A feather in our cap

The American Jewish Committee has just released the results of their 2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion to the acclaim of David Harris, Executive Director of the AJC, in his Jerusalem Post blog. Slagging off ‘surveys sponsored by right-wing or left-wing groups...

These ideologically-driven organizations always magically find polling outfits, construct questions, and present data that somehow undergird their preconceived views...

Enter AJC's Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion. No doctrinal axe to grind, no effort to tilt the questions, no desire to withhold "inconvenient" results.

Last year, the AJC reduced the sample size for their survey from 1000 to 800, implausibly claiming the same 3 percentage point margin of error. At the same time, they also reduced the question set from 38 questions to 15, unconscionably interrupting the time series I had so laboriously constructed for several questions.

This year, they have retained the reduced sample size but reintroduced some of the old questions, along with a few new ones. Lest anyone accuse me of cherry picking, I’d better go through all 21. I might just mention in passing, though, that both Harris’s blog post and the AJC press release claim that ‘there's little difference in attitudes towards Middle East matters among the various generational cohorts’. If they can disaggregate the responses by age, it’s a variable they must have collected, but have declined to report. So while there may be no desire to withhold inconvenient results, they have actually withheld some significant results, which can only make you wonder what else they have kept to themselves.

The poll begins with three new questions,

1. How would you characterize relations between Israel and the United States today? Are they very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative, or very negative?

2. Do you approve or disapprove of the Obama Administration’s handling of US-Israel relations?

3. Do you approve or disapprove of the Netanyahu government’s handling of Israel-US relations?

Like so many questions in AJC and other opinion polls, whatever little information you may be able to extract is ambiguous, contingent upon how you believe respondents interpreted it. When the survey went into the field, 30 August to 17 September, it was already clear that Israeli PM Netanyahu had absolutely no intention of humouring Obama’s insistence on a freeze in settlement construction. In that context, some may have felt Israeli defiance was a positive development, some that Obama’s humiliating retreat was positive, some that it was positive that he put on a show of confronting the Israeli government in the first place. Others might have thought the very same things evidenced negative relations, whatever that means. A wide variety of other aspects of the relationship could have struck respondents as positive or negative, depending on factors they were not asked about. For what it’s worth, 81% said relations were positive, 54% approved of Obama, and 59% of Bibi.

A fourth new question was slightly less ambiguous than most AJC questions,

4. Do you agree or disagree with the Obama Administration’s call for a stop to all new Israeli settlement construction?

If we assume that respondents believe that new settlement construction has nothing to do with expansion of the matrix of control over the population of the West Bank and is simply an effort to provide accommodation for younger generations born in the settlements, then it’s possible that the 51% who disagreed just think it would be unfair to force the Jewish settlers to live in more crowded conditions than they’re accustomed to, or to move their young families into ‘Israel proper’. It goes without saying that the AJC neglected to ask how American Jews felt about the restrictions on issue of building permits to accommodate the natural increase among Palestinians in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, or in ‘Israel proper’, nor about the home demolitions and evictions.

Of course we know that settlement expansion is not just about natural growth. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics’s Statistical abstract of Israel 2009 (Table 2.4), 31% of the population growth in ‘Judea and Samaria’ of 14,000 in 2008, was due to migration – 700 immigrants and 3900 internal migrants. The ICBS itself attributes only 69% to ‘Natural increase’. In 2007, migrants accounted for 37% of the increase. Since the data don’t disaggregate the areas of the Jerusalem District occupied in 1967, I have excluded it.

Yet another new question asks,

5. As compared with one year ago, are you more optimistic about the chance for a lasting peace between Israel and the Arabs, less optimistic, or do you think the chance for a lasting peace is about the same as it was one year ago?

This is even less informative than a typical AJC question without considering it together with a question about how they felt last year. We don’t know what the 2009 sample thought about the long term prospects for peace last year, but we do know how the 2008 sample answered a question the AJC has been asking since 2006,

10. Do you think there will or will not come a time when Israel and its Arab neighbors will be able to settle their differences and live in peace?

It’s a different sample of course and it’s kind of bodgy to compare percentages of percentages, but since that’s all the AJC has given us to work with, it turns out that 38% last year said that they thought there will come such a time and 56% that it will not. Among this year’s sample, 43% said there will and 51% there will not. So 13% more of this year’s sample said there will come a time and 9% fewer said there won’t. So you might expect some 22% to say they feel more optimistic and 78% to say they felt the same. In fact, only 12% were more optimistic, 23% less optimistic, and 65% the same as one year ago. They are not the same people, but if the samples were truly as representative as the pollsters claim, it shouldn’t matter. Of course, it’s possible that people discerned that they were more optimistic, while still thinking peace unlikely, and vice versa. Ultimately, the two variables aren’t strictly compatible. It’s not that the answers are inconsistent with each other, it’s that the respondents can make very fine measurements of their level of optimism.

Closely related to these two questions is Question 9, asked every year since 2000, except 2008,

9. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.”

It is, I suppose, mildly encouraging that with 75% agreeing, this has fallen to its lowest level since 2001, seven points below the proportion who agreed in 2007 and below the 78% average over the nine observations. That means that 28% of the sample who believe ‘the Arabs’ aim to destroy Israel also think that they will someday settle their differences with Israel and live in peace. Anyone familiar with Zionist discourse will find contradictions like this unsurprising. Furthermore, as I mentioned in 2007,

What this question does above all else is invite the respondent to buy into racism. By refusing to specify whether ‘the Arabs’ are ‘the moderate Arab states’, the PA, the Palestinians in general, Arabs in general, or whatever, the question’s framers force the respondent to accept the racist presupposition that ‘the Arabs’ are of one mind. They are duplicitous in pretending to demand the return of the territories occupied in 1967, but in reality, they are bent on Israel’s destruction, a second Holocaust. Again, we can’t really tell much about those who disagreed without knowing why they did so. But it’s pretty clear that those who agreed were prepared to accept those assumptions.

Just imagine a poll asking,

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? “The goal of the Jews is not the establishment of a viable Palestinian state but rather the annexation of all of historic Palestine.”

The AJC would be among the first to excoriate the pollsters for their blatant antisemitism. And rightly so.

The last question concerning the prospects for peace, which has featured in the last three iterations of the survey, is,

11. Do you think that Israel can or cannot achieve peace with a Hamas-led Palestinian government?

The proportion saying Israel cannot achieve peace with Hamas has risen by 11 percentage points from 2008 to 79%, the highest level in the three years the question was asked.

I assume that the reference to a ‘Palestinian government’ is just lazy shorthand for a Hamas majority in the Palestinian National Authority, a strictly administrative body whose mandate under the Oslo accords to police designated areas of the West Bank on the occupier’s behalf was to have expired in 1999. Still, by calling it a government, the question invites the respondent to think of the PA as a separate country that can treat with Israel on the basis of some sort of equality. And it is an important component of Israeli propaganda to represent Israel and the Palestinians, who are always assumed to be just the minority of Palestinians who happen to reside in the West Bank and Gaza, as adversaries. When couched in these terms, liberals can comfortably demand evenhandedness in treatment of the two sides, recognise that each has hurt the other, that each has suffered at the other’s hands, and that each ought to be willing to make painful sacrifices and compromise in the interests of peace. Explicitly recognising that Israel is the coloniser and the occupier would undermine such conceits and raise the spectre of recognising the Palestinians’ right to resist.

