Biden Supports Israel. Does the Rest of America?

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A New York Times/Siena College poll has found that voters disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, though voters are split on U.S. policy toward the conflict and whether or not Israel’s military campaign should continue. Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, breaks down the poll and what it means for U.S.-Israeli relations and Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro.
0:04.0	This is the daily.
0:07.0	Today, in a major new poll, the Times tries to understand how Americans really feel about
0:19.8	the war in Gaza, President Biden's role in the conflict and perhaps most revealingly
0:27.2	about the state of Israel itself. My colleague Jonathan Weisman, explains. It's Friday, Friday, December 22nd. The war between Israel and Hamas has become, and I'm not telling you anything you don't already know,
1:00.6	a source of profound division in the United States. You can see that from
1:04.6	the protests on college campuses and in big cities, from the strong emotions that are pouring
1:09.5	forth on social media, and from the political conversation in Washington.
1:14.8	And yet it's been very hard to actually measure any of them.
1:19.4	But the Times has now tried to do just that. That's right. We went out to try to ascertain
1:26.7	where Americans as a whole are and we talked to registered voters and we asked them two sets of questions.
1:34.3	One about how President Biden is handling this conflict and the other about Israel itself
1:42.4	and Israel's handling of its war against Hamas in Gaza.
1:47.0	Okay, well let's start with what the poll found when it comes to the first of those two areas of questions how Americans
1:56.1	see President Biden's handling of the war. I mean registered voters clearly
2:01.4	disapprove of the way President Biden has been handling this conflict.
2:06.0	57% say they disapprove and only 33% said they approved of the way the president has been handling the war in Gaza.
2:17.0	So what exactly does this poll reveal about what's behind those high disapproval numbers?
2:21.8	On the one hand, those numbers are striking because Israel is
2:26.3	historically such a close ally of the US and Biden has been so unwaveringly supportive of it.
2:31.0	On the other hand, it's perhaps not that surprising at all because of
2:34.2	how much anger Israel's retaliation for October 7th, the extremely high
	...

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