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       HISTORY shows that once a large enough number of people come around to a given belief, two things follow almost inevitably.

       First, the market acknowledges that there is money to be made by speaking to those people. Products appear, stories are told, marketing campaigns are tuned to resonate with them.

       Second, mainstream politicians realise that there are careers to be built by engaging with the people who hold that belief, even if — until recently — doing so would have been considered toxic or fringe.

       The belief now surging in this territory is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

       This has been well known to Genocide Scholars for a long time now. But awareness has now seeped into mainstream American society to a level that mainstream institutions are beginning to engage with it.

       Nowhere is this clearer than in the US Senate — an institution not known for sudden swings of conscience. Back in April 2025, Bernie Sanders introduced two resolutions to cancel $8.8 billion in weapons sales to Israel. Only 15 Democratic senators backed him. It was a courageous stand for a small minority, but a minority nonetheless. The resolutions failed by huge margins: 82-15 and 83-15.

       The belief now surging is that Israel is committing genocide.

       Then, on July 30, something remarkable happened. Sanders came back with two new resolutions: one to block the sale of 20,000 assault rifles to Israel, the other to block $675 million in bombs. Both still failed — but the votes were 70-27 and 73-24. This time, a majority of Senate Democrats supported at least one of the measures.

       What changed was political calculation. The senators could now see that more voters, including within their own base, view Israel’s actions in Gaza as not only wrong but as genocide. In April, siding with that view looked like a risky moral stand; by July, it was becoming a credential.

       If politics moves with the polls, the market moves with the ticket sales. This summer’s runaway success at the box office, James Gunn’s Superman, offers a striking cultural parallel to the Senate floor’s shift. The film grossed over $580m worldwide, with $332m domestic — making it the highest-grossing solo Superman film ever and even surpassing Batman v Superman in US earnings.

       Ordinarily, box office reporting focuses on franchise fatigue or marketing budgets. But much of the public conversation around Superman was about its political subtext. Online debates exploded over whether its fictional conflict — between the technologically advanced Boravia and the besieged land of Jahranpur — was an allegory for Israel and Gaza. On TikTok, edits framing Superman as “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Zionist” racked up millions of views. On Letterboxd, users praised the film as “very anti-Israel” and “awesome to see from a major studio blockbuster”.

       Whether Gunn intended this reading or not, the fact that a major studio tent pole could be interpreted this way — and still thrive commercially — suggests that studios no longer fear this audience. In fact, they may be starting to court it. If the market once punished films that could be read as sympathetic to Palestinians, today it seems ready to reward them. That is not the beginning of a movement; it’s the middle of one.

       Markets respond to spending power; politicians to voters. But journalism, at its best, responds to audience engagements. For decades, mainstream US outlets have often reported on Gaza’s suffering in the sanitised language of ‘clashes’ and ‘conflicts’.

       On July 30, Washington Post shattered that euphemistic habit; it published the names and ages of 18,500 children killed in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023, according to the Gaza health ministry. The list was searchable, sortable — human lives rendered visible in the most intimate way. Infants who never saw a sunrise outside of rubble. Teenagers who once dreamt of becoming doctors, poets, athletes.

       The impact was visceral. Numbers in headlines can feel abstract; names do not. By giving each child an identity, the Post moved the conversation from casualty figures to human loss.

       It was a statement, perhaps unspoken but unmistakable, that the deaths of these children are not the unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate war. They are the destruction of a people’s future. In editorial rooms, decisions like this are not made lightly.

       That the Post chose to publish it now speaks to a confidence that their readership will not only tolerate but demand this degree of unflinching coverage. That confidence is rooted in the changing beliefs of their audience.

       What ties these three episodes together is the simple arithmetic of belief. In April, 15 Democratic senators sided with the view that US weapons should not flow to a country committing what many of their constituents call genocide. By July, that number had grown to over 20.

       In cinema, the audience willing to embrace or at least tolerate a politically charged allegory has proven large enough to make Superman one of the year’s biggest hits. In journalism, one of America’s most influential papers has judged that giving a name to each child killed will not alienate its readership — it will inform them.

       Public opinion data supports this. Polls in the US over the past year have shown rising numbers, es--p-e--cially among younger Americans, who believe Is--rael is committing genocide in Gaza. Among De--mo-crats under 35, the figure has climbed into a clear majority. The belief has moved from activist circles into the political and cultural mainstream. In marketing, when you lose the youth you lose the future.

       The most telling part is not that this is happening but how quickly it is happening. For decades, unflinching support for Israel was a bipartisan art-icle of faith in Washington. In just a few months, the Senate has recorded historic votes, the box of--fice has crowned an unexpected champion, and one of the nation’s premier newspapers has memorialised Gaza’s dead with the intimacy of a family album.

       The tide is turning, and with it, the incentives that shape politics and culture. Israel’s days of securing unconditional support from the West are numbered.

       Once the institutions of America’s mainstream politics, entertainment and journalism learn there is money to be made, votes to be secured, readers to be found, by engaging with those who see Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, the momentum can become unstoppable.

       The writer is a business and economy journalist.

       Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2025