By asking whether Israel ‘can achieve peace’, the question further demands that the respondent accept that peace is Israel’s objective, that it is something Israel aspires to and is exerting itself to bring to fruition. There’s no point in reciting the litany of offers of peace, including recent ones from Hamas, that Israel has ignored or rebuffed. I think it will suffice to mention the siege imposed on the suffering people of Gaza and the shower of white phosphorous and whatnot that Israel treated them to earlier this year with the explicit aim of annihilating Hamas and the ‘infrastructure of terror’, like schools, hospitals, prisons, government buildings, warehouses, factories, farms, orchards, mosques, houses, power plants, and so forth, to evidence just how hard Israel is trying to achieve peace with Hamas.

Harris writes that American Jews, ‘understand that if peace with the Palestinians is to be achieved, it will require two states’. Now understand is another one of those ‘factive verbs’, like recognise, that presuppose the truth of the content of the that clause. So if American Jews understand that ‘it will require two states’, then it must really require two states. Apart from deploying a slimy rhetorical trick, therefore, Harris reveals his own preconception and ‘doctrinal axe to grind’.

Four questions bear on the respondents’ view of the two state ‘solution’. The first, an old standby, but a casualty of last year’s cull, returns this year.

6. In the current situation, do you favor or oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state?

This year, 49% favoured a Palestinian state, three percentage points more than in 2007 and below the average of 52% over the eight years they were asked, while 41% opposed it, two points less than 2007 and just over the 40% average.

But as I wrote in 2007, the last time they asked,

What’s interesting about the question, however, is not the numbers, but the wording, ‘In the current situation, do you favor or oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state?’ Without additional information, the answers to such a question don’t tell us very much. Some respondents may favour establishment of a Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. Others may favour a series of disconnected bantustans whose borders, airspace, port, communications infrastructure, etc. are under Israeli control. Some of those opposed may prefer a single democratic secular state throughout historic Palestine, or the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza to Israel and the expulsion of the remaining non Jewish population. So it is not at all obvious that favouring establishment of a Palestinian state is necessarily a progressive view, or that opposing it is not. In fact, even if it were safe to assume that all respondents understood the question the same way, as something like the Geneva initiative, with a return to more or less the Green Line and a ‘symbolic’ gesture towards justice for the refugees, that is a long way from progressive. As I’ve discussed before, it entails accepting that ethnic cleansing and terrorism are acceptable nation building strategies, that territory can legitimately be acquired by force of arms, that refugees deserve permanent exile and statelessness, that it’s ok to privilege one group over another on the basis of religion or ethnicity, and other positions that are prima facie anti progressive.

To understand what the opinions about the establishment of a Palestinian state mean, I would have liked to see answers to questions about the refugee issue, about Israel’s status as a Jewish state, whether a Jewish state can be democratic, the status of the Israeli Arabs, ‘targetted assassinations’, checkpoints, the boycott of Hamas and the siege of Gaza, the bypass roads, the future of the ‘large settlement blocs’, (In 2005, the last time they asked the question, 36% opposed dismantling any West Bank settlements, the highest ever and up seven points from 29% in 2004.), the construction and route of the wall (In 2006, 73% supported ‘the Israeli government's decision to build the security fence separating Israelis and Palestinians?’, up from 69% the previous year.), among other things. In particular, I’m interested in the proportion of US Jews who subscribe to views that I would define as Zionist, that is, who believe that a state that privileges Jews is acceptable. But I wasn’t really expecting them to ask that. I think it is clear from the phrasing of other questions, the ‘destruction of Israel’ question in particular, that those framing these questions simply assumed that it went without saying that all respondents do hold such views. It would be frightening, but not really surprising, if they are right.

Question 7 has been part of the AJC questionnaire since 2000, apart from last year.

7. In the framework of a permanent peace with the Palestinians, should Israel be willing to compromise on the status of Jerusalem as a united city under Israeli jurisdiction?

This year, 37% said yes, one point less than in 2007 and below the nine year average of 40%, while 58% said no, above the average of 55%, and 6% weren’t sure.

As I wrote last time,

Like most of the questions in the AJC survey, there are problems with the wording. To begin with, it rests on the assumption that ‘a permanent peace with the Palestinians’ is conceivable without a capital of the Palestinian state, whatever its configuration, in al Quds. And that already betrays further assumptions – that ‘the Palestinians’ means the PA; that anyone purporting to represent ‘the Palestinians’ could negotiate sovereignty over Jerusalem, that ‘peace’ means simply the end of all resistance. Furthermore, the question assumes that it would be a compromise for Israel to relinquish sovereignty, when not even the US recognises Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem. Anyway, the answers to this question do shed a little light on the Palestinian state question.

Specifically, if all of the 41% who oppose establishing a Palestinian state and all of the 1% who weren’t sure and all of the 9% whose response the AJC has not tabulated, presumably refusals, also said Israel should not compromise on Jerusalem, that means that a minimum of 7% of those who favour a Palestinian state want that state to exclude any part of Jerusalem, suggesting that the Palestinian state they envision falls short even of the miserly Arab peace plan or the Geneva initiative.

The next question, which the questionnaire included from 2001 until 2005 and again this year, asks,

8. As part of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians, should Israel be willing to dismantle all, some, or none of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank?

As with the Jerusalem question, this one rests on the assumption that there is some conceivable permanent resolution to ‘the conflict’ that would leave Jewish settlers in occupation of a portion of the sliver of territory east of the Green Line. This is of course consistent with the principal partition proposals, which envisage land swaps to compensate the Palestinian state for the land Israel would annex in the West Bank for the facts on the ground.

A significant proportion – 37% — want to retain all of the settlements. To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these actually believe that position is consistent with establishing a Palestinian state. It’s virtually inconceivable that any of the 8% of American Jews who told the AJC that they were prepared to countenance dismantling all of the settlements were among the 41% who oppose partition. Another 52% said it would be ok to dismantle some of them. That’s a larger proportion than the 49% who said they favoured establishing a Palestinian state, so even if I’m wrong about the ones who would dismantle all the settlements, there are still some in the sample who think Israel should be willing to dismantle some settlements even though they oppose partition. Which makes you wonder why they want to dismantle settlements. I can only speculate that they may harbour some resentment towards some particular group of settlers, perhaps because they’re too secular, or not secular enough?

One of the ironies of positions that Israel should retain control of all of Jerusalem, or all or some of the settlements, is the assumption that after the UN allocated 55% of historic Palestine to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition resolution and after Zionist forces captured and annexed an additional 23% in 1948, it is Israel that would be compromising if it were to relinquish control of part of what it annexed in 1967. Those who, like Nobel Peace Laureate Barak Obama, say, ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided’, are comfortable with Israel conquering territory by force and annexing it permanently.

