Taking sides: Public Opinion over the Israel-Palestine Conflict in 2021

Abstract

The Israel-Palestine Conflict, one of the most enduring conflicts in history, dates back to the start of 20th century, with the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine and has deeply rooted complex issues in politics, demography, religion, and other aspects, making it harder to attain resolve. To understand the conflict in 2021, we devise an observational study to aggregate stance held by English-speaking countries. We collect Twitter data using popular hashtags around and specific to the conflict portraying opinions neutral or partial to the two parties. We use different tools and methods to classify tweets into pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel, or neutral. This paper further describes the implementation of data mining methodologies to obtain insights and reason the stance held by citizens around the conflict.

Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the International Workshop on Social Sensing (SocialSens 2022): Special Edition on Belief Dynamics, 2022