From Poll to Pogrom: How Settler Zionism Became a Public Mandate for Genocide

What a “Liberal Democracy” Looks Like When It Votes for Genocide

On 30 May 2025, Middle East Eye reported the results of a horrifying but telling poll: 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Let that sit. Eight out of ten Israeli Jews not only back genocide—they want it escalated into full-scale ethnic cleansing. The poll, conducted by the Israeli firm Geocartography Knowledge Group in conjunction with Penn State professor Tamir Sorek, goes even further: 56 percent support expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. That’s not a fringe view. That’s settler consensus.

Middle East Eye, to its credit, did not bury the result. But it failed to call it what it is: an ideological snapshot of a genocidal settler society. The outlet framed the findings as a source of “concern,” as if this were a temporary mood swing or political misstep. The article situates the poll inside a live blog update—positioning an historic ideological referendum as just another datapoint in an ongoing horror show. There is no real analysis, no naming of Zionism, no recognition that this is not a deviation but the logical conclusion of a colonial state whose foundational act in 1948 was mass ethnic cleansing.

The choice of institutions involved also serves a propaganda function. The Israeli firm Geocartography is not neutral—it functions within the Zionist state apparatus. Tamir Sorek, though often critical of Israel, lends the veneer of academic legitimacy by conducting the poll from within a U.S. university. This triangulation—Israeli state logic, Zionist demography, and Western academic respectability—creates a buffer zone around genocide. The result is not denounced; it is observed. Studied. Tabled. Sterilized.

Worse still, major Western media—The New York Times, BBC, CNN—ignored it altogether. A genocidal consensus among Israeli Jews? Not newsworthy. A top-line finding that validates the expulsionist rhetoric of Israeli officials like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich? Inconvenient for their false narrative of Israeli democracy and moral superiority. Instead, it’s buried under stories about hostage negotiations and ceasefire logistics.

Let’s be blunt: this isn’t a democracy struggling with war trauma. This is a settler population signaling that it wants the land, but not the people. And if the people won’t leave voluntarily? The tanks and bulldozers will help. That’s the message. And this poll is not just a warning—it is a declaration.

Colonial Democracy, Settler Consensus

In settler colonial states, “public opinion” is not merely a reflection of political belief—it is a weaponized demographic project. Zionism, from the start, has relied not just on military force but on settler consciousness, manufactured and maintained through education, media, and state mythology. This poll confirms what Palestinians have long known: the Israeli settler population does not view Palestinians as people with rights, but as obstacles to be removed. That’s not radicalism—it’s the mainstream.

From the Nakba of 1948 to the ongoing siege of Gaza, expulsion is not an aberration—it is the political doctrine of Zionism. The Israeli state was founded on the violent removal of Palestinians, and its institutions, laws, and electoral structure were designed to preserve Jewish supremacy. What this poll reveals is not a break from Israeli democracy, but its logical fulfillment: when the entire polity is structured around a racial settler elite, then democracy becomes the ballot box of fascism.

And it’s not just the right wing. Liberal Zionists who profess discomfort with Netanyahu still support a Jewish ethnostate. Even Israel’s so-called opposition parties offer no path to Palestinian liberation or repatriation. What binds the Israeli electorate is not just fear, but entitlement—entitlement to stolen land, and to international immunity for their violence. What this poll proves is that any attempt to separate Israeli society from Israeli policy is a lie. The society is the policy.

The real question isn’t whether the Israeli public supports genocide. That’s been answered. The question is whether the world will continue to fund, arm, and defend it. Because without U.S. military aid, without European diplomatic cover, without the media silence that sanitizes Israeli violence, this machine could not run. The ideology may be Zionist—but the infrastructure is imperial.

And so, the stakes become clear. This poll is not just about Gaza. It’s about what kind of world will emerge in the 21st century: one where apartheid states can vote on ethnic cleansing with no consequence—or one where colonized peoples reclaim the land and the future.

Reframing the Struggle: Not a Conflict, but a Colonial War

Western propaganda wants you to think this is a “conflict” between two sides—Israel and Hamas, Jews and Muslims, settlers and terrorists. But what we are seeing, and what this poll exposes with brutal clarity, is the logic of colonial warfare: one side has tanks, jets, and nuclear weapons. The other side has refugee camps, water shortages, and resistance. This is not a war between equals—it is a war of dispossession.

When 82 percent of the settler population wants expulsion, that’s not a policy debate—it’s a colonial referendum. Israel is not “defending itself”; it is accelerating a plan of population removal, using the language of security to justify ethnic cleansing. Gaza is not a battleground—it is a laboratory for genocidal policy. And Israeli society has signed off.

This is the moment where we must destroy the liberal illusion of balance. There is no moral equivalency between the colonizer and the colonized. There is no symmetry between the forces of imperial violence and the right of a people to resist. Zionism is not a nationalist movement. It is a settler-colonial project propped up by Western empire.

The same Western countries that clutch their pearls over “human rights” in Russia or China have poured billions into Israeli death machines, from F-16s to AI-assisted bombing raids. And while they claim to stand for peace, they veto every resolution at the UN calling for a ceasefire. The hypocrisy isn’t accidental—it is systemic. Genocide is acceptable to the West, as long as it is conducted by their client states and packaged in the language of democracy.

This poll is a mirror. Not just for Israel, but for the entire imperialist world system. And it dares to ask: how far are you willing to go to defend your empire? The answer, once again, is: all the way to Gaza.

Mobilization: No More Genocide with Our Tax Dollars

This poll is not an Israeli problem—it’s a global crisis of imperial complicity. The U.S. sends Israel over $3.8 billion a year in military aid, while Europe shelters its apartheid from international law. These are not “mistakes” of foreign policy. They are strategic investments in settler domination, enforced by the same states that built their own empires through genocide, slavery, and theft. Palestine is their mirror—and their crime scene.

So what do we do? We tear the mask off. We refuse to let genocide be normalized. We refuse to let Zionism hide behind Judaism. We refuse to let white liberals talk about “civility” while entire cities are leveled. And we refuse to let our governments wage war with our silence.

Boycott Israeli products. Disrupt the flow of arms and tech transfers. Organize teach-ins and direct actions. Call out the NGOs and media who whitewash apartheid. Pressure every elected official who cosigns the death of Palestinian children. And build revolutionary solidarity with the Palestinian resistance—not as charity, but as comrades in a shared war against empire.

Palestine is not alone. From Haiti to the Sahel, from Yemen to Oakland, the people of the world are waking up to the fact that the enemy is not just a state—it is a system. A system of white supremacy, capitalist domination, and military occupation. And it is fragile. Every rebellion in Gaza shakes the pillars of that system. Every act of refusal—from a university sit-in to a port blockade—builds cracks in its foundations.

Our position is not neutral. It never has been. We stand with the colonized. With the displaced. With the fighters in the rubble, and the children in the refugee camps. This is not the time for hand-wringing. This is the time for action.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.