Pollster Tracks Trends in Israeli and U.S. Opinions on the Mideast

Israelis want peace, but most are not willing to sacrifice for it.

Most Palestinians support the concept of the peace process, but fewer have confidence in specific agreements made with Israel.

These ranges in public opinion are the findings of polls that have examined attitudes in and toward the Middle East during the past decade.

Mina Zemach, director of the largest polling firm in Israel, recently presented a compilation of survey findings at a conference in New York on the state of Jewish opinion. Her talk did not directly address the upcoming Israeli election, but the polls she cited did cover many issues prominent in the campaign.

Speaking to about 75 demographers and representatives from American Jewish organizations, Zemach concluded that “the majority of Israelis support the peace process,” but “are not willing to pay the price.”

This reluctance, she said, stems not from ideology but from security concerns. As proof, she points to two separate surveys conducted in March by her Dahuf Opinion Poll.

One indicates that 55 percent of Israelis agree with the concept of a Palestinian state. But the other shows that the number jumps to 62 percent when the question is qualified with the assurance that a Palestinian state would not have an army.

Zemach said 20 percent supported a Palestinian state in 1991 — before the Oslo accords were signed — rising to 29 percent after Oslo and 52 percent after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

The April 22 conference was sponsored by the New York-based Givat Haviva Educational Foundation, which raises money for a Jewish-Arab cross-cultural education center in Israel. Its organizers hope to become a clearinghouse for data from Israeli and American Jewish public-opinion polls.

Two Palestinian organizations have gotten into the polling business since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.

At the conference, Bishara Bahbah, a member of the Palestinian delegation to the 1993 Oslo accords, presented results from periodic polls taken among residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the Center for Palestinian Research and Studies in Nablus and the Jerusalem Center for Media Studies.

In late January, the Nablus center found that 73 percent of those Palestinians supported the peace process with Israel.

Most Palestinians surveyed in a November 1998 poll — 59 percent — supported the Wye agreement signed last October, although 64 percent said they believed its implementation would lead to internal conflict among Palestinians.

Only 19 percent believed that Israel would ever implement the pact, signed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Bahbah, who directs a consulting firm in Virginia, also presented results of a survey from early January that measured Palestinians’ impressions of various democracies. Seventy-five percent of the respondents said they had a favorable opinion of Israel’s democracy, 67 percent had a positive view of the American system and only 32 percent said the same of the Palestinian Authority.

As the Israeli elections near, Israelis can expect to be polled persistently, as they were prior to the last election for prime minister in May 1996.

The race between then-newcomer Netanyahu and sitting Prime Minister Shimon Peres was so close that contradictory polls appeared election week in competing newspapers, each calling a different winner by the same slim margin. In the end, Netanyahu prevailed with 50.4 percent of the vote.

This year, the Centrist Party — under former Likud Defense Minister and prime ministerial candidate — Yitzhak Mordechai is throwing a curve ball at those who would try to predict the May 17 outcome. A number of vote-swinging scenarios has been bandied about in anticipation of a June runoff, which will occur if none of the five candidates for prime minister garner more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round.

Zemach steered clear of political polls during her New York appearance, but she did touch on one political view that, according to her research, has remained constant since 1990.

Asked whether Israel should take American Jews’ opinions into account when designing its policies, most Israelis have said yes: 65 percent in 1990 and 62 percent in 1999.