(Note: A slightly different version of the following was published as a letter to the editor in the Oct. 9, 2025 edition of the Washington Post)
The October 4 news article “Many American Jews sharply critical of Israel on Gaza, Post poll finds” ignores important findings and key context from the newspaper’s own survey.
The Post’s own poll found that only 18 percent of American Jews said that they feel “very safe” in the United States today. And 26 percent of respondents said that they feel “not too safe.” These are astonishing, and deeply worrisome, findings. Yet the article on the poll omitted these statistics.
By contrast, the claim that 61 percent of American Jews say Israel has committed “war crimes” and “about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide” testify to the power of propaganda and disinformation in the modern age—and the media’s frequent failure to counter it.
Claims of a “genocide” and “war crimes” are based off of casualty statistics supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry—a Hamas-controlled entity with an incentive to inflate and distort the number of dead, and a history of doing precisely that. Indeed, the Ministry doesn’t distinguish between combatant and civilian dead and has, on a number of occasions, revised its figures without explanation. Yet too many in the press treat them as credible—with destructive results, if the poll’s findings are to be believed.
Sean Durns
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
Washington D.C.