than older Americans to rate Israel favorably, but they still signaled strong support for Jews. Among respondents aged 18-24, 40 percent said they were supportive of Israel but 71 percent said they were supportive of Jews. Among Democrats in that age group, the gap was even greater: Only 36 percent supported Israel but 75 percent showed support for Jews. “It’s becoming increasingly important to pay attention to these generational divides over foreign policy,” Schulman said. Such distinctions are clearer in a study with a much larger sample than traditional polls with a sample size of 1,200 or so respondents, said MATTHEW BAUM, a public policy professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government who was part of the research team. “We wanted to see what it would look like if we had a little more statistical power to know what people actually think.” While the survey shows a significant portion of the American public is antisemitic (18 percent of respondents rated Jews unfavorably), it makes clear that criticism of Israel itself is not necessarily driven by — or easily dismissed as — antisemitism. It should be noted that the survey also showed that anti-Muslim bigotry is more pronounced: 34 percent of respondents rated Muslims unfavorably. But the survey found that most people who supported Jews supported Muslims as well. “The relationship between Israel and Palestine is not necessarily zero-sum,” Schulman said. “The views people express online and on social media platforms aren't always reflective of the broader country, but those stronger voices do get heard and are probably over-represented in media coverage.” But even if the more impassioned voices may not be representative of the population as a whole, they do still represent a serious political challenge for Biden. “In the Democratic Party, the attitudes of young, non-white Americans are really important; and they are disproportionately likely to be in that activist category of folks who are especially sensitive to this,” said Baum. “With the activists, it’s a hopeless task to please either side. The best he can hope for is that this war ends very soon.” MESSAGE US — Are you GABRIEL KADER, associate counsel and deputy director of vetting? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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