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.

3 comments:

Roy said...

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?

David Schraub said...

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!).

Roy said...

Thanks for clarifying..