Children in Gaza, February 2025. Photo: Palestine News & Information Agency, WAFA.
By Ben Norton  –  May 29, 2025
A poll found that 82% of full citizens of Israel want to expel Palestinians from Gaza. 47% want to kill every single man, woman, and child in Gaza. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that Israel is waging a âwar of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civiliansâ.
Support for genocide, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing is widespread in Israel.
Israelâs former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that his country is waging a âwar of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civiliansâ.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Israelis want to expel Palestinians from Gaza, and roughly half want to kill every single man, woman, and child in the besieged strip.
This is according to a poll that was published by the major Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
It found that 82% of Israelis want to expel Gazans, and 47% support killing all Palestinians in Gaza.
The more religious an Israeli is, the more likely they are to support genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The survey was conducted in March by Israeli scholar Tamir Sorek, a professor at Pennsylvania State University. He worked with the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group.
A March 2025 poll of Israeli public opinion, commissioned by Pennsylvania State University and published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz
Most Israelis want to expel Palestinian citizens
Roughly 21% of citizens of Israel are Palestinians, although they are not considered to be fully Israeli. They are third-class citizens, and are denied equal treatment by the Israeli regime.
âIsrael is not a state of all its citizensâ, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared with pride in 2019.
âAccording to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people â and only itâ, Netanyahu stressed, making it clear that Palestinians are not truly considered to be Israelis.
The March 2025 poll commissioned by Pennsylvania State University found that 56% of Jewish Israelis â who are the only ones considered to be true, full citizens â want to expel all Palestinian citizens. This includes 66% of Israelis under the age 40.
The younger an Israeli is, the more likely they are to be a far-right extremist, the survey showed.
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How the political systems of Israel and the USA promote far-right extremism
Professor Tamir Sorek, the Israeli scholar who conducted the poll, noted that some prominent religious leaders in Israel have advocated for the mass murder of Palestinian civilians.
As an example, Sorek cited Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, an influential Israeli settler leader in the West Bank, which according to international law is Palestinian territory that has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967.
Ginsburgh, who wants to eliminate Palestinians and establish a theocratic monarchy in Israel, is also an American. He was born and raised in the United States, and did not move to Israel until he was in his 20s.
Sorek wrote that the attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 âonly unleashed demons that had been nurtured for decades in the media and the legal and educational systemsâ.
In Haaretz, Sorek wrote (emphasis added):
Zionism, besides being a national movement, is also a movement of immigrant-settlers, seeking to displace the local population. Settler-immigrant societies always encounter indiscriminate violent resistance from indigenous groups. The desire for absolute and permanent security can lead to an aspiration to eliminate the resisting population. Therefore, virtually every settlement project has the potential for ethnic cleansing and genocide, as indeed happened in North America in the 17th through 19th centuries or in Namibia in the early 1900s.
Sorek warned in another article in April that, âIn Israel, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstreamâ.
A clear example of how fascism has become mainstream in Israel is the countryâs extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the governmentâs powerful security cabinet.
Smotrich described himself as a âfascist homophobeâ. The top Israeli official has called for the âtotal annihilationâ of Gaza, and he argued it would be âjustified and moralâ to starve to death all 2.1 million Palestinians in the strip.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel is waging a âwar of exterminationâ in Gaza
Israelâs former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has accused his country of committing war crimes and waging a âwar of exterminationâ in Gaza.
Olmert led the Israeli regime from 2006 to 2009. He was previously a decades-long member of Netanyahuâs right-wing political party, Likud.
He made these frank admissions in a Hebrew-language article in Haaretz in May. (The following quotes are from Google Translate.)
âWhat we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: the indiscriminate, unrestrained, cruel, and criminal killing of civiliansâ, Olmert stated.
He made it clear that this is the âresult of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklesslyâ.
Israelâs Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with US President George W. Bush in the White House in 2006
Olmert explained that, in 2023 and 2024, he denied that the Israeli regime was intentionally committing war crimes, but he now realizes that he was wrong.
âThere are too many cases of brutal shooting of civilians, of destruction of property and homesâ, the former Israeli prime minister said. âLooting of property, thefts from homes, which in many cases IDF soldiers have also taken pride in and published in personal posts. We are committing war crimesâ.
Olmert stated in no uncertain terms that Israel is using hunger as a weapons: âYes, we are depriving the residents of Gaza of food, medicine, and minimal means of subsistence as part of a declared policyâ.
He referred to the Israeli regime as a âgang of criminalsâ, and wrote that âthe ministers of the Israeli government, led by the head of the gang, Netanyahu, are actually adopting, without forethought, without hesitation, a policy of starvation and humanitarian pressure whose outcome could be catastrophicâ.
Israel officially calls its war in Gaza âOperation Gideonâs Chariotsâ. Olmert said this is an âillegitimate military campaignâ, in which Israeli soldiers have gone on a ârampageâ, and have turned Gaza into a âhumanitarian disaster zoneâ.
The army is acting ârecklessly, carelessly, and excessively aggressivelyâ, he added.
The large number of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza is âunreasonable, unjustifiable, unacceptableâ, he wrote.
Olmert also admitted that Israelis âmassacre Palestinian civilians in the West Bank as wellâ, and âcommit heinous crimes every day in the West Bankâ.
In an interview with ABC News, the former Israeli prime minister acknowledged, âWe have destroyed Gazaâ.
Ben Norton
Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Multipolarista, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on Sky News, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, El Financiero Bloomberg, Al Mayadeen teleSUR, RT, TRT World, CGTN, Press TV, HispanTV, Sin Censura, and various TV channels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Benjamin writes a regular column for Al Mayadeen (in English and Spanish). He was formerly a reporter with the investigative journalism website The Grayzone, and previously produced the political podcast and video show Moderate Rebels. His personal website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
