Eldar's New Good News Poll

Can we trust Haaretz reporting on polls?

After Eldar and Levy on those "apartheid" stories?

Here's the latest, "For the right man, Israelis would make peace" which makes the claim that

"The consensus is moving to the right, but that doesn't mean Israeli Jews won't support a deal with the PA if the right leader comes along, a new study shows."

The May (five months ago!) data is from Tel Aviv University's Walter Lebach Institute for Jewish-Arab Coexistence, but it seems not even to be up at its site.

Some findings:

- 80 percent of Israelis don't believe it's possible to make peace with the Palestinians. Half of them don't believe it's ever possible to make peace, while half don't believe it's possible in the foreseeable future. About two-thirds support a diplomatic solution, but many more still eagerly buy the convenient argument that there's no partner.
- 87 percent of secular Jewish Israelis believe in the need for peace with the Palestinians, but only half the religiously observant and a smaller percentage of the ultra-Orthodox believe this. Traditional Jews have moved to the right and are now in the middle of the road.
- only about 20 percent of secular Jews see the demographic threat as an existential problem and only one-third believe the occupation and the settlements are creating a security threat to Israel.
- nearly half the respondents consider Palestinian terror a major security problem;
- Within the Green Line, the number who consider themselves rightists or right-leaning has increased from 41 percent to 48 percent. Two-thirds of this increase comes at the expense of those who say they hold centrist positions. But between 2002 and 2012 the left has strengthened; it has grown from 20 percent to 25 percent
- 60 percent of the public supports a democratic solution to the conflict, 22 percent of Jewish residents of the West Bank prefer the authority of the rabbis to the authority of the elected institutions.
-  six percent of the respondents (14 percent of the settlers ) see the use of violence to prevent withdrawal from the West Bank as legitimate, while 59 percent (70 percent of the settlers ) believe that the public only has the right to fight for its beliefs within the law (compared with 31 percent and 45 percent respectively at the beginning of the decade ).
- Around 37 percent of the secular respondents see the settlers as pioneers, compared with 32 percent in 2005, and 35 percent see them as "the bedrock of our existence," compared with 23 percent in 2005.

The really silly item Eldar emphasizes that

the hard core of settlers as represented by Gush Emunim, which has pushed the Israeli government and public to settle in the territories, hasn't spread its messianic ideology among the public, or even among the settlers. It turns out that the main motivations for living in the territories, including among many of the religious, are comfort and quality of life.

But that was the point, that it is natural for Jews to live in their homeland.  The vanguard always needs a more powerful ideological motivation but in pulling over the masses, the reasons for their remaining can assuredly be such mundane, for Eldar, ones.  Doesn't alter the reality.

He also claims the report indicates

...it's possible to evacuate half the settlers with their consent if they are offered compensation equivalent to up to 300 percent of the value of their property. 

but also the public is split

between people with a neo-Zionist outlook who emphasize a nationalist-religious agenda and a moderate Zionist majority that focuses on the land inside the Green Line and promotes a social agenda.  Therefore, the right is advancing its agenda unhindered, the researchers say...the occupation remains on the margins of the[centrists'] political concerns.

I think that's good news.

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