The last question about the partition agreement is brand new,

12. Should the Palestinians be required or not be required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement?

On the face of it, you’d think this was evidence of Harris’s assertion that the AJC has ‘no desire to withhold "inconvenient" results’, because this requirement, supported by a whopping 94% of the sample, is a true showstopper. And yet, when he writes in his blog

The most decisive response: 94 percent of those surveyed believe that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state in the context of a final peace agreement.

you’d think he didn’t even realise that this requirement was a serious, probably insuperable, obstacle to any kind of agreement with the Palestinians. Not that it’s contentious or anything – it was, after all, one of the principal demands of The Quartet whose Road Map peace plan has enjoyed so much success. Furthermore, as I’ve argued before, partition of Palestine actually presupposes the existence of a Jewish state because ultimately the whole point of creating a separate Palestinian state is to preserve the Jewish character and Jewish majority in Israel.

But to recognise Israel as a Jewish state implies accepting the legitimacy of Israel’s foundation as such, which required the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous inhabitants to establish the required sustainable Jewish majority, effectively relinquishing the refugees’ right to return. It is certainly not out of the question that some unrepresentative quisling Palestinian administration, like the current Abbas regime, might be prepared to humiliate itself even further by selling out the refugees and the Palestinian Israelis to retain control of some rump Palestinian state and the lucrative perks that go with being the big fish in a small pond. But that’s not a position widely favoured among Palestinians.

The 29 September AJC press release announcing the results of the survey quotes Harris,

“AJC surveys have consistently shown that American Jews yearn for Arab-Israeli peace, and back compromise through negotiations, but remain skeptical of Arab intentions, and disheartened by a tough environment in the Middle East, especially with Arab refusal to recognize Israel’s very legitimacy,” Harris said.

In reality, the questions in this year’s survey, as in previous iterations’, provide evidence for only one of these assertions – that American Jews are sceptical of Arab intentions. If you assume with Harris that establishing a Palestinian state has some prospect of delivering peace in historic Palestine, then all we can say with any confidence is that less than half of American Jews favour that, and most of them wouldn’t even go that far if it doesn’t involve the humiliation of the Palestinians by forcing them to accept the legitimacy of their dispossession. And many don’t yearn for peace enough to support withdrawing from the territory conquered in 1967. I think what he means is that they yearn for ‘calm’, the media euphemism for a situation where Israel persists in building settlements, restricting movement, demolishing homes, shooting protesters, committing extrajudicial executions notwithstanding ‘collateral damage’ and Palestinians don’t react. Their yearning for peace extends to Israeli Jews. And if that’s what he thinks, he may be right, but the AJC survey hasn’t asked any questions that would support it.

Only 8% of the sample, the lowest proportion in the six years they’ve asked, were prepared to compromise to the extent of dismantling all of the settlements, which can only mean that they reject withdrawal behind the Green Line. Over the six years they’ve asked, the average proportion was 11%, peaking at 15% in 2005. As in each of eight previous surveys, a majority won’t even consider ‘compromise’ on part of Jerusalem, with an average of 55% rejecting it. And hardly any of them would compromise on recognition. So it’s not at all obvious how he arrives at his conclusion that American Jews ‘back compromise’.

In 2000, 59% said they supported the Israeli government’s handling of ‘negotiations with the Arabs’. Between 2001 and 2004, majorities of between 60% and 63% agreed ‘Regardless of their individual views on the peace negotiations with the Arabs, American Jews should support the policies of the duly elected government of Israel’. Then in 2007, 55% said they thought ‘negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cannot lead to peace in the foreseeable future’. And that’s all we know about American Jews’ views on negotiations from the Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion. On this basis, I couldn’t claim that ‘AJC surveys have consistently shown that American Jews back compromise through negotiations’ without significant embarrassment.

On the whole it would appear that David Harris is unconcerned with presenting data that somehow undergirds his preconceived views. His preconceived views are independent of and impervious to his own data.

Moving right along, the survey goes on to ask three questions about the most pressing issue for American Jews, for Israel, and well, for everybody,

13. Do you approve or disapprove of the Obama Administration’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue?

A plurality of 49% approve, 35% disapprove, and 15% aren’t sure. As usual, there’s a hidden agenda. To answer the question requires respondents to accept that there is some Iran nuclear issue. The Iran nuclear issue is not that Iran has built uranium enrichment facilities, including one it has just announced it is constructing near Qom, in strict accordance with their obligations as a party to the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, that the IAEA and the US ‘intelligence’ community can find no evidence of any intention to develop a nuclear weapons capability despite the most intrusive inspection regime anywhere and despite imminent threats of attack by both the global and the regional superpowers. No. That wouldn’t be it. The Iran nuclear issue is that the fanatical mullahs, determined to exterminate all Jews even at the price of their own obliteration, are on the verge of producing two deliverable nuclear warheads with the inadequately enriched uranium it has stockpiled. It goes without saying there is no India nuclear issue and no Pakistan nuclear issue, at least not yet, much less an Israel nuclear issue or a US, UK, or France nuclear issue.

In their yearning for peace, only 56% support ‘the United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons’ (Q14) and just 66% support Israel doing so (Q15).

The next two questions seem designed to undermine confidence that the respondents possess any grasp on reality whatsoever.

16. Do you think that anti-Semitism around the world is currently a very serious problem, somewhat of a problem, or not a problem at all?

Ninety-nine percent said they thought antisemitism was a problem, 56% a ‘Very Serious problem’. Now there are cases in the US of nazi hooligans attacking Jews, and doubtless of landlords refusing tenants and employers refusing jobs to Jews because they were Jewish. But I doubt if there’s been a case of the police harassing anyone because they were Jewish in living memory. Nor of denying admission to university or any of the other manifestations of racism.

According to the Anti Defamation League’s 2008 annual audit of antisemitic incidents, they had declined for the fourth consecutive year, and the vast majority of incidents involved remarks or graffiti. And the ADL has a very low threshold for perceiving antisemitism. They were impelled, for example, to write to Garry Trudeau on 1 June to complain about his 31 May cartoon, where a child uses the expression 'moneylenders' in a conversation about the Bible with the vicar.

I assume, without much confidence, that Abraham Foxman’s noxious ADL excludes expressions of antizionism and mild criticisms of Israel from their enumeration of ‘incidents’, as Britain’s Community Security Trust claims to in its reports on antisemitic incidents. Of the 1352 incidents their audit enumerates, 37 involved actual assault, that is, if we accept the ADL’s claims that these were unambiguously racially motivated, about 1 assault for every 162,000 Jews in the US.

And as if that weren’t ample evidence of profound and delusory paranoia,

17. Looking ahead over the next several years, do you think that anti-Semitism around the world will increase greatly, increase somewhat, remain the same, decrease somewhat, or decrease greatly?

Only 10% expect antisemitism to decrease, while 45% anticipate an increase, 15% greatly, despite the ADL’s claims that it is declining.

The survey then asked about party affiliation and religious denomination.

18. In politics as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent?

Sixteen percent of the sample claimed to be Republican, 53% Democrat, 30% Independent, and 1% Not sure.

19. Do you think of yourself as . . .

Orthodox               9

Conservative       24

Reconstructionist 2

Reform               27

Just Jewish         36

Not sure                1

Without the original dataset, you can’t crosstabulate these with any other variables, so I don’t find them especially interesting. In any case, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, crosstabulating variables with a sample of 800 results in very high margins of error. Or to put it another way, you have to be less confident that the estimate really represents the population it’s supposed to.

