How the Israel-Palestine Conflict Has Shaped Islamophobia and Antisemitism in the United States

By Josh Goetz

Published May 26, 2026

Introduction

When violence escalates in the Middle East, its effects are felt thousands of miles away. Jewish and Muslim communities around the world become targets of hate. In the context of the United States, since October 7, 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have noted large increases in hate incidents against Jewish and Muslim Americans. This is not a new pattern: decades of research has found that spikes in the salience of the Israel-Palestine Conflict are consistently followed by spikes in hate incidents against Muslims and Jews in the West.

But hate crimes, as sobering as they are, only represent the extreme tip of the iceberg of prejudice. The extremists who commit hate crimes are clearly unrepresentative of the general public, leading me to ask: Does the increased salience of the Conflict cause the general public to adopt more antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes and behaviors as well? If so, does it matter how the Conflict is covered in the news (i.e., whether the coverage leans toward one side or the other)? And, finally, how would we measure these effects in a meaningful and realistic manner?

A Measurement Problem

Surveys about prejudice have an obvious limitation: people don’t always tell the truth. If you ask people how they feel about Muslims or Jews, they often give a positive answer regardless of what they actually think or how they might behave in real life. This is sometimes called “social desirability bias”, and it makes measuring prejudice difficult.

To get around this, I designed an experiment measuring how people behave rather than what they say they believe. In partnership with the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate, the UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and the survey firm Morning Consult, I surveyed 360 American adults and asked them to do something that felt nothing like a prejudice survey: evaluate babysitter profiles.

Survey respondents were told about a new (and, unbeknownst to them, fictitious) babysitter app, similar to SitterCity or Care.com, which was allegedly in beta testing. As shown in the figure below, respondents were asked to evaluate a series of pairs of babysitter profiles from the app and indicate which of the two depicted babysitters in each pair they would prefer to hire to watch their kids. The babysitter profiles contain a number of randomized attributes, including years of experience, cost, and—most importantly—religion, which is signaled through the babysitter’s name and through the name of the religious institution at which they volunteered. Political scientists call this kind of exercise a ‘visual conjoint,’ and it allows a researcher to calculate respondents’ aggregate preferences for and against different profile attributes across thousands of decisions. Critically, this provides a measure of respondents’ willingness to discriminate against Jewish and Muslim babysitters.

There are several advantages to this design over standard measures of discrimination. First, by combining a number of competing attributes into a visual profile, it closely mimics real-world hiring decisions. Second, because price is one of the attributes, I can express discrimination in dollar terms: i.e., how much extra a respondent would pay to avoid hiring a Muslim babysitter. Third, it allows for simultaneous tests for Islamophobic, antisemitic, and other forms of prejudice in a single battery of questions without tipping off the majority of respondents to the purpose of the exercise.

Preliminary Results

What does this all have to do with the Conflict? Prior to completing the hiring exercise, participants were randomly assigned to read one of four fictional social media posts about a violent incident. Depending on the group, the post described a Conflict-related incident with a pro-Israel framing, a pro-Palestinian framing, a more neutral tone, or described something entirely unrelated to the conflict. This allowed me to test whether exposure to conflict-related news—and the way it is framed—affects how people behave toward Jewish and Muslim individuals in the subsequent exercise, by comparing the average rates of discrimination across treatment groups.

With only 360 participants, the data is not yet large enough to draw firm conclusions. Yet even with this number of respondents, some striking patterns emerge. Specifically, the data suggest that exposure to news about the Conflict, regardless of slant, leads respondents to engage in significantly more discrimination against Muslim babysitters. Respondents in some of the treatment groups also discriminate more against Jewish babysitters than respondents in the control group, though these results were weaker and less consistent. I refrain from discussing details any further at this early stage, as a much larger follow-up survey is planned for the future.

Takeaways

There are two takeaways from this piece: a methodological one and a substantive one. Methodologically, and regardless of the results of the larger study, I believe visual conjoints are a promising, yet underutilized, way of measuring prejudice. I recommend that survey researchers incorporate measures like the babysitter hiring exercise described above in future studies, and I encourage anyone interested in the details of my methodology to learn more by clicking here.

Substantively, hate crimes are the visible surface of prejudice, but the roots may run much deeper. The more pernicious effects of trigger events like flare-ups in the Israel-Palestine Conflict remain largely understudied and unknown. If it is the case that the Conflict shapes the everyday behaviors of millions of Americans–as these pilot results suggest– then the true scope of the conflict’s harm is far greater than what hate crime reports capture.

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Josh Goetz is a 4th-year PhD student in the Department of Political Science at UCLA, and a researcher with the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate & Bedari Kindness Institute. His research centers on intergroup relations, discrimination, and prejudice reduction. A comparativist, he works in various contexts, including India, Rwanda, and the United States. Before joining UCLA’s program, he attended the Ohio State University, where he earned a BS in Political Science and a BS in Chemical Engineering.

References

Anti-Defamation League (2024). “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2024”.
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents-2024

Council on American-Islamic Relations (2024). “New CAIR Data Shows Anti-Muslim,
Anti-Palestinian Hate Remain Elevated in First Half of 2024”. https://www.cair.com/press_releases/new-cair-data-shows-anti-muslim-anti-palestinian-hate-remain-elevated-in-first-half-of-2024/

Goetz, Joshua (2026). “Visual Conjoints”. GitHub [Code Repository].
https://github.com/joshgoetz/Visual_Conjoints

Federal Bureau of Investigation (2025). “Crime Data Explorer”.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime

Vecchiato, A., & Munger, K. (2025). “Introducing the visual conjoint, with an application to
candidate evaluation on social media”. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 12(1), 57-71. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimental-political-science/article/introducing-the-visual-conjoint-with-an-application-to-candidate-evaluation-on-social-media/6C49A139715A9BCBAD4EF92CCA3D716A