Yet another poll lays bare the genocidal nature of Israeli society

A society that justifies its existence by exterminating others forfeits its claim to legitimacy.

Sample these survey results from Israel:

• In early November 2023, by which time Israel had already killed over 10,000 Palestinians 57.5 percent of Israeli Jews said that their military was using too little firepower in Gaza, 36.6 percent said it was using an appropriate amount of firepower, while 4.2 percent were unsure whether it was using too much or too little firepower. Only 1.8 percent believed that their military was using too much firepower. In short, 98.2 percent of Israeli Jews were perfectly fine with the indiscriminate attack on the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, over half of whom are children.

• In early December 2023, four of five Israeli Jews believed that Israel should not consider the suffering of Gazans as it conducted its military operation.

• In late December 2023, when asked if Israel should heed American advice not to heavily bomb densely populated civilian areas in Gaza, 75 percent of Israeli Jews answered that Israel should not let up its intense bombing of densely populated civilian areas.

• In February 2024, 68 percent Israeli Jews opposed the transfer of aid to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza as they were constantly bombarded.

• In October 2024, a year into the live-streamed Holocaust of the Palestinians, 83 percent of Israeli Jews rated their genocidal military’s conduct as ranging between good and excellent.

• In May 2025, 82 percent of Israeli Jews supported the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza; 56 percent even backed the ethnic cleansing of Arab citizens from the 1948 territories occupied by Israel. More startlingly, 65 percent of Israeli Jews professed belief in the existence of a modern-day incarnation of Amalek. (Israeli politicians and rabbis have consistently labelled Palestinians as the modern-day Amalek.) Furthermore, nearly half of Israeli Jews (47 percent) were prepared to mete out the biblical treatment to Amalek: kill all of them.

• In June 2025, 64 percent of Israeli Jews believed “there are no innocents” in Gaza, where half the population consists of children.

• Earlier this week, 79 percent of Israeli Jews said that they were not “troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza” — despite a constant stream of harrowing images showing emaciated children and adults, skeletal from starvation and dying en masse. Interestingly, Jewish women were slightly more genocidal (80 percent) than their male counterparts (78 percent) on this survey question.

This is a very small sample of numerous similar polls since October 7 that show a consistent pattern: the entrenched genocidal nature of Israeli society. This is not all, Israeli Jews also showed unbounded enthusiasm for the genocidal assault on Lebanon that killed more than 3,000 Lebanese last year. When a ceasefire deal was struck late November last year, “We didn’t finish the job” was a common refrain among Israeli Jews, signalling their desire to wreak more havoc and kill more Lebanese with the ultimate goal of annexing Lebanon — a belief that they started openly expressing in Jewish press. Some enterprising Jews started teaching their toddlers that Lebanon will soon be theirs and settler communities even began advertising land for sale to Jews inside Lebanon.

The survey results tell a harrowing story — of military brutality and widespread public complicity. What these polls show, taken together, is an active embrace of genocide. The logic of extermination is mainstream in the self-proclaimed Jewish state, institutionalised through state policy, media narratives, and a militarised education system that raises generations on siege mentalities and expansionist mythologies.

From elementary schools to university lecture halls, the Palestinian is not portrayed as a human being with rights, history, and suffering, but as a demographic threat or a biblical enemy. Dehumanisation is the baseline in Israeli public discourse. Palestinians are Amalek. They are “human animals.” They are “beasts walking on two legs.” They are “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” The use of such terminology by government ministers, military commanders, rabbis, and talk show pundits do not provoke outrage or censure. They are applauded.

This dehumanisation functions as a necessary ideological foundation for mass violence. When nearly half of Israeli Jews say they would support a biblical-style massacre of Palestinians, it reflects a deep cultural normalisation of genocidal thought. The fact that such beliefs are most intensely held among the youth — Israeli Jews aged 18 to 34 consistently show the strongest support for maximalist, Jewish supremacist policies — reflects a society that is a threat not just to the Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims, but to humanity at large.

It is impossible to separate the Israeli military’s actions from the public will that fuels them. The occupation forces’ mass killing of civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran is not a case of a rogue military dragging along a reluctant society. It is the material realisation of a political project sustained by overwhelming public enthusiasm and unflinching support, even in the face of a barbaric two-year assault that has resulted in mountain of corpses. The planes dropping US-made bombs on residential blocks, playschools, hospital wards, and flimsy plastic tents do so with the mandate of a population that cheers louder with each destroyed neighbourhood, each limbless child, each brutalised doctor, and each raped mother. A society that can look upon famine, displacement, and mass death — and respond with pride — is in a state of deep moral rot.

Founded on one genocide, Israeli society now sustains itself through another genocide. The dream of Greater Israel is taught in synagogues, invoked in parliamentary speeches, and plastered on billboards. Real estate listings inside southern Lebanon are part of a broader settler-colonial blueprint that views all non-Jewish life between the river and the sea — and beyond — as expendable.

And yet, the most chilling aspect may be the calm, bureaucratic efficiency with which this annihilation is being pursued. Starvation, relentless bombing campaigns, forced displacement, and death traps masquerading as “aid” distribution centres do the job more slowly but just as surely. Israelis don’t even hide anything. They don’t have to. No one can hold them to account. International law is less valuable than used toilet paper. The bombs from Western capitals flow unceasingly to their warehouses. The reconnaissance flights over Gaza by their Western backers are non-stop. It is credibly estimated that half a million Palestinians have been killed by now, and the whole enclave has become unlivable. The apartheid walls are physical, psychological, moral, and epistemological.

Israel is a society that, by all available measures, has accepted the idea that everyone is eligible to be killed for it to feel secure.

The genocide of the Palestinians is not just a crime of the Israeli state. It is being carried out with the blessing and active encouragement of a society that has become anaesthetised to human suffering. What does it mean for a nation to define its survival through the erasure of an entire people? A society that justifies its existence by exterminating others cannot claim legitimacy.

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