For example, Harris claims,

The gap in perspectives between self-identified Orthodox and Reform Jews is astonishingly wide. For instance, while 59 percent of Reform Jews approve of the Obama administration's handling of U.S.-Israel relations, among Orthodox Jews the figure drops to only 14 percent.

Only 9% of the sample – 72 respondents – said they were Orthodox, and they are supposed to represent the views of all the Orthodox Jews in the US. I suspect that the margin of error – the confidence that 14% of American Orthodox Jews have the same views as those ten respondents – is higher than the estimate itself. If Harris were honest, he would mention something about that. If you think crosstabulations like this are of any interest, the press release reports some.

Not to leave anything out,

20. How important would you say being Jewish is in your own life?

Although I don’t really know what the question might have meant to respondents, 84% said it was important, a slim majority of 51%, very important. Those estimates are lower than the averages over the six years they’ve asked of 88% and 55%, respectively. The 15% who said it wasn’t very important represent the highest level so far.

Finally, what struck Harris as ‘The saddest figure’,

21. How close do you feel to Israel?

As I wrote in 2007,

...without knowing respondents’ motivations – without asking why – we don’t know whether those who feel ‘very distant’ from Israel oppose any discussion of dismantling settlements and favour immediate forcible transfer of all Palestinians from ‘Eretz Yisra’el’, or object to the existence of a Jewish ethnocracy...

Encouragingly, the proportion who felt Very distant remained steady at 8% since last year, although the 22% who felt fairly distant represented a one point decline from 2008, but 30% distant is well above the ten year average of 26%.

It might be kind of interesting to go through Harris’s blog post in detail, refuting every claim, but I’ll confine myself to two more points. The 29 September AJC press release announcing the results of the survey quotes Harris,

While ideologically-driven Jewish groups of the left and right assert that a majority of American Jews share their views on the Middle East, it just isn't true. The AJC survey results reveal very clearly that, in fact, the bulk of American Jews hold largely centrist views, at times tilting to the left, at other times tilting to the right. [my emphasis]

It may provide some insight into what he means by ‘left’ and ‘right’ to consider a couple of paragraphs from his blog post.

The problem for the right: A plurality of American Jews, by a margin of 49 to 41 percent, supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in the current situation.

In addition, a majority of American Jews, 54 percent, supports the Obama administration's handling of U.S.-Israel relations. 32 percent do not.

Clearly, there are American Jewish organisations, like the Zionist Organisation of America, so far to the right that Obama’s insincere and ineffectual pleas for negotiations offend them.

If Harris reckons a 49% plurality of American Jews supporting some kind of Palestinian state is a problem for the right, he must consider it some kind of left wing position. Since, as I mentioned before, the main rationale for partition of Palestine is to preserve Israel as a Jewish state, it takes a long stretch to perceive supporting it as left.

In any case, the AJC survey doesn’t really provide scope for respondents to express unambiguously left wing positions. They could, of course, say they felt very distant from Israel, but we can’t be sure of the extent to which that category may be polluted by ZOA supporters and their ilk. Surely the positions majorities adopted on Jerusalem and recognition of Israel and settlement construction and bombing Iran and, perhaps above all, the Arabs’ goal, do not betoken centrism – these are extreme positions. Beyond that, insofar as the sample truly represents the views of American Jews, they are deeply confused if they think, as some do, that a Palestinian state that accommodates Jewish settlements and foregoes all of Jerusalem is a recipe for peace. And whether the paranoia about antisemitism is clinical, or arises from their uncritical consumption of ADL fear mongering, it strongly suggests we accept their opinions cum grano salis.

Harris expresses contempt for the ‘ideologically-driven Jewish groups of the left and right’ and the polls they’ve conducted. I surmise that ‘the ideologically-driven Jewish groups of the left’ must be J Street, whose National Survey of American Jews I analysed in April. And the only group I know of to the right of the AJC, if you can imagine such a thing, and has conducted any recent polling is the ADL.

I have to concur with Harris that those are pretty ordinary, ideologically driven and rather bodgy polls. The ADL survey results only appear to be available in the form of a little slideshow. The J Street poll is full of loaded and complex questions that by and large can only tell you anything about those who give affirmative responses.

But it takes considerable chutzpah to criticise others’ polls for the same things your own is guilty of. Anyway, it transpires that, to the extent that they are comparable, the results are not that different. For example,

• 54% of the AJC sample approved of Obama’s handling of US-Israel relations, as did 72% of the J Street sample; 55% pf the ADL sample approved Obama’s handing of ‘US policy towards Israel and the Palestinian Territories’.
• 62% of the ADL respondents were as optimistic as last year about prospects for peace; like 65% in the AJC poll, well within the margin of error.
• 49% of the AJC sample support establishing a Palestinian state, like 61% of the ADL sample and 76% of J Street’s.
• 74% of the ADL sample approved the ‘military action that Israel took in Gaza’, as did 75% of the J Street sample.
• 66% in the ADL survey and 69% in the J Street poll thought the ‘military action’ was not disproportionate.
• 49% of the AJC sample, 55% of the ADL sample, and 40% of the J Street sample support a US attack on Iran.
• 58% of the ADL sample and 66% of the AJC sample support an Israeli attack on Iran.

The results of at least two of the three surveys are close on several measures, and where they depart, it’s not always in the expected direction. So if the ADL is spinning results to support a right wing agenda, how does it come to pass that the ADL reports a much larger proportion than the AJC supporting the purportedly left wing position on establishing a Palestinian state? Or that the ‘left wing’ J Street admitted that more of their respondents supported Israel’s pogrom in Gaza than even among the ADL’s?

So it would seem that Harris talks out the wrong orifice. He is prepared to make assertions about what his own poll found that are inconsistent with the very results he’s presenting and promoting. He lampoons those he seems to perceive as his competitors for the same gaffes he makes even as he does so. He seems to imagine that he can compensate for his ignorance and hypocrisy with arrogance and bluster.

And guess what! A few weeks back, the American Jewish Committee boasted,

David Harris, AJC’s executive director, has been elected a Senior Associate Member of Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College for the academic year 2009-10. He will also be a Member of the college’s European Studies Centre.

“This is a big feather in our cap,” said Richard Sideman, AJC’s president. “It is yet another sign of the esteem in which our staff is held around the world. For AJC, it means, above all, precious exposure to the world of thinkers and ideas affecting the environment in which we work. This, in turn, will further strengthen the agency’s ability to fulfill its ambitious mission.”

Needless to say, my first thought on reading of this was, ‘What an embarrassment for the fifth greatest university in the world...like Oxford needs its very own Dershowitz’. But it turns out that a Senior Associate Member is not such a big deal.

Senior Associate Members are normally visitors to the College and the University for periods of up to a year who are pursing [sic] a specific research objective of their own. They or their academic work must be known to the Governing Body Fellow who is acting as their Sponsor.

If St Antony’s know about the honour they’ve proffered to the AJC, they’re not doing a song and dance about it, because Harris’s name appears nowhere on their site.

Thanks, but no thanks

Turkish students protesting a 300% hike in university fees last week evaded a police blockade by dısplayıng thıs placard, reading ‘Thanks, my honourable Prime Minister!’, as they marched.


Only to peel that slogan off the banner, revealing their true message to Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, ‘No gratitude, No haggling, No to fees! (Student Collectives).

