By LINLEY SANDERS

WASHINGTON (AP) — American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.

That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54% of Americans sympathized more with the Israelis, compared to 31% for the Palestinians.

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Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41% saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36% saying the same about the Israelis.

The numbers reflect how support for Israel has become deeply contentious in the U.S., with profound implications for American politics and foreign policy. The changing sentiment has been largely driven by Democrats, who are now much more likely to sympathize with Palestinians. U.S. assistance to Israel has been a major dividing line in the party’s primaries this year.

Gallup’s data indicates that the shift was already happening before Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, then increased during Israel’s subsequent military operations in Gaza. The polling has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning sentiment toward Israelis and Palestinians are roughly even.

“It’s the first time they have reached parity, which is really quite striking,” said Benedict Vigers, a senior global news writer at Gallup. “In not many years, that very significant gap in public opinion has now completely closed.”

Democrats and independents

About two-thirds of Democrats now say their concerns lie more with the Palestinians, while only about 2 in 10 sympathize more with the Israelis. As recently as 2016, the picture looked very different: About half of Democrats sympathized more with the Israelis and only about one-quarter sympathized with the Palestinians.

The shift began even before the Israel-Hamas war turned the issue into a flash point within the Democratic Party. Palestinian combatants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the initial attack and took another 251 hostage, but the Israeli response has been widely seen as disproportionate, with Gaza health officials reporting more than 72,000 Palestinians killed, nearly half of them women and children, and wide swaths of the territory reduced to rubble. Many progressive politicians and activists now describe Israel’s actions in the war as genocide — a charge Israel vehemently denies.

Democrats have expressed greater sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis since 2023 — in a Gallup poll that was conducted before the Oct. 7 attacks — but Gallup’s surveys show their support in the conflict has been tilting toward the Palestinians and away from the Israelis since around 2017.

Some of that early decline in sympathy appeared to be tied to disapproval of the right-leaning Israeli leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose favorability in the U.S. fell nearly 15 percentage points between 2017 and 2024, according to separate Gallup polling.

Netanyahu clashed with former President Barack Obama in the last year of his administration, then forged a warmer relationship with President Donald Trump, who delivered several victories to Netanyahu in his first term, including recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Trump also persuaded three Arab countries to establish commercial and diplomatic ties with Israel. The closeness between Trump and Netanyahu has continued into Trump’s second term.

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians was a point of tension for Democrats during President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as during the 2024 presidential election. An AP-NORC poll conducted toward the end of 2023, just a few months into the war in Gaza, found that Democrats were sharply divided on whether the U.S. was too supportive of Israel, and another AP-NORC poll from 2024 found that Democratic voters were more likely to say the Israeli government held “a lot” of responsibility for the war’s escalation.

Democrats’ sympathy for the Palestinians intensified as the war progressed, Gallup’s polling shows, and independents’ views also shifted. This year, independents expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis for the first time in Gallup’s trend. About 4 in 10 independents are more sympathetic toward the Palestinians. That’s compared to about 3 in 10 for the Israelis, a new low.

Most Republicans continue to side with Israel — about 7 in 10 say they are more sympathetic to the Israelis — but that is a slight downtick from about 8 in 10 before the start of the war. Some figures in the Republicans’ isolationist “America First” wing are also increasingly questioning traditional U.S. support for Israel.

Generational gaps

Younger adults — those 18 to 34 in this poll — are also increasingly sympathetic toward the Palestinians, according to the Gallup survey.

Younger Americans’ sympathies have been shifting toward the Palestinians since around 2020, and reached a new high this year. About half of 18 to 34 year olds say they have more sympathy for the Palestinians, compared to about a quarter who say that about the Israelis.

Student protests against the Israel-Hamas war appeared on college campuses around the country during the war, asking colleges to cut investments supporting Israel.

But the shift is only “partly a generational story,” according to Vigers.

The new poll also found for the first time that middle-aged Americans, those 35 to 54, expressed more sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis — a reversal from last year. And while Americans over 55 are more sympathetic toward Israel, that gap is narrowing, too.

“With adults over 55, they are more sympathetic to Israelis, but it’s as low as it’s been since 2005,” Vigers said.

Palestinian state

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults, 57%, favor the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to the new polling. That’s not significantly different from recent years, as at least half of U.S. adults have supported an independent Palestinian state since 2020.

