June 5, 2024 - 10:00am
A majority of Britain’s young people do not believe Israel should exist, a new UnHerd poll has revealed.
A preliminary finding of an exclusive survey of 1,012 voters about foreign policy, conducted by Focaldata and due to be released tomorrow on UnHerd, found that a striking 54% of 18-24-year-olds agreed with the statement that “the state of Israel should not exist.” Just 21% disagreed.
| “The state of Israel should not exist” |
| Percentage of UK voters who agree, by age group |
 |
This finding dovetails with other UnHerd polling on the same issue. In a separate question, young respondents were asked who was more to blame for the war in Gaza. Half blamed the Israeli government, while a quarter answered Hamas. Only 19% responded “all equally”.
The war’s high degree of exposure online and on social media appears to have fuelled interest among Britain’s young. An AI-generated “all eyes on Rafah” graphic was shared more than 44 million times on Instagram recently, with pro-Palestine content also proliferating on TikTok. Critics have argued that the Chinese social media platform has deliberately promoted anti-Israel content, which TikTok has denied, citing the existing attitudes of its young user base.
| Who do you blame for the war in Gaza? |
| Percentage of UK voters by age group |
|
These attitudes are reflected in further UnHerd polling, which asked young Britons about their level of interest in wars around the world. It found that Britons aged 18-24 are far more interested in the war in Gaza than they are in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or in US-China tensions. Among this group, 38% were very interested in Gaza and 28% were somewhat interested, compared with 19% and 44% who were very or somewhat interested in the war in Ukraine, respectively.
As the Israeli war enters its eighth month, public opinion has slowly shifted in Palestine’s favour. Historic polling shows that popular support for Israel was at its highest shortly after the 7 October attacks at 21%, but this figure has since fallen. Although young people were most sceptical of Israel before the attack, the overall level of support for the Jewish state over the same time frame has plummeted to 16%, according to YouGov figures.
As of this week, a new ceasefire proposal is on the table, and the US is pushing Israel to accept it. The deal would involve the exchange of prisoners for hostages and would pave the way for negotiations. A ceasefire has strong majority support in the UK.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeYou lost your country. Your future is a Caliphate.
You lost your head. Your future is a phosphate.
(Helps with decomposition in soil.)
Now ask them their preferred methods for ending the existence of Israel: genocide or mass deportations or a colonising force to overrule the self-determination of the people that live there.
These are our democracy loving, anti-colonisation anti-fascist children.
Good observation.
Apartheid in South Africa ended without “genocide or mass deportations or a colonising force to overrule the self-determination of the people that live there.”
Exactly why couldn’t the same happen in Israel/Palestine?
The majority of “those polled”! I suspect the actual majority of the UK’s young people don’t actually care either way. Many will have not even know there is conflict in Israel, if they even know where Israel is!
I’d argue this is closer to the truth. Two horrible regimes battling over territory in the Middle East, 99% of British youths would give it as much thought as they do the conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar.
It’s nothing to do with Britain so why the politicians feel the need to pick sides I’ll never know
Surely in all wars all sides do depsicabable things – this is not to say that there is moral equivalancy. One side here is fiercely undemocratic, autocratic, committed to eradicating the other, repeatedly rejects realist solutions, and runs their economy/society on a fundamentalist religious-war footing. The other is essentially reacting to that. There are many ways in which one could reasonably debate that view, add nuance, exceptions etc – but I believe that it iis basically true.
It concerns politicians in the West because there are similar, and growing, fissures in the West.
But it’s not politicians picking sides. It’s children wanting to politicians to pick their side.
The trouble with learning everything you know from watching TikTok in your bedroom while stuffing sugar into your face….
It’s also the fault of the education system, both secondary and tertiary.
In si many schools they no longer teach pupils sbout the Holocaust or the POWs taken by the Japanese in case they terrify the children and haven’t for the lsst 20 years. Cotton wooling kids get us this.
And few will have ever met anyone who was in the death camps and liberated.I supported several Jews who were relocated to the UK after liberation and their testimony has never left me.
The Long March Through The Institutions. Chickens are coming home to roost and it ain’t pretty at all.
Unfortunately, that is the problem with democracy.
We allow tool of foreign dictatorship, China, to indoctrinate our youth.
TikTok should had been baned long ago.
We have enough traitors in our schools and universities.
Probably a majority of these people think Damascus is in Palestine!
They think there was an Arab country called Palestine, that was stolen by rich colonial Jews. Their teachers told them that. Along with Western culture must’end.
