According to a recent poll of Americans:
While Israeli-Palestinian strife has been in the news for the entire lives of the respondents, 75 percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ismail Haniyeh, and countless others in the United Nations, Arab League, and the European Union are all working hard to make that 100%.
National Geographic took a similar survey in 2002, and found similarly poor results, but one particularly interesting question had to do with locating Israel on a map. See here. The countries on the map are numbered, and the respondent had to choose which one of four numbered countries was Israel. (The countries that were the wrong answers were actually Argentina, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.)
The results can be seen here. While the U.S. respondents did very poorly (21% right), Canada and Mexico did even worse, and Japan and Great Britain hardly any better. (If there are only 4 choices, there’s no excuse for doing worse than random guessing.)
I think it’s safe to say that if someone does not know the difference on a map between Israel, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Argentina, that person is not qualified to express a sensible opinion about Israel.