They all hate us anyhow

On 29 July, Ibrahim ibn Yusuf over at The hasbara buster did a post on Dershowitz’s latest antics, effectively blaming Amin El Hussayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, for the Final Solution. Ever since my last post on 30 July, I’ve been kicking myself for deferring reading that post until I’d finished my own, because apropos of Israeli street naming conventions, I would have learned

...Avraham Stern was a Jewish leader, and in 1941 he offered the Nazis to enter the war on Germany's side (see here for a facsimile of the proposal). The Palestinians can't be demonized for doing what the Jews also tried to do (although the Zionist defense for this is that Stern has been repudiated in Israel, this is yet another lie: streets in all major Israeli cities are named after this frustrated Nazi collaborator).

Ibrahim’s post makes two central points: that leaders of the Zionist movement were also cosying up to the Nazis during World War II and that Dershowitz has been characteristically cavalier with the facts. He claims that the Mufti ‘personally stopped 4,000 children, accompanied by 500 adults, from leaving Europe and had them sent to Auschwitz and gassed’. Ibrahim points out that Raoul Hilberg’s magisterial study of the Holocaust, The destruction of the European Jews, recounts a similar incident, but those 4500 people all safely emigrated to Palestine. It is unsurprising that Dershowitz would want to conclude from the Mufti’s objection to their emigration that his goal was the eradication of the Jews. A more obvious motivation would be to inhibit further Jewish colonisation of Palestine.

Since then, Ibrahim has been doing some research in the archives of the Palestine Post, where he’s discovered evidence refuting a number of myths about Zionist terrorism in 1947-48.

In the discussion of lenin’s post on the topic, I learned a lot about the Mufti. It appears that the post of Grand Mufti was probably invented by Herbert Samuels, the British High Commissioner, in 1921. Mohammad Amin al Husayni did not actually possess the qualifications in Islamic jurisprudence the post required. Although there was an election, I haven’t found much about the body that carried it out, but it appears to have been a college of Islamic jurists appointed by the Mandatory authorities. Al-Husayni came in fourth of the four candidates, but Samuels selected him anyway, suggesting that he was in the colonial administration’s pocket. His stay in Berlin was not in an official capacity – he was on the lam from the British and the Axis powers offered him sanctuary. He was apparently deeply sympathetic to the Final Solution and aspired to carry out his own upon his triumphant return to Jerusalem after the British defeat in WWII. But there is no evidence that he exercised any influence over any particulars, much less instigated it.

Dershowitz refers repeatedly to the Mufti’s ‘followers’ as if the entire population of Palestine were Nazi sympathisers. While he doubtless had followers within the various organisations he founded and led, there is no evidence that he enjoyed mass support. In any case, as Grand Mufti, al-Husayni was a colonial appointee, not the elected representative of the Palestinian people. And in that capacity, his role was to administer the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim shrines in Jerusalem, not to articulate foreign policy or forge alliances.

But what if he was? What if the Grand Mufti really did represent the Palestinians and faithfully articulated their desire to rid the world of Jews? By what reasoning does that justify their ethnic cleansing, and only theirs? If the rationale is that all members of a population perceived to express support for an atrocity are complicit and the appropriate punishment for their complicity is forcible, permanent exile, then where would that leave the American Jews, 74% of whom admitted to the ADL in April that they approved of ‘the military action that Israel took in Gaza’? Perhaps Dershowitz doesn’t intend this principle to apply so generally. Maybe it only applies in cases of genocide, but where would that leave the American Jews, who applauded the massacre of Deir Yassin when they read of it in the NY Times? Or maybe it’s just support for the Shoah, which is absolutely uniquely evil in every respect, that is to attract collective punishment on this basis? Even then, we are still left with the question Dershowitz set out to answer, why is it the Palestinians alone who deserve this fate? Surely there was support for Judeocide among populations outside of Palestine during World War II? So how did it come to pass that the Germans weren’t forced into Poland and Denmark to make way for the Jewish national home?

The answer is obvious. Either in the wet noodle-sharp juridical reasoning of Harvard Law Professors, supporting the Holocaust deserves to attract a more severe penalty than carrying it out, or the Germans, as a civilised European nation, were exempt, while the Palestinians were just Arabs. In other words, it makes perfect sense if you’re a shameless racist shit.

In reality, of course, it has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Whatever hasbaristic spin you put on it, the Zionists had determined that they wanted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. When their best efforts failed to secure a Jewish majority, they created one by expelling the Arabs.

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 Jewish fingernail

To the clamour of sensational headlines, Britain’s Community Security Trust (CST) has released its latest report, Antisemitic incidents, January – June 2009.

In case they are unfamiliar, according to the CST website,

Every year CST helps secure over 170 synagogues, 80 Jewish schools, 64 Jewish communal organisations and approximately 1000 communal events. CST also represents the Jewish community on a wide range of Police, governmental and policy-making bodies dealing with security and antisemitism. Indeed, the Police and government praise CST as a model of how a minority community should protect itself.

It seems that one of the threats from which they secure communal events is Jewish women distributing flyers.

Their other claim to fame is compiling data about antisemitic incidents. ‘Anti-Semitic attacks in Britain at record high’, wrote the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on 24 July. Similarly, Ha’aretz reported, ‘Watchdog: British anti-Semitism doubled after Gaza war’, and BBC News, ‘'Record rise' in UK anti-Semitism’.

The BBC’s Dominic Casciani opens his article, ‘Anti-Semitic attacks in the UK doubled in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2008, according to new figures.’ In reality, the CST reported a total of 609 incidents in the first half of 2009, compared to 276 over the first half of 2008. The 77 assaults recorded in the last six months are not nearly double the 45 they claimed for January to June 2008. Of course an attack need not be a literal assault, but Casciani couldn’t possibly be in any doubt about how his audience would interpret that first sentence, as he tacitly acknowledges a few lines down, ‘Most incidents were abusive behaviour, but there were also 77 violent acts.’

The CST’s media release itself notes that the perceived explosion of antisemitism was a direct response to Israel’s slaughter of the besieged population of the Gaza Strip.

The main reason for this record number of incidents was the unprecedented number of antisemitic incidents recorded in January and February, during and after the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza

There’s absolutely no reason anyone should give them the benefit of the doubt, but let’s assume they are not disingenuous when they claim, ‘Anti-Israel activity, which does not use antisemitic language or imagery and is directed at pro-Israel campaigners rather than Jewish people or institutions per se, is also not classified by CST as antisemitic.’ When the State of Israel claims to be the state of all Jews and to act on behalf of all Jews, when all the principal Jewish organisations in Britain applauded the massacre, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, ‘The voice of British Jewry since 1760’, organises a rally to celebrate it, it is understandable, if wrong and unforgivable, how some might form the impression that Jews were complicit.

As Casciani mentioned, only 77 of the 609 ‘attacks’ (less than 13%) actually involved any violence. Another 63 (10%) involved ‘Damage or desecration’, defined as

Any physical attack directed against Jewish property, which is not lifethreatening. This would include the daubing of antisemitic slogans or symbols (such as swastikas) on Jewish property, or damage caused to Jewish property, where it appears that the property has been specifically targeted because of its Jewish connection.