Jews have been in the area for thousands of years, unlike the muslim invaders. Hundreds of mentions of Jerusalem in the Tanakh, yet just one in the Koran says much…
Given that you asked them a silly question then what do you expect? Exist as what? Some land? A set of borders? A violent, relentlessly disembling, racist, morally bankrupt, increasingly fascist, genocidal ethnostate? What exactly?
States don’t have rights, people do.
Actially, almost the opposite. What rights do the people of the Hamas state or China or Iran have? Practically none.
Go to China and try and exercise your right of free speech against the Gov’t, or practice your religion. You’ll find their concentration camps lovely this time of year.
Yet outsiders still treat those as legitimate states in the international system.
The only rights most people have are natural law rights, which in most of the world are observed only in the breach.
Morons.
I wonder how many know that 20% of Israel’s population is Arab. And that they seem on the whole happy to live there rather than the less appetising alternatives on offer.
More specifically, not population but citizens (with the right to vote etc). There are of course also a lot of Arabs living under Israeli rule that have no such rights.
Essentially, the Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank are governed by Israel, which has almost complete control over their borders and kills them with impunity.
Do they get a vote in Israel’s national elections?
No.
Ergo, Israel is not a democracy, because around half of the people living under its rule don’t have a vote… and this is racially based (Israeli colonisers living (illegally) in the West Bank do get to vote in Israel’s elections).
Yes, that’s why I corrected Peter B and said that it wasn’t the population in Israel, but its citizenship that was 20%arab.
Exactly this
Shocking that so many blame the victim. Even shortly after October 7th (so before the IDF entered Gaza) popular support for Israel was only 21% according to this article.
Israel does not have a right to exist, on account of the fact that in International Law no such right exists for any nation state. Surely what you should be asking is what is it about the non-youth portions of your sample population that renders them so ignorant of these facts?
https://theconversation.com/israel-has-no-right-to-exist-and-neither-does-any-other-state
Yeah yeah, you’re right: nice bit of sophistry/obfuscation.
Let’s have a go with self-determination then.
The polling question was not whether Israel had a right to exist, but whether Israel should exist. Not exactly the same thing.
A copy of a comment below that article:
Interesting article and well written. But that it didn’t ignore a central fact of the conflict. The Arabs in Palestine do not want to co-exist with Jews. These people were not a nation; ironically their national identity has been founded by opposing Jewish immigration and later the state of Israel.
The problem for every side is they have a case to make but it always depends how far back you want to go. The ‘Palestinian’ people are only so because they see themselves as so. Palestine is a Roman name put on the region after they decided to wipe the Jewish trace from the land.
Maybe we want to argue it wasn’t up to Britain to decide what happened in Palestine, but then by that reasoning neither did the Ottoman Empire, the Crusaders, the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Edomites, the Umayyad’s, and any other “occupier” I’ve missed. How was the first person to exist there, can anyone tell me so we can sort who has the moral authority? Starting a war in 1948 to commit ethnic cleansing and losing is a disaster, but a self-created one. What right to the losers have to claim their land back?
Anyway, the point is, the argument is sound but it is presented in a vacuum. While this is an academic site, realpolitik is still relevant.
And what’s with idiots that like to talk about an apartheid state? It’s really cool to have a label to seem informed I guess. How soon the history is forgotten.
When you are asking the question about a country that its neighbours have tried to eradicate since its inception, the meaning of “does it have the right to exist” is crystal clear: does it have the right to defend itself against those who would eradicate it, or should it give in to the sentiment expressed by the majority of British youngsters, lie down its arms and let itself be slaughtered? Because the significance of the non-existence of the state of Israel for its population – Jewish and, most likely, non-Jewish alike -, if it ever was in doubt, cannot be in doubt after October 7. No amount of sophistry can obfuscate this.
Article removed by TheConversation.
Literally the 1st time I’ve ever seen that… would seem to indicate they don’t stand by it.
I wonder how meaningful TikTok “opinions” are. Isn’t it always “the next big thing”? They will blissfully forget about Gaza and let their kaffiiyas collect dust the moment the next existential cause appears on the horizon
What religious faith did these 18_24 belong? Were they Christian, Muslim, Jewish?
Until we know who these young people were the pole is meaningless
How many have any religion at all?
If they do, it’s Progressivism—or Islam. Not for nothing did the late Lawrence Auster refer to Britain as the Dead Island.
Why? From what I have seen, blind support for islamist terror is not confined to the followers of the muslim prophet.
Isn’t that a bit unfair on Poles?
Would be interesting to know what % of young people believe Britain should exist, or the US. I suspect a surprisingly large minority would reject it.
