Prime Minister Netanyahu shaking hands with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as President Obama looks on.

A recent joint poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal posed several  questions to U.S. citizens on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The first question was whether the United States should support the Israelis more than the Palestinians, support the Palestinians more than the Israelis or should the U.S. treat both the same? To this question 55% of respondents answered that they should be treated both the same, while 31% said Israelis should be favored vs. just 4% in favor of the Palestinians.

The following question asked which nation Americans sympathized with: 45% said Israel, 13% said the Palestinians and 19 percent said neither. Sympathy for Israel stood at 48% in 2002 and climbed to 61% in 2010, according to the survey.

To the final question, whether they believe Palestinians and Israelis will or will not be able to form a lasting peace agreement that will work, the overwhelming majority of respondents, 69% in fact, believed that the two sides would not be able to live alongside one another in peace, while only 18% said that they would. This was up from 57% and 31% respectively in a similar 2005 poll.