Most (64%) of the ‘incidents’ comprised ‘Abusive Behaviour’, which ‘includes a wide range of types of incident, including antisemitic graffiti on non-Jewish property, hate mail and verbal racist abuse.’ To be honest, I’m not convinced that the Jewish community is likely to flee in panic to the sanctuary of the West Bank at the sight of a sticker like this one allegedly distributed in Bournemouth:

But taking the CST at their word again, let’s assume that there were 77 actual physical assaults on Jews motivated by antisemitism over that six month period. The CST’s 2008 report claims 44 assaults in the last six months of 2008, giving a total of 121 for financial year 2008–09.

According to Wikipedia, the total number of Jews in the UK is 350,000. That means that the rate of antisemitic assaults for FY 2008–09 was 34.6 per 100,000 Jews. In comparison, the Home Office site gives a figure of 960,187 cases of ‘Violence against the person’ in England and Wales during FY 2007-08, the most recent data available. The total population of England and Wales is 54,096,600. So the rate of assault in the population in general is 1774.95 per 100,000. Bearing in mind that the figures are not strictly comparable because the Home office figures cover the previous year and are more geographically restricted, they may still provide a rough indication of the scale of difference, and that means that any Briton, Jewish or not, is roughly 40 times as likely to be the victim of assault as a British Jew is to be the victim of an antisemitic assault. Looked at another way, 0.01% of all assaults are motivated by antisemitism.

But that scenario doesn’t really account for the alarming increase witnessed in 2009. So let’s assume that the level of violence for 2009 is exactly double the rate over the first six months, even though we know that the rate of ‘incidents’ plummeted in the six weeks after Israel withdrew its troops in January and has now plateaued at around 50 per month, as the graph shows.

On that assumption, the antisemitic assault rate is 44 assaults per 100,000, as compared to 1775 total assaults per 100,000.

Indeed, even ‘Damage or desecration’, like this swastika daubed outside a synagogue in Manchester, is not a great threat to Jewish life or community.

Still, compared to the ‘Criminal damage’ rate for England and Wales in 2007–08 of 1915 per 100,000, the antisemitic ‘Damage or desecration’ rate for 2008–09 is 30 per 100,000. Antisemitic “damage or desecration’ turns out to be equivalent to about 0.010% of the 1,036,123 cases of Criminal damage. In the implausible scenario where the observed increase persists through 2009, the Damage or desecration rate would be 36 per 100,000, or 0.012% of Criminal damage.

One is doubtless tempted to compare the frequency of antisemitic incidents with analogous racist incidents targeting some other oppressed minority in Britain, say Muslims. According to a May 2002 BBC article,

Muslim groups have agreed with a report by the EU race watchdog that anti-Islamic feeling has "detonated" in the UK since 11 September.

The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) said there had been a big rise in attacks - including physical assaults - on Muslims in Britain since the US terror attacks.

That would be the same EUMC that promulgated the execrable ‘Working definition’ of antisemitism that has been such a big hit with the US State Department, among others. They have a new name – the Fundamental Rights Agency and the link from the BBC site to the EUMC report is broken, nor can I find either that report, or indeed the ‘Working definition’, on the FRA site. (For reference, you can still find the ‘Working definition’ on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism site.)

There is an EUMC report, apparently from 2003, National Analytical Study on Racist Violence and Crime, but I’m sceptical that it is the one described in the article. It devotes a whole page to ‘New antisemitism’, including a table lifted from an earlier CST report, but only one paragraph to Islamophobia. Two graphs at the back chart the risk (Chart 2) and rate (Chart 3) of victimisation by ‘racially motivated incidents’ (RMIs) for four groups – White, Black, Indian, and Pakistani/Bangladeshi – in 1993, 1995, and 1999. They are not terribly informative, disaggregate neither Jews nor Muslims, and cover a period irrelevant to the topic of post 9/11 anti Muslim RMIs, much less to the explosion of antisemitism in the first half of 2009. For what it’s worth, however, they seem to show a pattern of RMIs targeting Pakistanis and Bangladeshis at a much higher rate than Blacks or Indians.

On visiting the sites of the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Society of Britain, linked to from the article, there doesn’t appear to be a compilation of data. While the Islamic Human Rights Commission apparently collects incident reports, I haven’t managed to find evidence on their site that they publish the data, either.

In any case, to compare antisemitic incidents with anything else would of course itself be antisemitic. After all, we know how many Arabs a Jewish fingernail is worth.

Agree to differ

On her Muzzlewatch blog a couple of months ago, Cecilie Surasky, Director of Communications at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), excoriates the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for their recent survey of Israeli Jews, headlining the post, ‘ADL completely disappears 25% of Israel’s population- joining efforts with Avigdor Lieberman?’

Nowhere in their lengthy release does it mention what you can only find by reading the actual report, under Methodology, where it says:

The poll was conducted as a telephone survey…constituting a representative sample of the adult Jewish population (aged 18 and higher) in Israel.

So in the eyes of the ADL, if you are not Jewish, you are not Israeli. Some 25% of Israelis are not Jews…

She’s absolutely right to say the press release, which claims that it was ‘a comprehensive poll of Israeli opinions’ and consistently generalizes about ‘Israelis’ without ever mentioning that only Jews were sampled, is downright offensive. And the report, entitled ‘Israeli Views of President Obama and US-Israel Relations’, should have been clearer that it was a survey specifically of Israeli Jews. But it’s not true that you have to read all the way to the Methodology section – the second paragraph of the report – to find this out, because the very first sentence declares, ‘we have conducted an opinion poll among the Jewish public in Israel’.

And yet, a poll of all Israelis that fails to disaggregate Jewish views from those of other Israelis in the sample would be decidedly less interesting, a point I’ll return to. It’s not that the views of Palestinian Israelis are uninteresting – quite the contrary. But when aggregated with the views of the Jewish majority, they dilute and are themselves diluted by Jewish responses.

Importantly and somewhat surprisingly, she observes

Sounds just like “anti-Arab demagogue” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who thinks of non-Jewish Israeli Arabs, whose families lived in Jaffa and Hebron long before most Jewish Israelis made Aliyah, as a fifth column. Some choose to think Lieberman’s open racism is an exception, but it’s not. The kind of thinking which only recognizes Jews as citizens and denies full rights to others has long pervaded Israel and the Jewish Diaspora here.

The poll itself is mainly concerned with Jewish Israelis’ views of Obama and the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Israel. But that’s not what struck me as the most interesting findings.

Asked ‘Obama has declared his intention of bringing about reconciliation with the Muslim and Arab worlds in order to improve the United State’s position and reputation. Do you believe or not that such reconciliation will be at Israel’s expense?’ (Q13), 63% said ‘It will come at Israel’s expense (80% of those who expressed an opinion one way or the other).

Fifty-one percent said, ‘The U.S. should not negotiate with Iran’ and 66% support Israeli

military action aimed at destroying the Iranian nuclear facilities (81% of opinion holders), and 75% of those who supported an Israeli attack still supported it even ‘if the Obama administration opposed’ it.

Finally, 52% said American Jews should not ‘feel free to publicly criticize the Israeli government and its policy’ (Q20), while 35% disagreed. In a 2007 survey, only 36% opposed freedom of expression for US Jews, while 62% supported it. The recent J Street poll of American Jews found that 58% said ‘It does not bother me when American Jews disagree publicly with Israeli government policy’, while 28% said it did.

