When Kamala Harris sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash last month, Bash asked a question: “Would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”
Harris sidestepped the question, talked about a ceasefire, and ultimately said that she would not change course from the Biden administration’s policy of arming Israel as its war on Gaza enters its 11th month.
But polls of the American voting population show that she’s ignoring more than just the “progressive left”: A majority of voters support ending arms transfers to Israel, and support for an arms embargo is growing.
“The reality is that the public is far more in favor of stopping arms sales to Israel than opposed,” Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington D.C., told The Intercept. He pointed to a June poll from CBS that showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.
Poll results have been consistent for months.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, a majority of Americans have expressed support for some form of restrictions on the U.S. sending weapons to Israel in repeated public surveys. Americans are even more overwhelmingly in favor of a ceasefire.
Among the most consistent string of polls on the issue of weapons transfers to Israel has come from CBS News, which partnered with YouGov to carry out its survey. About two weeks after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, as Israel’s bombardment had already killed more than 2,000 civilians in Gaza, a CBS poll of more than 1,800 Americans found that 52 percent of American adults said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel. The totals included large majorities among both Democrats and independents, and 43 percent of Republicans.
In April, CBS News/YouGov asked the same question in a new poll and found that an even larger number of Americans (60 percent), including 68 percent of Democrats, said they felt the U.S. should not send arms to Israel. The poll was conducted days after an Israeli strike killed seven aid workers in a clearly marked World Central Kitchen convoy.
Hellbound and Down 