Percent of what?

You may have come across a new poll that's doing the rounds.

According to to Yaniv Reich, reproduced at Information Clearing House ‘53% of Israelis think ethnic cleansing is the solution to the conflict’.

The actual question was ‘What's the best solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?’, and the response options were

• Two states for two peoples, 30.8%
• Transfer of Palestinians to another Arab country, 53.2%
• Maintain status quo, 1.3%
• Give Palestinians Jordanian citizenship, 14.5%

As I’ve often pointed out before, if the response options don’t exhaust all the possibilities, if only by offering an ‘other’ option, it inevitably distorts the results. In most cases, as in this one, failure to include other possibilities, like extending Israeli citizenship to everyone in the area Israel currently controls, or federation with neighbouring countries, for example, means that the poll is actually more an exercise in propaganda than research —an attempt to form rather than to measure respondents’ views.

But in this case, that hardly matters. To his credit, Reich disclaims of Israel National News (Arutz 7) ‘its a right-wing rag’. As far as I’m aware, its principal audience is settlers, presumably, hard core English speaking olim. So the population ‘sampled’ is already heavily skewed to the extreme right.

At the same time, apparently picking up on Arutz 7’s claim of ‘more than 6,400 people surveyed’, he gives Arutz Sheva too much credit in describing the number of votes as ‘sample size “more than 6,400″’.  In reality, the poll was not a survey as usually understood, where respondents are selected at random from identified ‘strata’ of a population to ensure that the sample reflects demographic characteristics of the whole population, like sex, age, location, etc. The ‘sample’ was entirely self selecting. We have no way of knowing whether respondents corresponded in any way even with the population of Arutz Sheva readers, much less with Israeli Jews, much less with Israelis in general.

Based on this thoroughly bogus online vote, it is not possible to say, as Reich does, that ‘53.2% of surveyed Israelis say the “solution” to the conflict was the ethnic cleansing (”transfer”) of Palestinians out of occupied Palestine and into other neighboring Arab countries’. Because there was no proper sampling, we can’t calculate the ‘margin of error — for all we know, it’s 90%, or 3%.

As for the other results, Arutz Sheva is actually more honest than Reich in claiming, ‘The "two-states for two peoples" solution being pushed by the United States and the international community received 30.8 percent support’, where Reich writes, ‘only 30.8% of Israelis support the “two-states for two peoples” framework for peace’. It’s not 30.8% of Israelis — it’s just 30.8% of those who voted in the poll, since they don’t represent anyone else. Bear in mind that this was an online poll, so anyone at all can vote, Israeli or not, Jewish or not.

According to Tel Aviv University’s October War and Peace Index, however, which does purport to be based on a genuine sample of 514, with a margin of error of 4.5%,

...the distribution of views among the Jewish public is quite clear : the majority, about two-thirds (64%), favor the principle [of “two states for two peoples”] compared to a third who oppose it.

So it’s highly probable that the proportion of Israeli Jews who support ‘two states for two peoples’ is actually more than double what this poll claims.

It’s worth reiterating that for Israeli Jews, ‘two states for two peoples’ does not necessarily mean The International Consensus. As I pointed out in July, 60% of Israeli Jews say withdrawal to the Green Line is ‘unacceptable’, and 53% consider evacuation of the settlements unacceptable, while 45% insist that it’s ‘essential’ for all of Jerusalem with its expanded boundaries, to remain annexed to Israel, etc. October’s War and Peace Index found that 54% of the two state supporters ‘thinks continued construction in the settlements will not ultimately detract from the realization of the two-state solution’.

Real opinion polls, for all their legion faults, provide us with at least a gross indication of the level of unabashed and unalloyed racism among Israeli Jews, whether they support establishing a Palestinian bantustan, and what form they want it to take, among other things. And we can use that information in countering the perennial hasbara onslaught about ‘Israel’s quest for peace’, but wherever you may read about it, this Arutz Sheva poll tells us squat and it is self defeating to pretend that it does.

More pots and kettles

Arutz Sheva’s David Lev is scandalised that the PA has launched a plan

to commemorate the actions of terrorists who are still alive, serving sentences in Israeli prisons.

At least 100 streets in PA cities will be named for these terror prisoners, said PA Minister of Prisoner Affairs Issa Qaraqi announced last week.

The terrorists to be honored in this manner have all been convicted for directly participating in or helping plan terror attacks in which Israelis were killed, and all have been sentenced by Israel to at least 20 years in prison.

Israel would never commemorate terrorists like that, unless...

