SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom
Three-quarters of US college students agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to a new survey from Brandeis University.
Even among students the researchers classified as “Israel Supporters,” one in four agreed.
It is the headline finding of “American Undergraduates and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” a report by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.
The survey’s results are fundamentally unfavorable to Israel but the authors devote much of the report attempting to diminish its significance.
They argue that agreement Israel is perpetrating genocide “tells us relatively little” about students’ wider views and speculate that many have not seriously considered what genocide means.
The study was partly funded by the American Jewish Committee, a major Israel lobby group.
The stated purpose of the survey is to help university administrators, advocacy groups and other “campus stakeholders” understand students’ views and promote conversations about Palestine that the authors present as part of efforts to combat “Israel-related anti-Semitism.”
Almost 4,000 students at more than 300 colleges and universities participated in the survey conducted by Generation Lab between October 2025 and January 2026.
Three percent were Jewish, three percent Muslim, 47 percent non-Jewish and non-Muslim students of color, and 46 percent white and neither Jewish nor Muslim.
Politically, 52 percent of students placed themselves somewhere on the “liberal” side of the political spectrum, 28 percent were “moderate” and 20 percent “conservative.”
Jewish respondents were even more liberal: 72 percent placed themselves somewhere from slightly to extremely liberal.
The authors stress that only 24 percent called “Israel/Palestine” “very important” and that it ranked last among five issues. But another 37 percent called it “somewhat important,” meaning 61 percent considered it at least somewhat important.
It was also the only international issue the researchers asked about, compared with racism, immigration, LGBTQ issues and Donald Trump and democracy.
Hamas viewed more favorably than Israel’s government
Overall among the students surveyed, Palestinians were viewed more favorably than Israelis – a finding that aligns with national and international trends.
Seventy-seven percent viewed Palestinians favorably, compared with 52 percent who viewed Israelis favorably.
Just 15 percent had a favorable opinion of the Israeli government, below the 18 percent who viewed Hamas favorably and the 41 percent who favored the Palestinian Authority.
Based on their responses, the researchers sorted the students into six groups.
The labels given by the researchers betray their biases: They designated nine percent of the students as “Israel Supporters,” while 20 percent were called “Anti-Israel Palestinian Supporters.”
There is no corresponding category of “Anti-Palestinian Israel Supporters” – even though 58 percent of the “Israel supporters” viewed Palestinians unfavorably.
The largest group, 34 percent, were classed as “Uninformed Civilian Sympathizers,” favorable toward both peoples but hostile to the Israeli government and Hamas. Another 15 percent were “Informed Civilian Sympathizers” with a similar outlook but greater self-reported knowledge and personal investment.
Jewish students were far from uniformly pro-Israel. Thirty-six percent – more than any other category – were “Informed Civilian Sympathizers,” compared with just 29 percent classed as “Israel Supporters.” Another 20 percent were “Uninformed Civilian Sympathizers,” while nine percent fell into the “Anti-Israel Palestinian Supporters” group.
The diversity of views among Jewish students, including some strong opposition to Israel, further undermines Israel lobby assertions that campus activism in support of Palestinian rights amounts to an attack on Jewish students collectively.
Explaining away genocide
Asked to respond to the statement “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” 38 percent strongly agreed and another 36 percent agreed – 74 percent in all.
Only eight percent strongly disagreed.
Agreement reached 98 percent among the researchers’ “Anti-Israel Palestinian Supporters,” 91 percent among “Informed Civilian Sympathizers” and 84 percent among their supposedly uninformed counterparts.
Remarkably, 25 percent of “Israel Supporters” also agreed that Israel is committing genocide.
The genocide question offered no neutral or “don’t know” response, although participants could skip it.
The authors call 25 percent “relatively rare” and repeatedly question whether students understand their own answers.
They suggest that liberals may simply repeat what they hear from political figures and that others may use genocide as shorthand for conduct they see as immoral.
But the study did not test students’ factual knowledge or ask why they believe Israel is committing genocide. “Knowledge” was measured solely by asking respondents to rate themselves.
Nor do the authors seriously consider the most obvious explanation: Students had watched more than two years of Israel’s mass killing, starvation, forced displacement and destruction in Gaza, along with countless videos of Israeli politicians and soldiers openly reveling in cruelty, killing and destruction.
By the time the survey began, Amnesty International, the Israeli organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and a United Nations commission of inquiry had all concluded that Israel was committing genocide.
Students did not need to be duped by social media or partisan propaganda to reach the same judgment as major human rights investigators and, above all, Palestinian survivors and witnesses.
The report instead speculates about “siloed and polarized social media,” schools, campus advocacy groups and antipathy toward Donald Trump as possible explanations for Israel’s unpopularity.
Similar to earlier Israel lobby-backed analyses, this one treats Israel’s unpopularity primarily as a problem of perception and public relations to be fixed by more “dialogue.”
But Israel’s real problem is that the public, including students, sees reality too clearly.
It is not necessary to have deep expertise about the history of Palestine to correctly understand a campaign of mass killing and destruction as genocide – especially when top Israeli leaders call Palestinians “human animals,” promise “hell” and invoke the biblical story of Amalek.
A “right to exist”?
Similar biases inform the report’s discussion of the statement “Israel does not have the right to exist.”
The authors assert that many Jewish students and “many formal definitions of anti-Semitism” consider that view inherently anti-Semitic, without identifying those definitions or explaining why rejecting a state’s supposed right to exist amounts to hatred of Jews.
States do not have an inherent right to exist, as international lawyer Craig Mokhiber has recently explained.
In recent decades many new states have come into existence while others – including the Soviet Union, East Germany, Yugoslavia and the regime in apartheid South Africa – have ceased to exist.
While states do have rights under international law, that does not establish an unconditional right to retain a particular constitutional or supremacist form. And some forms of internal arrangements, notably apartheid, are illegal.
Israel moreover does not just claim a “right to exist,” but a right to exist specifically as a “Jewish state” – an impossibility without grave and ongoing violations of the rights of indigenous Palestinians.
Peoples have rights to self-determination, which they may choose to express in the form of a state. In other words, a state can only exist if the legitimate residents of its territory choose for it to exist.
Throughout recent history, peoples have abolished their states or merged them with others.
In any event, 86 percent of students overall disagreed with the statement that Israel has no right to exist.
Meanwhile, the report states that 82 percent affirmed that Palestinians have a “right to self-determination in a Palestinian state” – including 60 percent of “Israel Supporters.
Students however were not asked their views of a single, democratic state with equal rights for all regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Unsurprisingly, the report displays other biases, for example describing the genocide as the “Israel-Hamas war,” imposing a grotesquely false symmetry between Israel’s US-backed military and Palestinians resistance in a tiny besieged territory.
“War” is also a misleading label for a brutal campaign that primarily consists of bombing and forcibly displacing civilians and has involved very little actual combat from the Israeli side.
Between October 2023 and the end of June 2026, Israel’s assault had killed at least 21,700 children in Gaza.
Israel has killed at least 300 children in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” began in October 2025.
By contrast, during four years of war in Ukraine, a vast country far more populous than Gaza, nearly 800 children have been killed.
These are some of the realities that shape student opinion.
Despite the authors’ best efforts at spin, this report’s key findings are hard to downplay: Solidarity with Palestinians is mainstream, support for Israel is marginal, Jewish students hold diverse views including strong opposition to Israel’s actions and the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide extends far beyond any activist minority.