Vigers notes that “party polarization is at or near its record high” on this question, even though it hasn’t been sharply increasing year over year.

In the last few years, there’s been an uptick among Democrats and independents in support for the two-state solution. Now, about three-quarters of Democrats and roughly 6 in 10 independents say they support an independent Palestinian state. Only about one-third of Republicans say the same.

The opinions of the people who would be directly affected by a two-state solution are quite different. Only about 3 in 10 Israelis living in Israel and Palestinians living in the West Bank and east Jerusalem said they supported a two-state solution in which an independent Palestinian state existed alongside Israel, according to the Gallup World Poll conducted in 2025.

“On the ground, in the region, far fewer Israelis and Palestinians tell us that they are in favor of the two-state solution than Americans when asked a very similar question,” Vigers said. “There is that interesting sort of disconnect between the region itself and Americans’ views toward it.”

Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

The Gallup poll was conducted Feb. 2-16, 2026, among 1,001 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older, using a sample drawn from Gallup’s probability-based panel. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points.

By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. wholesale prices came in hotter than expected last month.

The Labor Department reported Friday that its producer price index, which measures inflation before it hits consumers, rose 0.5% from December and 2.9% from January 2025. Economists had forecast a 0.3% increase for the month and 1.6% year over year, according to a survey by the data firm FactSet.

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Excluding food and energy prices, which bounce around from month to month, so-called core wholesale prices rose 0.8% from December and 3.6% from January 2025 — both higher than forecasters had expected.

Energy prices were down. Wholesale gasoline prices fell 5.5% from December and plunged 15.7% from a year earlier.

Driving the increase was an uptick in the wholesale price of services, led by higher profit margins for retailers and wholesalers.

The producer price report comes two weeks after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose just 2.4% last month compared to a year earlier, closing in on the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Economists had worried that President Donald Trump’s double-digit taxes on imports would drive inflation higher. Their impact has so far been more modest than expected — although inflation remains higher than the Fed would like.

Wholesale prices can offer an early look at where consumer inflation might be headed. Economists also watch it because some of its components, notably measures of health care and financial services, flow into the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or PCE, price index.

By ELAINE KURTENBACH and MATT OTT, AP Business Writers

U.S. futures fell overnight Friday after Block CEO Jack Dorsey said his payment company would lay off 40% of its workforce, citing a shift to artificial intelligence.

Futures for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each fell 0.4% before the opening bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 0.6%.

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Shares in Block, formerly known as Square, shot up more than 20% after markets closed following Dorsey’s comments about laying off about 4,000 of its 10,000 employees.

“We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that,” Dorsey wrote in a letter to shareholders.

Dorsey “just did what most CEOs have only whispered about in boardrooms,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management wrote in a commentary.

“For years we’ve debated whether AI would dent jobs at the margin. Now we have a public case study where the CEO explicitly says intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company,” he said.

Shares in streaming giant Netflix jumped 7.3% in premarket trading after it walked away from its bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business. That put Skydance-owned Paramount in a position to take over its Hollywood rival. Paramount Skydance shares climbed 7.9% before trading opened Friday.

Netflix said the price required to buy Warner after its board announced that Paramount’s offer was superior would make it a deal that is “no longer financially attractive.”

Warner Bros. shares fell 1.4% overnight. On Thursday, the entertainment giant reported a $252 million loss for the fourth quarter.

Coming later Friday morning is the latest data on U.S. inflation at the wholesale level.

Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX rose 0.3%, while the CAC 40 dipped 0.2%. Britain’s FTSE 100 gained 0.5%.

In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 edged 0.2% higher to 58,850.27.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng jumped 1% to 26,630.54, while the Shanghai Composite index advanced 0.4% to 4,162.88.

South Korea’s Kospi lost 1% to 6,244.13 as traders sold to lock in profits from recent gains.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 closed 0.3% higher at 9,198.60, while India’s Sensex lost 0.8%.

In energy markets, U.S. benchmark crude oil gained $1.66 to $66.87 per barrel. Crude prices have been swinging while the United States and Iran held indirect talks about Iran’s nuclear program.

The two sides walked away from the latest talks without a deal. That left the danger of another Mideast war on the table as the U.S. has gathered a massive fleet of aircraft and warships in the region.

