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Thursday, December 01, 2011

New Israel Poll

The University of Maryland has released a new poll documenting the attitudes of Israelis, broken down between Jews and Arabs. There's lots of interesting data in there, but three things jumped out at me:

(1) Barack Obama's approvals have recovered and are now quite strong -- he's at 54/39 split amongst Jewish Israelis. That's a gain of 25 points from last year.

(2) Jews and Arabs are mostly in agreement when describing the situation of Israeli Arabs: Formal equality, but with institutional and social discrimination. 52% of Jews and 57% of Arabs agree with that statement, as against "full equality" (a third of Jews and a handful of Arabs) and "apartheid" (a third of Arabs and a handful of Jews).

(3) There was a precipitous fall in the number of Israeli Arabs who see "right of return" for Palestinian refugees as a redline issue. Whereas in 2010 57% of Arabs viewed it as an important issue on which no compromise could be broached, now, that same number still call it important but say a compromise should be reached.

Anyway, all the findings are interesting. I encourage you to check it out.
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3 comments:

  1. Roy4:16 PM

    Hi David.
    Can you explain why you used the word "precipitous" to describe the changing attitude of Israeli Arabs to the the concept of Right of Return?
    I'm not a native English speaker so when I checked the meaning of the word "precipitous" I saw that it means not only "steep" but "dangerously steep".
    I was wondering if you really meant to imply this meaning, and if so, why do you see it as dangerous that Israeli Arabs are more willing to compromise?

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  2. David Schraub8:29 PM

    Hey Roy,

    "Precipitous" generally just means "extremely steep", with a connotation of suddenness. "Dangerously" comes because it is most often associated with a literal drop (as in, a cliff), in which case a sudden, steep dropoff is quite literally dangerous. But here I simply used it for emphasis -- that it was a very large drop in a very short amount of time. I certainly didn't intend to imply that this drop was bad thing (I think it is very good!).

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  3. Roy6:00 PM

    Thanks for clarifying..

    ReplyDelete