A new Pew Research Center survey, released September 15, delivers a finding stark enough to end debate on its own terms: only 17% of Israelis and 21% of Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem now believe Israel and a Palestinian state could exist together in peace. Majorities on both sides, 56% of Israelis and 68% of Palestinians, say it cannot happen. For the first time since Pew began asking Israelis this question in 2013, more than half explicitly rejected the possibility outright, rather than simply falling short of a majority who believed in it.
What the Poll Actually Found
Pew surveyed 1,001 Israelis between April 5 and May 6, 2026, and 1,038 Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem between March 30 and April 28. Fieldwork began while the Iran war was still underway and continued after the April 7 ceasefire. Gaza could not be surveyed at all; Pew states it remains unable to conduct fieldwork there, and this marks the first time in several years the organization has managed to poll the Palestinian public anywhere.
Respondents were asked a single, direct question: whether a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully. Those who answered were then asked, in their own words, to explain why. Pew recorded and coded those explanations verbatim, and the resulting material is far more revealing than the topline numbers alone.
Among Jewish Israelis specifically, only 16% said coexistence was possible, against 64% who said it was not. Arab Israelis broke differently: nearly half (46%) either declined to answer or said they did not know, a share that has grown sharply from the year before, while those who did answer split almost evenly, with 23% saying peace was possible and 26% saying it was not. Overall, a full 20% of Israeli respondents did not answer the question at all, double the share that opted out the previous year.
The explanations Pew collected reveal why the numbers have moved this way. Disagreement over land emerged as one of the most common reasons cited on both sides for rejecting coexistence entirely. Several Jewish Israeli respondents grounded their answer explicitly in religious and historical claims rather than security calculations alone. One woman told Pew simply that the land belongs to the Jewish people alone. A 79-year-old man went further, stating that the land was promised to the chosen people by the Creator, and that not a grain of its sand may be given away. Palestinian respondents mirrored this with their own claims of exclusive rightful ownership, with some describing Israeli policy as an attempt to seize “the entire land of Israel from the river to the sea.”
Religious framing surfaced repeatedly and on both sides, well beyond the question of land ownership. One Jewish Israeli woman explained her answer by saying that the Jewish people are “destined to fight with the Ishmaelites until redemption comes,” invoking explicitly messianic language. Several Palestinian respondents echoed this with their own eschatological framing, predicting the conflict would continue “until the Day of Judgment.” One Palestinian woman stated plainly that her religion permits no coexistence with Jews at all. A Jewish respondent argued that Islamic ideology itself obligates its adherents to fight non-Muslims. Both populations, independently, described the other as denying their most basic claim to national existence: one Israeli woman said the Palestinian position amounts to “there is no country called Israel,” while Palestinian respondents offered the mirror accusation about Israel’s claim to the land.
October 7 served as an explicit rupture point, repeatedly named by Israeli respondents. Multiple people cited the Hamas-led massacre by name as the specific moment they abandoned belief in coexistence, with one man describing the personal loss of a couple he knew who were killed that day, and stating flatly that no forgiveness exists for what occurred. Palestinian respondents cited the devastation of the war that followed with equal specificity, with one woman naming the death of her own brother as sufficient reason to reject any further discussion of shared statehood.
Distrust ran through nearly every explanation on both sides, which Pew described as one of the most consistently cited reasons for pessimism. Some Palestinian respondents said Jews could never be trusted because covenants with them had been broken repeatedly throughout history. Some Israeli respondents offered the identical accusation in reverse, arguing that any agreement reached would not be honored by the other side.
A Decade of Decline, Not a Sudden Collapse
None of this represents a sudden shift produced by a single war. It is the continuation of a decline that began well over a decade ago and has now reached its floor.
When Pew began polling Israelis on this question in 2013, nearly half of Jewish Israelis, and a majority of Israelis overall, believed peaceful coexistence was achievable. By 2017, that confidence had already begun eroding along religious lines: Masorti, or traditionally observant, Jewish Israelis stood at 33% support, while Haredi and Dati Jewish Israelis stood at 22%. In the spring of 2023, just months before October 7, Jewish Israeli support had fallen to 32%, already less than half its 2013 level. The Hamas-led invasion did not create this decline. It accelerated one already well underway, driving Jewish Israeli support down to 19% by spring 2024, the lowest level Pew had recorded to that point. It fell again to 16% in 2025 and has held roughly flat since.
Pew’s own analysis found that the erosion has not been distributed evenly. Arab Israeli support has fallen 33 percentage points since 2013, more than double the 14-point decline recorded among Jewish Israelis over the same period.
The Palestinian trend line tells an even steeper story, and independent pollsters confirm it was already collapsing before the war began. Gallup found Palestinian support for a two-state outcome at 59% in 2012. By the time Gallup surveyed again between July and September 2023, in the weeks immediately preceding October 7, that figure had already fallen to 24%, a decline of thirty-five points that occurred entirely without the war as a cause. The Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research recorded similarly high historical support, with 62% of Palestinians and 63% of Israelis backing a two-state framework in June 2014, and Jewish Israeli support alone measured at 53% as recently as June 2016.
Set against that history, the numbers in this year’s Pew survey are not an anomaly produced by three years of war. They are the continuation of a trajectory that began when support stood at a majority on both sides and has now fallen, on both sides, to a fifth or less. What has changed is not merely the arithmetic. It is that both populations, independently and for their own reasons, have stopped treating coexistence as a live possibility at all.
