Chapter 7 of 8
CHAPTER SEVENDid any of it change what Americans thought?
No. The question cannot be answered from this evidence.
Gallup has asked Americans where their sympathies lie since 1988. This archive begins in 1724. For 264 of its 300 years there is no American opinion data on the subject at all — nothing for the 1930s revolt, nothing for the 1940s, nothing for 1948 or 1967 or the first intifada.
FROM OUTSIDE
Corrected 9 October 2026. An earlier version of this note said the change in wording made the newspapers and the polling harder to separate, and that joining this line was the error. Gallup had already run the test. In a poll of 1,009 adults on 22–24 April 2002 it put the Palestinian Arabs wording to half the sample and the Palestinians wording to the other half, and reported “no significant differences in the results between the two questions.” It changed the wording the following month. On its own evidence the words were not moving the answers, and the claim went further than what was known.
It is still one test, on about five hundred people a side, and a sample that size cannot see a small effect. It rules out a large one. The rest of the reason for care here has nothing to do with vocabulary: the series starts in 1988, the archive starts in 1724, and there is no series of coverage to set against it. And the two changes are not one event: the papers moved over seventy years of their own accord, while Gallup moved once, on purpose, having measured the consequence first. Gallup, 29 April 2002.
And the number usually quoted as American opinion of Palestinians is not a measurement of opinion of Palestinians. In the last readings before October 2023, Gallup put sympathy with the Palestinians at 31% while Pew, asking separately about a people rather than a side, found 52% held a favorable view of Palestinians, and 28% of the Palestinian government. Twenty-one points apart, because one question is a forced choice about a conflict and the other is a question about people.
THE LIMIT
The largest movements in the series are February 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, and September 2001, days after the attacks. The partisan gap on Palestinian favorability in 2022 is larger than any movement the national series has shown in thirty-five years. And this project has no series of coverage to set against it: a correlation needs two, and there is one.
This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.
Last updated 2 November 2026
Every figure about this archive is computed from the records at build time. Every figure from outside it is logged with the query that produced it.
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Collected, transcribed and checked by Maria Robles · maria@rozumstudio.com