Two polls that purport to show anti-Arab racist tendencies among a significant percentage of Israeli Jews have kindled a fierce public and political controversy here.
Charges of demagogy and deception have been leveled at the chairman of the Knesset Education Committee, Avraham Burg of Labor, who released one of the polls and, in comments on it, drew an analogy between Israeli racism and the current wave of violent hatred in Germany against foreigners.
Burg himself backed off Sunday from the German analogy, but remained firm in his contention that the polls uncover a real problem that he, as a public figure, has the right and duty to raise on the public agenda.
“Forget about Germany, about France, about the U.S. or any other place,” he said. “What we have here is a major problem.”
The poll Burg released, at the end of last week, was taken among 500 Israeli Jews, interviewed over the telephone by the Tel Aviv polling form Teleseker. It showed that some 40 percent of the respondents condone violence against Arabs and favor activities designed to induce Arabs to leave the country.
This poll came under severe professional attack over the weekend by a group of leading sociologists and pollsters. In a joint statement, they noted critically that the poll had comprised only three questions, which, they said, is not enough to test opinions on “a very complex issue.”
The group also faulted Burg for making “unprofessional use” of the purported findings.
The group included academics like Arik Carmon of the Hebrew University and Charles Liebman of Bar-Ilan University, as well as commercial pollsters, such as Mina Tsemach of the Dahaf polling concern.
But on Sunday, Israel Radio disclosed that an even more damning poll — this one taken among 5,000 teen-agers — had been commissioned four years ago by the Education Ministry, which never published the findings.
According to the report, that study, too, found a high proportion of respondents condoning violence and discrimination against Arabs, though less than a majority. The poll reportedly found higher levels of hatred in the state-run religious schools than in the state-run secular schools. It was lowest in kibbutz schools.
The issue is expected to provoke controversy in the Knesset. Knesset Member Yehoshua Matza of the opposition Likud bloc has demanded that Burg reveal “who paid for the so-called poll.” He suggested that either the Israeli human rights group B’tselem or a Palestinian group was behind it.
Another Likud Knesset member, Limor Livnat, who is a member of Burg’s Education Committee, said the committee members had no knowledge of the poll that had ostensibly been commissioned by them.
Abba Gefen, a retired ambassador who now heads the Lithuanian Immigrants Association, accused Burg on Sunday of doing the work of anti-Semitic and neo- Nazi groups in the Baltic states and elsewhere.
He said Burg’s comparison between German racism and Israeli attitudes about Arabs was precisely what these groups needed for their propaganda ends.
“He did it to grab publicity, ” Gefen said. “Without the German analogy, no one would have published his story, since it contained nothing new.”
Burg himself said he welcomes the vigorous debate that his release of the poll has triggered, because this means the issue of racism is now firmly in the public arena.
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