Poll results released last month show that Americans are sharply divided over the influence of Israel on U.S. politics, and those divisions often fall along party lines.
On Dec. 4, The Brookings Institution, a highly influential Washington-based think tank, released the results ofa study of American attitudes toward Israel and the Middle East. The report comes after a year in which Israel’s influence on America’s governance and foreign policy received heightened scrutiny, especially following a controversial speech to a joint session of Congress by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3. AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobbying group, also faced increased criticism.
The bulk of the poll was based on the opinions of 875 randomly selected Americans, but the study’s author, Shibley Telhami, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings’ Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, also polled an additional 863 additional Americans who self-identify as Evangelical or Born-again Christians to determine how their attitudes differed from the average.