Exist as what?
Exist as sovereign states. Why are you being so purposely obtuse about this?
I don’t think Britain should exist as a cheesecake. Or the US as an inflatable swimming pool. Obviously it is not obvious what the question was (note sarcasm).
Did South Africa cease to exist as a sovereign state when apartheid was ended?
It would be interesting to know (a) how the respondents were chosen (ie, random mobile phone numbers, voters lists, geographical distribution etc), and (b) exactly what the question was.
Without that information, the survey is pretty meaningless. I can’t really imagine that most people would say that a country should not exist – the next questions should be, “why not?”, and then “what would you do with the people who are living there now?”. Just a straightforward glib question about whether some country should exist or not invites a glib answer, which doesn’t actually mean anything without a lot more data. Personally I’d be quite happy if most of these respondents didn’t exist, but I’m sure someone will accuse me of being racist, or homophobic, or some other random insult flung at anyone who doesn’t follow the current woke mania.
I don’t know it it’s the same over in Britain, but here in the States, a sharp class divide exists, with young people from wealthier backgrounds more anti-Semitic. All the tent cities were in top-tier Ivy League and flagship public universities, few, if any, in majority working-class colleges.
Young people per definition are driven by feelings, group think, are unaware about the world and amoral.
I’m not sure I understand the point of this poll. Do we ask if Bosnia should exist? India? North Korea? Young people don’t know much of anything, and we’d do better to remind them of that and help them learn than to reinforce simplistic binaries.
Indeed, Israel is probably the only state in the world whose very existence is regularly called into question.
Let’s remember that was poll of 18-24 years olds.
There are adults with votes.
These morons will be deciding future of this country, including coming election.
When you are asking the question about a country that its neighbours have tried to eradicate since its inception, the meaning of “should it exist” is crystal clear: does it have the right to defend itself against those who would eradicate it, or should Israelis lie down their arms and let themselves be slaughtered? Because the significance of the non-existence of the state of Israel for its population – Jewish and, most likely, non-Jewish alike -, if it ever was in doubt, cannot be in doubt after October 7. That this is the sentiment expressed by the majority of British youngsters should be more concerning for Britain than for Israel.
No. When people protested against apartheid in South Africa, they weren’t calling for the death of White South Africans. This is no different.
The fact that “Israel” would no longer exist as an apartheid, “Jewish” state is not the same thing as saying all the Jewish Israelis would have to be killed or leave.
So, the people who accuse Israel of genocide are perfectly willing to see genocide committed on the one democratic outpost in the Middle East. How utterly progressive.
Wait till Sharia Law replaces Anglo Saxon legal rights
Eh voila!! The bitter harvest of the Progressive New Order’s two core ideological aims. Shatter the idea of meritocracy and debase the standards of the educational system to justify your social engineering 50% university project and you arrive at an army of frighteningly ignorant youths, totally susceptible to Leftist propaganda on race, international politics and more. The credo of aggressive multiculturalism and refusal to help the assimilation of tight-knit Muslim communities has allowed extreme and toxic ideas towards Jews and Israel to flourish in this same tiktocked angst ridden generation. Chilling if all too predictable.
I upvoted your post but idea that Muslims can be assimilated into West is delusional.
They need to be eliminated.
It is them or natives of Europe.
It is that simple.
This is a silly and misleading poll.
Although the sample size of 1012 people is enough to produce some interesting data if the entire set of people, carefully chosen, is assayed, looking at a single smaller segment, the 18-24 year age group, and expecting the results to have any real relevance or truth is unrealistic and anti-scientific.
Do these young well read sarc people believe UK should exist compared to being absorbed into a nation state of Europe? Do they think gvt offices should strictly reflect ethnic makeup of population? I could go on. They are worthless cretins. Too bad they can’t be forced to pickup dung
A majority of young Britons are fantastically ignorant – thanks to their years of indoctrination at the hands of leftish teaching unions and adherence to the fashionable social-media uni-cause.
They parrot fashionable slogans whilst knowing NOTHING about the history, geography or politics of the region.
We are about to get a Labour Govt who are set on extending the franchise to 16 year olds.
No good can come of this.
Where is commentator Paul T and the anons who argued with me, 9 days ago, when I claimed a large number of these kids felt this way?
I note they are nowhere to be seen on this comments thread.
Some of us are nowhere to be seen because our comments are continually removed. I’ve posted three commenting on the question itself and the notion of a states ‘right to exist’ – all removed.
But funnily enough, your “link” to TheConversation to support your ‘argument’… has been deleted by TheConversation itself. Not exactly a glowing endorsement.