Last week the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah wrote a devastating critique of parallel polls of Palestinians in the occupied territories and of Israelis conducted by One Voice in February, two months earlier than the ADL survey. He discerns that the survey, developed by Dr. Colin Irwin of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, ‘...appears intended to influence international opinion in a direction more amenable to Israel, rather than to record faithfully the views of Palestinians or Israelis...The group's press release unabashedly spun the results to claim popular legitimacy for the two-state solution and to discredit alternatives...’

Nevertheless, I found it remarkably interesting. Unlike any other poll I’ve come across, it gets right down to the nuts and bolts, asking about a broad, if not quite comprehensive, range of options regarding the principal aspects of any solution, including even refugees and the corridor connecting Gaza with the West Bank, as well as process related issues. Although neither Abunimah’s critique nor Irwin’s report mentions it explicitly, a footnote indicates that Palestinian Israelis were included in the Israeli sample and their responses are disaggregable, although not actually disaggregated except with respect to two questions about the division of Jerusalem mentioned in the note. As I mentioned earlier, this pollutes the responses of the Israelis, presumably drawing the Israeli proportions closer to the ‘Palestinian’. For example, when asked about ‘Greater Israel – A Jewish state from the Jordanian border to the sea‘, 47% of Israelis found the prospect ‘Unacceptable’. My suspicion is that this proportion would be lower in a poll of Israeli Jews.

Irwin’s method is to ask respondents to rate various propositions on a five point scale: ‘Essential’, ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, ‘Tolerable’, ‘Unacceptable’. I’m ambivalent about this approach. The first and last points are true polar opposites and may provide a sound basis for comparison. But I’m not confident that the respondents could distinguish ‘Acceptable’ from ‘Tolerable’. I’m not sure what Irwin wanted to capture with these terms myself. Furthermore, there’s no real middle term – the first four points on the scale are effectively opposed to ‘Unacceptable’. In his analysis, Irwin sometimes sums ‘Essential’ and ‘Desirable’ responses as if this were an ordinary five point scale where the response categories are more balanced around a non committal middle term. In other cases, he sums all four responses – ‘Essential’ through ‘Tolerable’ – to provide the impression of a larger base of support for a proposition.

In the OneVoice press release, we learn that ‘74% of West Bank & Gaza Palestinians and 78% of Israelis are willing to accept a two state solution’. These figures represent the sum of all responses other than ‘Unacceptable’ to the question about the ‘Two state solution - Two states for two peoples: Israel and Palestine’. So we don’t actually know what the respondents found ‘Essential’ or ‘Tolerable’. In all probability, the Palestinians thought they were responding to a question about a version of partition where the border would be drawn along the Green Line (78% ‘Essential’) and East Jerusalem would be incorporated into the Palestinian state (89% ‘Essential’), while the Israelis, or the Israeli Jews, at any rate, thought they were being asked about a partition with the border drawn along the wall (58% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’), and Israel retaining sovereignty over all of Jerusalem (74% ‘Essential’ to ‘Tolerable’). So it is a distortion to imply that the Israelis and Palestinians surveyed are prepared to tolerate the same two state ‘solution’.

As Abunimah points out, 53% of the Palestinian sample were willing to tolerate ‘One joint state – A state in which Israelis and Palestinians are equal citizens’, but only 18% said it was ‘Essential’, and 43% said it was ‘Unacceptable’, while the Israeli sample wasn’t asked about this option. As for ‘One shared state - Bi-national federal state in which Israelis and Palestinians share power’, 34% of Palestinians and 32% of Israelis were prepared to tolerate it, while 59% and 66%, respectively, found it ‘Unacceptable’.

Note that, as Abunimah also remarks, ‘One Voice asserts that a "very conscious effort was made in this poll to cover as wide a range of potential solutions as possible." But except for the initial question about the type of state, all the other questions assume, and are primarily relevant to, a two-state solution.’

I think it might be instructive to compare what the Palestinian sample found ‘Essential’ and comparing it to what the Israeli population found ‘Unacceptable’, for some key issues, omitting the equivocal middle terms – ‘Desirable’, ‘Acceptable’, and ‘Tolerable’. In this way, we may discover some intractable sticking points. Among the Israelis, there was little consensus on what was ‘Essential’ – they are mainly united in their rejectionism.

The option the highest proportion of Palestinians deemed ‘Essential’ was ‘Historic Palestine – From the Jordanian river to the sea’ with 71%, another option not offered the Israeli sample. On what was ‘Essential’, the highest proportion among the Israelis was 32% for the two state ‘solution’.

A more recent survey, jointly conducted in late May and early June by the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah, asked

According to the Saudi plan, Israel will retreat from all territories occupied in 1967 including Gaza the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a Palestinian state will be established. The refugees problem will be resoved through negotiation in a just and agreed upon manner and in accordance with UN resolution. In return, all Arab states will recognize Israel and its right to secure borders, will sign peace treaties with her and establish normal diplomatic relations. Do you agree or disagree to this plan?

As is always the case with complex questions like this, ‘disagree’ answers are uninformative because we don’t know which component respondents objected to. But it is probably safe to assume that those who agree accept every component. Only 22.2% of Israeli Jews agreed with this formulation, 7% ‘definitely’. Among the Palestinian sample, 57.3% agreed, 8.3% definitely. Interestingly, in a follow up survey of Israelis only and not disaggregated by ethnicity conducted after Obama’s 4 June Cairo speech, 35% of all Israelis agreed, 13.3% ‘definitely’. This represents a slight decrease from before the speech when 36.3% of all Israelis agreed, 14% ‘definitely’. Although the margin of error is not stated, the drop may not be significant.

On the question of the border, 78% of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ ‘Israel should withdraw to the 67 border’, while 60% of Israelis said that was ‘Unacceptable’. There was again no consensus among Israelis on what was ‘Essential’, but 58% would tolerate a ‘Border established by the security wall’, an option 73% of Palestinians considered ‘Unacceptable’.

It was ‘Essential’ for 91% of Palestinian respondents that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine’, while 45% of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel’. A point of agreement was that majorities of both populations regarded it as ‘Unacceptable’ either to divide the city or to make it an ‘International City of Peace’ under UN or multifaith jurisdiction.

Ninety-eight percent of Palestinians said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished’ and 83% that ‘Abandoned settlements and infrastructure should be given to Palestinians’. Without access to the interviewers’ instructions or comparable metadata, I can’t be sure, but I surmise that this apparent contradiction arises because respondents were asked to consider each option independently of the others. These were ‘Unacceptable’ to 53% and 58% of Israelis, respectively. Thirty-seven percent of Israelis said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘All the settlements on the Israeli side of the security wall should be part of Israel’ and 20% that ‘All the settlements should remain as they are’. Significant majorities of both populations agreed it would be ‘Unacceptable’ for settlers to stay in the Palestinian state.

Curiously, the Palestinian sample was not asked about the crucial corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank, but among the Israelis, 47% said a bridge would be ‘Unacceptable’, 57% rejected a tunnel, and 43% wouldn’t accept a ‘Corridor between Gaza and West bank on land given to Palestine under land exchange’. Only about 8% of Israelis thought it ‘Essential’ for there to be any form of ‘transportational contiguity’ between the two enclaves at all.

