The poll so dark that it will make you wish the polling industry didn't exist

In the seventeen years I've been writing this blog, I've covered hundreds and probably thousands of opinion polls, but none have been as dark as this one.  In fact it's almost sinister that it occurred to anyone to ask these questions in the first place, but they obviously knew the target population better than the rest of us did.

In a Geocartography poll which seems to have been conducted among a representative sample of Israeli Jews (ie. excluding the one quarter of Israeli citizens who are not Jews, most of them Palestinian Arabs), 47% say that the Israeli army should kill all of the inhabitants of any city that it conquers.  That means half the general population thinks the genocide should go even further than it has.  So far, Israel has only exterminated a substantial minority of the inhabitants (or rather the former inhabitants) of cities like Gaza, Khan Yunis and Rafah.  

82% think Palestinians should be forcibly expelled from the Gaza Strip.  So just under half of the Jewish Israeli population are supportive of genocide, and more than four-fifths are in favour of ethnic cleansing, which is also forbidden under international law.  But even more extraordinary is that 56% support the forced expulsion of the Palestinians who live in Israel proper, ie. their fellow Israeli citizens who just happen to be of a different ethnicity and religion.  I was going to say that's equivalent to the far-right view in the UK that British citizens of Pakistani or Caribbean origin who were born here and whose parents or grandparents may well also have been born here should be "repatriated".  But in a sense it's even more bizarre and extreme than that, because of course Arab Israeli citizens are the indigenous population.  It's the Jewish population that is largely either composed of immigrants or of the descendants of immigrants (not exclusively, because a very small percentage of the Palestinian population was Jewish even in the late 19th century).  So it's the immigrant and immigrant-descended population that wants to be "cleansed" of Israel's indigenous population.

Unless someone can identify methodological flaws in this poll, it's pretty clear that the Israeli Jewish population has been radicalised to an even greater extent than the German population was under Nazi rule.  If you had been able to poll Germans in the early 1940s, there would undoubtedly have been overwhelming support for the forced expulsion of Jews from German-controlled parts of Europe, but I doubt if there would have been anything like 47% support for total extermination of the Jews.  There was a reason why the Holocaust was being carried out in secret.

But some genocides are only possible with the active support of the general population.  In Rwanda, for example, some of the genocide was committed on a DIY basis by ordinary Hutus who were radicalised by genocidal radio broadcasts.  That's not quite the case in Gaza - the genocide is being carried out by the IDF, not by Israeli civilians.  But there again, the IDF is a conscript army, and it perhaps wouldn't have been possible to get conscripts to follow orders to mass-murder Palestinian civilians if the genocidal mania among ordinary Israelis didn't match or exceed the intentions of the Israeli authorities.

So how on earth has this extreme radicalisation occurred?  Part of it must be the validation and normalisation of genocide that has been coming from foreign politicians and foreign media.  Keir Starmer must accept a share of the blame for saying at the outset that Israel had the right to commit genocidal acts such as the withholding of water from Gaza, and that the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians was a legitimate form of "self-defence".  The German government must accept a share of the blame for openly saying that Israel was quite right to bomb hospitals (and grotesquely, it was a senior government minister from the Green Party who said that).  The BBC must accept a share of the blame for doggedly defending Israel against each and every charge of genocide, and for deliberately and systematically sowing doubt about the credibility of sources giving accurate information about the plight of civilians in Gaza.

And yes, in his own small way, our old friend Stew Campbell of Wings Over Scotland must accept his share of the blame for arguing that elected Scottish politicians should be thrown into jail for expressing pro-Palestinian views.  Ironically, it's only in the last few days that Benjamin Netanyahu has fully caught up with Campbell by arguing that "Free Palestine" is the new "Heil Hitler".  It was more than a year ago that Campbell first demanded that the Green MSP Ross Greer should be jailed simply for using the words "victory to Palestine, victory to humanity".  

To the extent that a "war" is actually occurring in Gaza, the war aims of Israel are to exterminate and expel the Palestinian people, while the war aims of Palestine are to survive the extermination attempts and to resist expulsion.  The only conceivable "victory to Palestine" would therefore look like simple survival, which is doubtless why Greer added the words "victory to humanity".  Campbell is thus arguing that any belief that the Palestinian people have a right to survive and to exist should be a criminalised belief.  He thinks it is a belief that should land you in prison if you openly express it.

Campbell's main contribution to the debate on Gaza over the last week has been to repeatedly mock the claim that thousands of Palestinian babies are on the brink of starvation, presumably because he thinks the priority should be to massively reduce pressure on Israel to allow food, water and humanitarian aid through to the people who are dying.  He even went so far as to retweet Jake Wallis Simons, one of the most extreme UK-based pro-genocide propagandists, who has spent months openly denying that any famine in Gaza is occurring, in the hope of building support for Israel to be given free rein to continue committing mass murder.

Campbell also shared an article blasting the Doctor Who actor Ncuti Gatwa for supposedly "letting the BBC down" by refusing to read out the UK jury results in the Eurovision Song Contest.  Some would say it was in fact the BBC who let a known supporter of Palestine like Gatwa down by putting him in the indefensible position where he might have been compelled to read out the grotesque words "12 points go to Israel".  

You might think it odd that a self-styled 'free speech warrior' like Campbell ("JD Vance is right about free speech!" he told us the other day) would support compelled speech at the Eurovision Song Contest, and prison sentences for free speech at the Scottish Parliament.  But if so, you haven't been paying attention - when called out on his repugnant views about the Hillsborough disaster, Campbell's first resort was to threaten legal action to try to get the criticism censored out of existence.

I remain of the view that the Alba Party leadership's sycophantic hero-worship of a genocide apologist like Campbell is a stain on the party that will probably never wash away.  At the very least, it drains all credibility from Alba's claims to be standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Some have argued that Israeli society will need to undergo a "de-Zionisation" process in the same way that German society was "de-Nazified" after the Second World War.  To me, that has always sounded like pie in the sky - Zionism has a secure future for as long as the US supports it, as will almost certainly always be the case.  But there may be a small grain of truth in the claim, because a population that wants to ethnically cleanse its fellow citizens and to exterminate its neighbours is not a population that has really reconciled itself to the liberal democratic system it has nominally lived under for the last eight decades.  If there is going to be any lasting solution, the Israeli population is going to have to be educated on basic truths such as "genocide is wrong" and "Palestinians are humans just like you are", and that will require a lot of remedial action from the foreign politicians and journalists who have helped create this disastrous climate.

If Starmer supports Hamas (and it would obviously be anti-semitic to doubt the word of the Israeli Prime Minister on this) shouldn't he now be detained under anti-terror laws? https://t.co/uQOrjFdhVg

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 23, 2025