I blame this “shouldn’t exist” attitude, at least in the United States, to the lack of teaching about the Holocaust. (I taught in California, and the Holocaust was not taught—it was not in the state standards. Back in the olden days, when I move to California (in the Seventies) it was taught. I read Anne Frank’s diary in the sixth grade, and we learned about the Holocaust. It was taught again in high school. Many of us had fathers who fought in WII. What I see is a lack of empathy.
Assuming a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran can be avoided (quite a big if, it has to be said), a post-apartheid one state solution will be the final outcome.
This really is non news, a report of a poll clearly carried out to produce a “look at this” result whether it was that “Israel shouldn’t exist”…”yes it should” or even ” the moon is made of green cheese”.
As ever the result depends on the actual question, who is asked, whether they actually know anything whatever about the matter, or even care about it. But the headline is the “important” thing…except it isn’t because it’s just more non news.
There is far too much of this stuff in the MSM already, we shouldn’t be getting it on Unherd.
Reasoned opinion pieces are fine, sensationalism like this isn’t.
I think ignoring polls like this is misguided.
It really shows how stupid young people are as a result of Neo-Marxists takeover of uk institutions including education.
It is not going to get better under Labour.
This younger generation seems to be a combination of Islamic immigrants and TicTok brainwashed virtue signaling wannabees. This the future of the UK, Hamas with colder weather and a National Health Insurance. The UK will become a Califate and King will become a Sultan.
Fellow commentators: Tell me either I’m nuts or when my predictions will come to fruition.
You are not. On current demographic trends, Britain will become minority white in about 50 years.
What are they teaching at schools if young people can’t think critically and analyse properly?
Your poll should really have included the option of “Iran” being to blame.
I’d say that ‘peace’ has a strong majority support. But a ceasefire won’t deliver peace. Peace was delivered in 1945 through the use of overwhelming power and subjugation of the bad guys.
The bewildering problem is that Western academics and Leftists don’t see the fanatical jihadist nature of Hamas, that they are the bad guys. Nor do they understand that if not for the Jews developing the god Yahweh, appropriated by Mohamed, there would be no Islam.
Muslims ALREADY worship Yahweh, why don’t they all just convert to Judaism, or just show some gratitude for developing the god Muslims worship? Who am I kidding? Islam is all about Mohammed. ‘Mohammedanism’ reflects the nature of the movement.
Alan Sugar said once that, given a million dollars for advertising, he could sell any rubbish to the gullible.
I’m not Jewish nor have any connections to Jewish people though I do have large and significant connections to other demographic groups throughout society but regardless, I’m not sure I want to live in a country for much longer where 54% of the young people don’t believe Israel should exist.
If they come for the Jewish people it won’t be long before they come for the rest of us also. Perhaps we all need to skill up so that we can all flee to any other country ourselves and leave them to it, see how they get on. I love my current career in the UK but it’s not something that exists in many other countries unfortunately.
Proof indeed that hamas has won the propaganda war. It’s difficult to believe that youngsters seemingly have no knowledge of Israel’s history, and probably have no more than an inkling of what happened to the Jewish people between 1933 and 1945.
The mind boggles that young people have seemingly forgotten what happened to cause the current situation: the barbaric ‘invasion’ of Israel on October 7th 2023, which was a declaration of war by the hamas thugs.
I really weep at these graphs: they make horrific viewing.
I wonder what % of these young people actually know any of the key facts about why the war is happening. I suspect it is only slightly greater than the % of those who think Israel should not exist that have a coherent answer to what should be done instead, given Israel has existed for nearly 75 years.
There seem to be plenty of Youtube videos where kaffiyeh kids are asked about the situation and demonstrate their massive ignorance of the history and the context. Their political views are TikTok fragments.
This sad period demonstrates why democracy inevitably fails. It is not OK to hold some opinions. It is not ok to act upon feelings
Tok Tok should be banned and similar visual aids for the ignorant majority. The Stuarts were right.
Jew hatred has always existed independently of facts.
Is it “Jew Hatred”, though?
Westerners have been taught that White Nationalism is a terrible sin… why would they think Jewish Nationalism is any different?
“Jew Hatred” has a bit longer history. You only now feel the taste of “White Hatred”.