Among Palestinians, 96% said ‘Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space’, while this was unacceptable to 35% of Israelis. Ninety-three percent of Palestinians considered it ‘Essential’ for the Palestinian state to have an army, while 63% of Israelis said that would be ‘Unacceptable’, and 25% said it was ‘Essential’ that ‘The IDF should remain in the Occupied Territories/West Bank’.

On the central issue of the right of return for the refugees, 87% of Palestinians said return with compensation, as provided in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, was ‘Essential’, while 77% of Israelis said it was ‘Unacceptable’, 83% even without compensation. Even the prospect that ‘The number of refugees returning to Israel should be limited to family members and numbers agreed between Israel and Palestine/the Palestinians’ was unacceptable to 49% of Israelis. Similarly, 60% rejected ‘An Israeli recognition of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, while most refugees return to the West bank or Gaza and some return to Israel’.

In summary, in the context of a partition arrangement, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians consider it essential for the Israel to withdraw to the Green Line, evacuating all settlements, with Jerusalem to be incorporated into the Palestinian state, which must have its own army and control its own resources, and the refugees should have the right of return and compensation. A majority of Israelis regard most of these as unacceptable, with a large minority rejecting Palestinian control of resources. A significant plurality says it is essential for Israel to retain all of Jerusalem.

Key issues
	Palestinians – Essential %	Israelis – Unacceptable %
Israel should withdraw to the 67 border	78	60
All the settlers should leave the occupied territories/West Bank and settlements demolished	98	53
Right of return AND compensation	87	77
All of Jerusalem should remain in Palestine	91	-
All of Jerusalem should remain in Israel	-	45 (Essential)
Palestinians should have control of their energy, minerals and air space	96	35
Palestine should have an army	93	63

Finally, only 33% of Israelis said it would be ‘Unacceptable’ that ‘Israeli Arabs should be transferred to Palestine/the West Bank and Gaza’, while 18% thought it ‘Essential’ and another 46% can live with it.

What this shows is that when asked about ‘the two state solution’ majorities among both Israelis and Palestinians say they would tolerate it, but when probed about the details they are diametrically opposed on the main issues – borders, refugees, settlements, and Jerusalem. At the same time, there is no enthusiasm for binationalism on either side and while a small majority of Palestinians would tolerate ‘one joint state’, the prospect was so offensive to Israeli respondents that ‘the interview would often be brought to a close’.

The International Consensus, as I understand it, is more or less captured by the three principal demands of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative:

I. Full Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied since 1967, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the June 4, 1967 lines as well as the remaining occupied Lebanese territories in the south of Lebanon.

II. Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194.

III. The acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. [my emphasis]

The Palestinian respondents to the OneVoice poll regard these provisions as ‘Essential’. Their only departure from the Consensus is in demanding all of Jerusalem. It’s clear that they don’t mean just the part that Israel occupied in 1967 because 50% rejected the proposition that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into East and West along the pre 67 border’. Large, but not overwhelming, majorities of Israeli respondents, in contrast, reject all the provisions of the Peace Initiative, including 77% who reject dividing Jerusalem on the old border.

While we’re talking about The International Consensus, I might just point out that there is a wee problem. I mean apart from the problem about partition and all. It calls for an independent Palestinian state and goes on in a later section to offer normalisation of relations with Israel. This has received a lot of coverage lately, as US President Obama is quite keen on that aspect of the Initiative, effectively asking the Arab states to normalise relations before Israel complies with the provisions I quoted. Now the whole point of Israel is to be a Jewish state – state that privileges Jews in some meaningful sense. But what would it mean to achieve ‘a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194’? For reference, here is the relevant passage:

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible [my emphasis]

Nobody really knows how many of the millions of refugees would actually exercise their right to return, but, as I wrote some time ago,

In other words, it is up to the refugees themselves, and not someone purporting to negotiate on their behalf, to decide whether or not to return, and the place they are entitled to return to is not some arbitrary place, but ‘their homes’. Even if only a small fraction of those currently languishing in refugee camps were to decide to exercise their right, if it were a meaningful right – to return to their homes - it would almost certainly entail a non Jewish majority within the Green Line. The compensation due to those choosing not to exercise their right, if it were just, would almost certainly bankrupt Israel.

As I read it, therefore, any two state arrangement that provides the minimum just redress for the 1948 refugees would create a non Jewish majority in the Jewish state, which is precisely why the Zionists reject the right of return as ‘national suicide’. The inevitable outcome of two states in historic Palestine turns out to be two non Jewish Palestinian states, which defeats the purpose.

But of course, since the purpose of the two state ‘solution’ from the 1947 UN partition resolution to the Geneva initiative and the Road Map is precisely the creation or retention of a sectarian racist ethno-religious Jewish state, the question of justice - for the refugees or anybody – doesn’t arise. And in the absence of justice, there will not be peace.

A drop in the bucket

The other day I received an appeal from the American Task Force for Lebanon (ATFL) requesting tax deductible donations to assist in clearing mines in Lebanon.

During the 2006 war, Israel air-dropped and ground-launched cluster munitions into South Lebanon. These munitions are supposed to open in mid-air so that the bomblets contained inside scatter and explode. Except the bomblets do not always explode.

HERE ARE THE GRIM STATISTICS: From August 14, 2006 to March 31, 2009: 21 civilians were killed; 204 civilians were injured...

Hardly more than a year and a half into the mine clearing operation,

Since March 2008, the ATFL has been working with the U.S. Department of State, Congress, and Lebanon's Ambassador to the U.S. to ensure that additional funding is available to continue the clearance operations in Lebanon. Thankfully, in 2008, the Department of State provided $825,000 from the global de-mining budget for this urgent, life-saving cluster munitions clearance operation.

In 2009, the ATFL again worked with the State Department, which was able to secure an additional $1.5 million for the demining operations in South Lebanon. However, these funds are not sufficient to clear the remaining cluster bomblets strewn in South Lebanon.

When we asked the State Department for more funding, they challenged us to raise funds for the demining operations and committed to match what we raise at the rate of two-for-one.

As I reported last month, the funding shortfall is well in excess of US$300,000. More importantly, according to Christina Bennike, country programme manager for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), the largest international demining organisation working in Lebanon, ‘…with 20 demining teams working in Lebanon clearing 800 square metres per working day, clearing the remaining 12 million square metres of affected land will take over eight years to finish’.

If it costs $300,000 to field ten teams for one month and it’s going to take 20 teams eight years to complete the demining, that would bring the total cost to some $8.64 million. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, the arms and legs of Lebanese kids are not in the same league as the mansions and yachts of the banksters. Still $200k, or even $1.5 million, seems a trifle stingy for the US government, which did after all supply the cluster bombs in the first place.

The other grim statistic ATFL cites is ‘14 deminers were killed; and 43 deminers were injured’ since the 14 August 2006 ceasefire. While Briton and Bosnian deminers are sacrificing their feet and their lives, nobody is calling for the Israeli government, who are even more directly responsible for the bombs, most of which they dropped in the last two days of the war with the clear intention of creating the disaster we are now observing, to contribute to the clean up operation.