When a poll says most Americans think that the Iran war serves U.S. interests, readers should check the source.
For the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), this scrutiny raises doubts. IMEU is an advocacy group with an anti-Israel agenda, and its surveys show this bias; citing them as proof of American opinion is as reliable as quoting Hamas press releases as news.
Its leadership and affiliations underscore this. Executive director Margaret DeReus started a political committee intended to counter AIPAC and support pro-Palestinian candidates; communications director Diana Buttu is a former PLO official who has defended Hamas; and policy director Josh Ruebner has worked extensively in advocacy critical of Israeli policies. The group has a $5 million budget, with funders including the Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, both of which are known for supporting organizations critical of Israeli government policies.
The bias is not subtle; it is embedded in the organization’s framing of basic facts. Its materials often label Israel’s actions as “illegal,” while giving less attention to comparable or more severe violations by its adversaries. These narratives tend to highlight claims against Israel and omit or distort the wider historical and strategic context.
The homepage of its website, for example, references Israel’s “illegal use” of cluster bombs. The accompanying facts are wrong, but what is striking is that it says nothing about Iran’s current illegal use of cluster bombs.
The rest of its “facts” are a similar catalog of Palestinian propaganda falsehoods.
For example, IMEU claims the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not religious—a position that requires ignoring the mufti of Jerusalem, Hamas’s founding charter, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the entire documented history of radical Islam’s genocidal hostility toward Jews and the Jewish state. Interestingly, they admit, unlike most propagandists, that “Jews were certainly indigenous to Palestine,” but blame the conflict on those pesky Zionists who came to create a Jewish state.
It repeats the mythical figure of 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war while omitting the Arab states’ explicit promise to drive the Jews into the sea, the Palestinians’ willing participation in that war, and the decades of anti-Jewish terrorism that preceded it.
IMEU acknowledges Israeli hostages and casualties from Oct. 7, but also asserts—falsely—that some Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli forces to prevent them from being taken hostage. This claim undermines the clear moral context of one of the worst massacres of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Its treatment of Hamas’s documented war crimes is similarly revealing.
The organization acknowledges that war crimes occurred but describes the evidence of systematic rape as “in dispute”—a characterization that contradicts the findings of U.N. investigators, the testimonies of survivors and the documentary record compiled by multiple international bodies. It then quotes Hamas itself acknowledging that “mistakes were made,” as though the bureaucratic passive voice of a terrorist organization constitutes meaningful accountability.
It compares Hamas’s slaughter of men, women and children to the actions of Nat Turner—framing mass murder as the understandable, if regrettable, violence of an oppressed people.
This is not analysis. It is moral inversion.
On settlements, IMEU condemns so-called “Jewish-only” communities, supports Palestinian-only areas, and ignores Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s demand to keep historic Jewish areas Jew-free. The asymmetry is deliberate. Israel faces standards its rivals never do, and such scrutiny is one-sided.
IMEU opposes providing even defensive weapons to Israel and, despite ongoing realities, insists that Israel can strike its neighbors at will with little or no consequence.
IMEU makes tired comparisons between Israel and South Africa, repeats disproven charges of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and tries to separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism. On BDS, it defends the movement as peaceful expression but ignores its founders’ central demand: eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. A movement aiming to destroy the world’s only Jewish democracy isn’t a free-speech cause. It’s eliminationist. Endorsing slogans like “Globalize the intifada” and “From the river to the sea,” as IMEU does, removes doubt about its goals.
To avoid trouble with Hamas or the P.A., IMEU doesn’t back a two-state solution. It claims that Israeli leaders reject it, ignoring Palestinian rejection and repeated spurned offers of independence. Echoing U.S. President Donald Trump, it says Israelis and Palestinians must decide on “one state, two states or some other configuration.”
Most revealing of all is the IMEU’s answer to the most fundamental question in the entire debate: Does Israel have the right to exist? Their answer is no.
The organization also denies Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, claiming this is impossible because Israel denies equal rights to Palestinians. This is a lie. Arab citizens of Israel hold equal rights under Israeli law, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court and participate fully in Israeli civic life. Israel has no legal or moral obligation to extend citizenship rights to noncitizen Palestinians in territories it does not govern, any more than Jordan extends Israeli citizenship to its residents.
And notably, the IMEU has nothing to say about the P.A.’s systematic denial of civil rights to its own people, or Hamas’s brutal repression of Gaza’s population. Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Palestinian leadership is simply not a subject this ostensibly pro-Palestinian organization chooses to address.
The bottom line is this: Any survey, report or set of statistics bearing the IMEU’s name should be treated as propaganda. The organization exists to demonize Israel, drive a wedge between the United States and its most reliable Middle Eastern ally, and lend a veneer of empirical credibility to positions that cannot withstand honest scrutiny.
Journalists who cite IMEU surveys without disclosing the organization’s identity or its mission are not informing their readers. They are laundering propaganda.
