War and Peace Index

December 2009

Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann

With the start of the new year, a majority of the Israeli Jewish public considers that the present government is functioning well or even better in the security sphere,medium in the economic sphere, and not well to poorly in the social sphere.

In the Israeli Arab public, a majority thinks the government is functioning not well to poorly in all the spheres. The ranking of the spheres, however, is identical to that of the Jewish public: the government gets the lowest grade for its treatment of the social issue, and the highest for its treatment of the security domain.

A segmentation of the answers by voting for the Knesset in the 2009 elections reveals an interesting finding: there is agreement between left-wing voters (Meretz) and voters for the right-wing religious parties -the Jewish Home and the National Union -that the government is not functioning properly in the security sphere. The voters for all the other parties are much more satisfied with the government’s functioning in this area. In the social sphere, however, there is a consensus among the voters for all the parties that the government is not functioning properly. Note that we also found such a consensus among all income groups: 60% of those with lower than average income, 55% of those with average income, and 61% of those with higher than average income.

In the security context, especially interesting are the views on who is responsible for the existing situation. We asked: “According to the overview by the chief of Military Intelligence, 2009 was a particularly quiet year in security terms. Some claim the quiet resulted from the activity of the Israeli security forces, and some claim it resulted from a decision by the Palestinian leadership to reduce the use of violence at this stage. Which, in your opinion, contributed more?” As the next figure shows, whereas a clear majority (54%) of the Jewish public sees the activity of the Israeli security forces as the reason for the quiet, the prevailing assessment (49%) in the Arab public is that the quiet resulted from a decision by the Palestinian leadership to lessen the violence.

When it comes to forecasts for the coming year in the security sphere, a clear majority – 57% -of the Jewish public believe the situation will remain as it is, 19% think there will be significant progress in peace talks, and only 13% foresee a further round of violent struggle between Israel and the Palestinians (11% do not know). In the Arab public the segmentation of the forecasts is very similar, though the rate of the optimists who expect progress in peace negotiations is higher – 35%. We found a large difference in the Jewish and Arab publics’ positions on a question about the government’s decision not to accept Hamas’s proposal on the terms for releasing Gilad Shalit. We asked: “According to the media reports, the Israeli government did not deign to accept Hamas’s latest proposal regarding Gilad Shalit because it includes, among other things, the release of the ‘heaviest’ terrorists. In your opinion, did the government act rightly or wrongly in rejecting Hamas’s proposal?” In the Jewish public, the majority (53%) answered that they are sure or they think the government acted rightly, while only about a third (35.5%) thought or were sure that it acted wrongly (11.5% did not know). The current position of the Jewish public is considerably different from the prevailing position in recent years, when a large majority favored Shalit’s release even at the price of freeing terrorists “with blood on their hands.” It appears that as the moment of decision approaches, the public tends to rely on the government’s judgment on this painful issue.

Conversely, the prevailing position in the Arab public was that the government erred -57%, with only 20% saying it acted rightly. A segmentation of the Jewish public’s answers by the respondents’ gender revealed that whereas a majority (54%) of the men supported the government’s decision, among the women there was a tie between those who thought the government acted rightly (41%) and those who thought it erred (41%) in rejecting Hamas’s proposal.

The Jewish public’s support for the government’s policy in the security sphere also emerges in the context of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the matter of opening Road 443 to Jerusalem. A large majority of the Jewish public (63%) favors maintaining the current situation, where the road is open only to Israelis, because they think opening it to Palestinians will enable terrorist attacks. Only a 30% minority supports the Supreme Court’s decision, which states that the current situation constitutes discrimination according to international law and, hence, the road must be opened to Palestinians living in its vicinity pursuant to arrangements to safeguard the Israeli motorists. A segmentation of the answers by voting for the Knesset in the 2009 elections shows that only among Meretz (100%) and Labor (54%) voters is there a majority favoring the Supreme Court’s decision. A majority of voters for all the other parties opposes this ruling. As expected, in the Arab public an overwhelming majority, 83%, supports the Supreme Court’s decision to open Road 443 to Palestinian travelers.

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The War and Peace Index is funded by the Evans Program for Conflict Resolution Research of Tel Aviv University. The telephone interviews were conducted by the B. I. Cohen Institute of Tel Aviv University on 4-5 January 2010, and included 525 interviewees who represent the adult population of Israel (including the territories and the kibbutzim). The sampling error for a sample of this size is 4.5%.