America’s youngest voting block warms towards Hamas, cools on Israel

As President Donald Trump works to secure the release of the remaining hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza, on the home front, America’s younger generation strongly opposes his peace plan and handling of the conflict. Strikingly almost half also oppose Hamas releasing the hostages without conditions. 

Rather than a reflexively anti-Trump position, the polling data suggests that members of America’s youngest voting generation–Gen Z–are not only becoming increasingly anti-Israel, but rather many are supportive of Hamas over Israel at higher levels than its fellow generations.

Hamas is a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. government that holds as one of its primary goals the elimination of the Israeli state. Hamas “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” according to the group’s covenant. 

Gen Z markedly anti-Israel, polls show

While America’s older generations support Israel over Hamas by an average of about 75% to 25%, Gen Z respondents have the closest margin for the question, according to the latest poll from Harvard CAPS/Harris.

When asked, “In the Israel-Hamas conflict, do you support more Israel or more Hamas?,” Gen Z respondents only support Israel over the terrorist group by a 55% to 45% margin, nearly half of that voting generation, which encompasses 18 to 24 year olds. 

Hostage taking: OK by many college students

Just more than 40% of that generation also opposes “the position that Hamas must release all remaining hostages without any conditions or face serious consequences?” 

Victoria Coates, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Trump in his first term, places the blame on education in America that inculcates anti-Israel views that can further lead into support for terrorism and antisemitism.  

“The other piece of this that's important… is the youth demographic. Our children are being indoctrinated by not only their high schools, but by their institutions of higher learning, that Israel is immoral, illegal and Imperial and racist, and that, oh, by the way, the United States is too,” Coates told the John Solomon Reports podcast.  

“And if you're taught this by authority figures, you start to believe it, and that's the demographic I think we need to pay the most attention to,” she added. 

Many college campuses across the country became hubs of the recent waves of anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests in the wake of Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and the beginning of the war that followed. The largest, and which garnered the most media attention, was at Columbia University in New York City, where students occupied the school’s Butler Lawns for nearly two weeks in Spring 2024. 

Students and outside agitators occupied outdoor greens and plazas reminiscent of the “autonomous zones” established during the 2020 BLM protests. They chanted slogans such as “Intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

Both slogans are often viewed as a call for violence or ethnic cleansing in the land currently inhabited by Israeli citizens. Intifada is an Arabic wording meaning uprising that is often used to refer to the Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The sentiment has been expressed at some of America's most elite schools, including Columbia University, Harvard and Yale.  

The alarm was raised after Jewish or Israeli students reported instances of discrimination and verbal attacks, which launched a congressional inquiry into what the major universities, which receive federal funding, were doing to address concerns of their Jewish students.

Government officials have also raised concerns about channels of funding to several pro-Palestine demonstration groups that are Marxist and have potential links to the Chinese Communist Party. For example, the New York-based People’s Forum has been linked to several of the campus demonstrations throughout the city. A major patron of The People’s Forum is wealthy communist businessman Neville Roy Singham, who lives in Shanghai, China and runs pro-China news sites. 

"Alarming" increase

In December, a joint congressional panel concluded in its final report that amid the “alarming” increase in antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, many major U.S. universities failed to confront and crack down on its spread. The report singled out Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of California–Los Angeles.  

They found that “many colleges handed down disparate disciplinary actions for Jewish students versus their antagonists—the students who engaged in antisemitic behavior, encampments, and intimidating tactics such as campus checkpoints and tax-exempt organizations that enabled and funded violent campus protests, among other troubling findings,” according to the report. 

The panel in particular found that a failure to stop anti-Semitic activities on campuses likely violates Title VI of federal civil rights laws. Title VI prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin, per the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

For example, the panel pointed to Columbia University’s own internal task force on antisemitism, which found “pervasive civil rights violations at the University,” according to Congress. 

“The Task Force found Israeli students were frequently targeted on the basis of their national origin in violation of federal antidiscrimination law, explaining that ‘hatred toward Israelis has reached alarming levels on campus’ and that ‘Israeli students found the pervasive hostility made it difficult to access necessary services, such as healthcare,” the congressional reviewers wrote. 

When President Trump took office he signed an executive order and vowed to address the issue by enforcing U.S. civil rights law to its fullest extent. In the order, the president directed federal agencies to assess “all civil and criminal authorities or actions within the jurisdiction of that agency” that could be used to combat antisemitism. 

“Jewish students have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination; denial of access to campus common areas and facilities, including libraries and classrooms; and intimidation, harassment, and physical threats and assault,” the president wrote in the order.

The Trump administration placed several universities under review after what it said were anti-semitic incidents took place on their campuses during the anti-Israel, pro-Palestine protests that swept the country in the wake of Oct. 7 and the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

President Trump warned that his administration could pull federal funding from the schools for violating the federal civil rights of its Israeli and Jewish students. The Justice Department formed an antisemitism task force earlier this year to visit ten universities that experienced anti-Semitic incidents since the Oct. 7 attack. 

Harvard University has found itself in hot water with a concurrent probe from the Trump Health and Human Services Department which concluded that the university did in fact violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with its indifference over the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. Harvard received $794 million in federal financial assistance from HHS from fiscal years 2023 to 2025, according to the department.