Public support for Israel in the United States has reached historic lows.
A Gallup poll in July found that 32 percent of Americans approve of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, while 60 percent disapprove, a 10 percent drop in support from the previous September.
Pew Research Center findings showed that a third of American adults (33 percent) say the country sends Israel too much military aid, a larger portion of the population than those who say the US provides the right amount (23 percent) or not enough (8 percent).
A majority of Americans hold a negative view of Israel and report being “extremely” or “very” concerned about its military strikes killing Palestinian civilians and about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza.
A New York Times/Siena poll revealed that there are slightly more Americans who sympathise with the Palestinians than those who sympathise with Israel.
Israel’s popularity crisis is particularly acute among young Americans, with only nine percent of those aged 18 to 34 backing Israel’s military action in the Strip. Forty-two percent of those in the 18 to 29 cohort say the US grants Israel too much military aid, compared to 21 percent whose opinion is that the US is giving the right amount or too little.
One influential ghoul after another – from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress – has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents filled with displaced persons.
Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment, which is functionally the same as a decline in support for US imperialism in and beyond the Middle East, the US ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.
Control of the narrative
On 25 September, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in the US, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.
Trump’s actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration’s approach to TikTok, which also called for US control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.
Accordingly, a group of US investors led by the software firm Oracle is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.
Oracle is set to oversee TikTok’s US operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app’s algorithm.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a US nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and “we”, seemingly a reference to Oracle, will “do everything we can to support the country of Israel”.
A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family’s media company, Skydance – an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David – acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.
Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser and tattle-tale passionately opposed to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News’s editor-in-chief.
Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.
Media capture
While there is ample space for pro-Palestine messaging on TikTok, it is not as if traditional news outlets like CBS have a record of supporting Palestinian liberation.
CBS, like all major corporate media in the United States, far more often than not produces content favourable to US-Israeli objectives in West Asia.
For example, in the last year, the CBS News website ran 2,575 stories that mention Gaza, with only 388 containing the word “genocide”.
In other words, in a period that mostly predates the Ellison-Weiss regime, only 15 percent of the site’s Gaza coverage mentioned the crime of crimes, even as one credible source after another has concluded that Israel has carried out a genocide in the Strip.
Thus, CBS News already had a record of what I have previously called genocide denial by omission, a form of media distortion that helps enable genocide by reducing the likelihood that enough of the American population will accurately understand that their government is party to an extermination campaign to bring it to a halt.
CNN, for its part, helped manufacture consent for the Gaza genocide by making pro-Israel propaganda its official policy.
What the latest developments in the media landscape represent are, as with so much else in the Trump era, a movement towards vulgar, unabashed assertions of raw power that dispense with the typically hollow and hypocritical pretences of an open and democratic society that characterised America’s recent past.
Losing legitimacy
The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy.
Trying to stamp out content that makes Israel and the US look bad by occasionally giving audiences a partial glimpse of US-Zionist barbarism in Palestine is a sign of desperation rather than strength.
The gambit will not work.
Media outlets do not operate in a vacuum, and people are not empty vessels that news firms can simply fill with whatever they like.
Israel’s image cannot be restored, and neither can that of the US ruling class, certainly not among young people who won’t soon forget their peers being suspended, expelled or chewed up by the US’s merciless deportation machine.
They won’t soon forget their colleges turning riot cops against them or putting snipers on the roofs of school buildings during pro-Palestine student protests. They won’t soon forget the mainstream media lying to them while Palestinian journalists showed them the grieving parents whose bereavement was enabled by western, and especially American, taxpayers.
If the Gaza “ceasefire” holds, the international movement in solidarity with Palestine may lose some of its energy in the West.
However, even if the frequency of mass demonstrations in western cities dwindles, the organisations and alliances formed after 7 October are not all going to disappear.
Indeed, many of these formations predate 2023, with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement having established nodes around the world and achieved numerous successes since its inception in 2005.
That institutional memory cannot be erased by media manipulation, nor can the experience, political organising skills and self-confidence that pro-Palestine activists have gained by fighting, and sometimes winning, through 20 years of BDS or two years of resisting genocide.
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Source: MEE