A peaceful solution would lessen the threat of war, which could disrupt the global flow of oil and drive prices higher.

Brent crude, the international standard, gained $1.70 early Friday to $72.54 per barrel.

The dollar fell to 155.93 Japanese yen from 156.13 yen. The euro rose to $1.1803 from $1.1796.

The Minnesota Orchestra rang in the Lunar New Year with a celebratory evening of music, culture and a dancing dragon. Featuring both folk and contemporary music from China, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and beyond, the show emphasized cross-cultural explorations even as it honored musical traditions of countries who mark their calendars by the moon.

Pipa player Gao Hong and the Carleton College Chinese Music Ensemble got things started with a pre-show in the atrium before the concert. Hong performed in group pieces and accompanied soloists throughout the short presentation. An exquisite player herself, Hong mostly let her talented students take the spotlight for the warm-up show.

After the pre-show, the evening began in earnest in the auditorium, where guest conductor Chia-Hsuan Lin led a crowd-pleasing program, thanks in part to principal bassoon Fei Xie, who was artistic consultant for the event.

The first two works came from alumni of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, a program that nurtures emerging composers each year. Zhou Tian, who participated in the program in 2006 and has since been nominated for a Grammy, wrote a marvelous piece titled “Gift,” which the orchestra performed, while Texu Kim created a commissioned new arrangement of Hong Nan-pa’s “Spring in My Hometown,” and the orchestra gave its world premiere at the concert.

Both works carried cinematic, pastoral qualities. Zhou’s work swelled with sweet detail and texture, while “Spring in My Hometown” brought an earthy, meditative feeling.

Then, guest suona player Yazhi Guo played two numbers. A member of the Silk Road Ensemble, a group founded by Yo-Yo Ma, who is also coming to play a sold-out concert with the Minnesota Orchestra on March 3, Guo’s performance was a journey.

The suona is a squeaky instrument. It has a double reed, looks a bit like a trumpet, and sounded like a cross between an oboe and a saxophone, and at times a bagpipe without the drone. Guo’s performance was a whirlwind of unexpected rhythms, inspired characters, and joyful play.

First up was Hao-Fu Zhang’s “The River Crosses the Desert,” opening with a gong and continuing with mysterious percussive sounds — one section sounded like a descent of woodpeckers. Between gurgling cello and moody brass, the orchestra reached cacophony.

Guo’s second piece, the traditional Chinese “Hundreds of Birds Worshipping the Phoenix,” arranged by Huihui Cheng, featured Guo channeling the squawks and squabbles of birds, approximating nature’s rhythms.

At intermission, guests watched a dragon dance performed by the Alliance of Minnesota Chinese Organizations and the CAAM Chinese Dance Theater. Accompanied by boisterous drumming, puppeteers swept through the foyer and up the stairs with thunderous artistry.

After intermission, the orchestra performed a series of shorter pieces, beginning with an excerpt of Bright Sheng’s Concerto for Orchestra: “Zodiac Tales,” titled “The Flying Horses.” With its riveting trombone and smashing rhythms, the music exhilarated.

Next, the Minnesota Orchestra’s assistant concertmaster, Rui Du, shared his rich tone and emotional nuance in “Nostalgia” by Ma Sicong and “Seed of Eternal Love,” by Gordon She-Wen Chin.

The orchestra closed out the evening with a series of joyful numbers: “Confluence” by Wang Chenwei had a swinging sense of excitement, while Huang Ruos’s “Flower Drum Song from Feng Yang,” and Li Huanzhi’s “Spring Festival Overture” brought the program to a festive end.

The orchestra also played an encore. In a nod to host Roz Tsai, who likened “Spring Festival Overture” to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” the orchestra finished off the evening with the Western classic. The choice made for a somewhat disjointed conclusion as it veered from the rest of the concert celebrating Asian traditions.

The Minnesota Orchestra

Next up: Ben Rector: Symphonies Across America

When: 7 p.m. on Sat. Feb. 28

Where: Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis

Tickets: $54-$136

Info: minnesotaorchestra.org

Accessibility: See minnesotaorchestra.org/plan-your-visit/accessibility

Capsule: After a riveting Lunar New Year Concert, the Minnesota Orchestra teams up with Ben Rector for an Anthem Sing-Along.

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