I’m not shocked the slightest. If you’d ask a demographic watching Breitbart, the masses that attended Tommy Robinsons march etc. The answer would be much different. The Eurovision showed exactly who support Israel (silent majority) or the five members in the jury in each country. All the five members of the Swedish jury was revealed and the they were either far-left or immigrants from Africa or the Middle East. I’m not worried. Also a recent poll in the US revealed that the Israel-Hamas war came extremely low on the list of adolescents concern. We all know what TikiToki is, a cesspool. Just shut that garbage down. I’m not buying the “free speech” defenders of TikiToki, just as much as any p*rn site boasting the myth of a happy 3hore. Cheers
It’s amazing that the west has allowed Tik Tok Chinese backers to learn our kids weaknesses.
My guess is very little that is critically thought about of the intricacies of the history of the relationship down the centuries between Israelis/Jews & the sheep-like mentality of their Arab and other enemies. They are driven by almost psychotic pernicious envy, of the sort that can’t apprehend that they could be as advanced as Israel if they challenged their leaders and opposed them, that fumes over Israel’s/Jews’ successes and instead of making moves in concert to change their own status quo, projects the blame for it onto Jews and the successes of their state’s contribution to the world.
And the morally challenged around that world, devoid of values and meaning in their own lives, feel awake and alive by the rush of hatred played out in front of them and over-identify with it.
Of course they should know better, but that’d be asking a lot, wouldn’t it, from those who engage in the racism of low expectations from Palestinians?
The ‘could be advanced as Israel’ ignores the role tha the West and Israel have played in ensuring they’re not. From the Iranian coup in 1957 to the dirty war on Syria and the destruction of Libya, only the tamest, most subservient of Arab states has been allowed to survive intact. See also Israel’s fermentation of war in Lebannon throughout the late 1970s and 1980s with all sorts of proxy agents – including making and handing over car bombs to them or their assassinations of anyone looking a bit moderate (see Ahmed Yassim in 2004). Sure the Arab states haven’t helped themselves, but don’t pretend they’ve not been herded down this path.
Indeed, after the Brits promised the regional Arabs self-rule in return for rebelling against their Ottoman overlords, “we” did a classic backstab and carved up the region with the French.
Sykes-Picot deliberately created weak polities (ie, with ethnic and sectarian divisions) so that their autocratic rulers would have to rely on outside powers to survive.
If those rulers start meddling with the interests of those powers, they suddenly get a load of democracy imposed on them, good and hard.
I wonder what percentage of people in the sample as a whole understand the complete absence of any notion of a nation’s right to exist under International Law or academic discourse for that matter. What do you understand by the concept?
The kids are right on this one.
Since the kids are right, does England have a right to exist? Since you think not, what should be done about it?
Expel all non Celts?
Romani ite domum?
As I said in a comment that seems to have disappeared: the poll was not about whether Israel had a right to exist, but whether it should exist.
Exactly! Whilst I doubt many of those who answered no really understood that nuance, if something does exist and you think it shouldn’t then they need to be able to explain how it should be made non existent. I doubt any of them have given that issue any consideration at all.
The right to self defence, which Israel has been exercising since Oct 7 in Gaza, is well established in international law though.
As opposed to the Palestinians’ right to self defence since 1948?
I replied to you already, but that seems to have disappeared from the page. Good post.
Let’s remember that vile BLM kneeler Starmer is going to give votes to even younger morons.
Then, if polls are right, there is majority for Labour government without any policies.
Not that Conservatives (ha, ha) have any.
The kidults forgot that Hamas started this war, and that Hamas constantly pepper Israel with rockets.They ignore that fact that Hamas uses it’s own citizens as human shields.
They appear ignorant that Jews have been persecuted – for no good reason – in most countries where they’ve settled around the world.
They’ve ignored inconvenient facts like the 6 million Jews who were murdered in World War 2 holocaust, not for defensive reasons, but for no good reason other than pure racism.
They have been far too easily duped. It’s stupid not to realise that the timing of October 7 was instigated by Iran to stop Israel and Saudi Arabia having closer ties like the UAE and Qatar.
Oh please. Hamas were a tiny fringe Islamic fundamentalist charity before Israel provided them with the funds required to become a paramilitary force so they could i) weaken the secular Fatah, and ii) provide a pretext to never give the Palestinians a State, while Zionist theft of Arab land continued in the West Bank. Anyone who reads the Israeli press is aware of this, by the way; it’s not some “antisemitic conspiracy theory”.
When Hamas were on the brink of collapse in 2009 the Israelis allowed in suitcases of Qatari cash (US dollars, BTW) to prop them up.
Hamas is the greatest asset hardcore Zionists could ever hope for. Yes, they kill a few Israelis on a occasion, but they also provide an endless excuse to slaughter vastly more Arabs (Muslim and Christian) and steal their land.