Last week the Hasbara buster quoted from a biography of Irgum leader David Raziel:

On July 6,1938, time bombs were put in milk cans and placed in the Arab market place in Haifa by an Irgun member dressed as an Arab porter. In the explosion that followed, 21 Arabs were killed and 52 wounded. Terror spread throughout the Arabs of Haifa, among the most vicious of the enemies of Zionism.

The attack was in reaction to the murder of two Jews the previous day in Jerusalem, and the Arabs of Jerusalem were not to be spared. A bomb thrown into a crowd of Arabs on David Street in the Old City killed two and wounded four. Two days later, the Irgun threw a bomb into a crowd of Arabs waiting near the bus terminal near Jaffa Gate. Three were killed and 19 injured. A week later, on a Friday, as Arabs left their mosque at the foot of David Street in the Old City, an electronically detonated mine went off killing ten Arabs and wounding 30.

On July 25, 1938, a 30-kilogram explosive went off in the Arab market place in Haifa. Hidden in a barrel of sour pickles, it killed at least 35 Arabs and wounded 70 more. The Arabs were terrified; (...) Raziel was content.

One month later, the Irgun switched to Jaffa, a nest of the worst gangs of Arab vipers in the country. An Irgun member, once again dressed as an Arab porter, placed a bomb in the Arab Dir-a-Salach marketplace. The official version listed 21 Arabs dead and 35 wounded. In reality many more went to heaven.

February 27, 1939, proved to be yet another "Black Day" for the Arabs as the Irgun, sensing collapse of Arab terror in the face of Jewish vengeance, attacked in three cities. In Haifa, two powerful explosions went off, one at the ticket window of the railroad station in East Haifa and the other at the Arab market place. At least 27 Arabs were killed. Half-an-hour later in Jerusalem, three Arabs were killed and six wounded in an Irgun explosion on David Street while another died after being attacked on an Arab bus passing Machane Yehuda.

The Hasbara buster concludes,

One would hope for this beast to be fully repudiated by Israel. One would hope in vain. Today, Israel celebrates this mass-murderer with a village named after him, Ramat Raziel, which is located in the Jerusalem corridor. Streets in all major Israeli cities bear his name as well.

I shudder to think how many places bear the names of Menachem Begin, who ‘has streets and parks named after him in no less than 43 communities’ and the other bloodthirsty gunmen who roamed Palestine in the middle of last century, and ever since.

A twisted mind

A couple of weeks ago, I criticised Human Rights Watch for adopting a ‘balanced’ approach to the violence of the coloniser and the violence of the resistance to colonisation. Well, Former CIA Director James Woolsey, in an interview with IsraelNationalRadio's Alex Traiman, has done them one better.

"An Arab Muslim living in Jaffa," Woolsey said, "enjoys freedom of speech, religion, and expression, and can vote for his representatives in the Knesset, and doesn't go to sleep worrying that some government element might come and kill him. I think that once the Palestinians start treating Jewish settlers with that same degree of humanity - and they're very, very far from doing that now - at that point I think we have to seriously consider how they could have some degree of self-governing. I won't get into the question of borders, but what I think is that the Palestinians must be held to the same standards as Israel regarding how they treat the other. I am sure this will be many decades from now, though, because their children are taught the Wahhabi doctrine of being suicide bombers and the like."

Now that’s a twisted mind! Colonists and usurpers who have invaded their land, encroach further and further into it, demolish their homes, orchards, and infrastructure, prevent them from accessing their agricultural land, their schools, hospitals, and jobs, take their precious water, and kill and injure them at will with complete impunity are somehow entitled to the same rights as an indigenous minority living quietly in a colonists’ city? No settler, no Israeli government, nor, I daresay, Woolsey himself, has ever suggested that the colonists should have some kind of political rights in the PA. They are all universally considered part of Israel. In fact, the whole idea of building that vast network of settlements and roads was precisely to create ‘facts on the ground’ that would prejudice any future discussion of Israel’s border. And I wouldn’t be so sure that Palestinians in Jaffa sleep as peacefully as he reckons, either.

Meanwhile, in the very same issue, Arutz 7, reports that according to WorldNetDaily (WND),

Negotiations have been quietly proceeding apace for the past two or three weeks, according to sources quoted by WND reporter Aaron Klein, after PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas suggested to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert late last month that the two men switch to “back channel talks” in order to avoid media coverage.

According to Egyptian and EU sources, one of the plans currently under consideration involves handing over control of central and southern Yesha [Hebrew acronym for ‘Judea and Samaraia’, i.e the West Bank – HF] to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces. In northern Yesha, the transfer of responsibility to Abbas’ security forces over the area would be monitored by Jordan and EU observers.

But it looks a lot like an article to scare their readers, who, according to a recent post from Sol Salbe, would be principally settlers themselves.