Survey: Israelis Support Arab Emigration, Fewer Rights

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132893

(IsraelNN.com) More than half of Israeli Jews (53 percent) and 77 percent of the country’s immigrants support encouraging Arabs to leave Israel, according to a new survey from the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI).

A third of respondents said they agreed that Arab citizens of Israel should be denied the right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, 54 percent agreed that "only citizens who are loyal to the state are entitled to benefit from civil rights," including 67 percent of immigrants. Thirty-eight percent of Israeli Jews believed that Jewish citizens should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens.

The figures are part of the IDI’s annual audit of democracy in Israel, first started in 2003. This year’s survey marks 20 years of immigration from the former Soviet Union.

In response to the statement that there should be "a Jewish majority in decisions relating to the fate of the country,” only 27 percent objected. Six years ago, 38 percent objected to the statement. The report’s conclusions said the figures indicate relatively broad support for decreasing the political rights of Israel's Arab minority.

The survey interviewed 1,191 Israeli adults in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. A nonprofit think tank, the IDI was established in 1991 to serve as a forum for research, debate and reform of Israeli democratic institutions, and to promote and strengthen democracy and democratic values in Israel.

I often wonder whether the Palestinians are following a Rwandan strategy:- simply wait for the other side to lurch into a campaign of ethnic cleansing and then hopefully harness the wave of international sympathy as momentum for the creation of a state.

There seems a clear trend here - and I suppose when the main three parties in Israel are right of centre, right-wing, and far right wing, you don't need to be a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.

Fortunately, the present appointees to the Supreme Court are all recent and impeccably liberal, so it will take some time for the rightward tilt to manifest itself in the judiciary. But that will come too, http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/1091419.html">given time.

I'd encourage you to judge all responses accordingly.

about the same as Haaretz. In per capita terms, that's seven times the readership of the New York Times.

He is still a right-wing extremist and I would judge those who comment on his website accordingly.

The New York Times has a circulation of over 1 million.

The newspaper version of the website in the OP has a circulation of about 150,000 and it is distributed for free - and is a weekly.

so I was referring to its readership over the whole country. I doubt the circulation of one million is confined to New York alone.

I did refer to readership, not circulation, in the original post. The 7% figure is from the wikipedia article that refers to the paper.

Are you arguing that this is not a right-wing extremist settler news source?

The issue with talking about what is or isn't "extremist" in the context of Israeli views on the Palestinian conflict is that Israeli politics has lurched to the right in the last decade while political terminology has not, so that the vast majority of Israelis hold views on the I/P conflict to the right - often far to the right - of what is usually still referred to as "the centre".

So this source is extremist in the sense that it's a long way to the right of what is usually referred to as "the centre".

But I don't think it's all that extremist in the sense that "only a few people hold views that far right", sadly.

It's lunatic, but (as far as I can tell from opinion polls, election results, articles in other media sources and the like) it isn't fringe.

Most left-wingers believe that Israel should not be able to settle Jews in Arab areas of East Jerusalem as a way of annexing it; if/when it is returned to the Palestinians then pretty much 100% of left-wingers believe Jews and anyone else should be allowed to live there if they are willing to live under Palestinian rule and buy land consensually.

Are you part of this 55%?

If the conflict goes on 2 more years or another 50 years, you're against any Jews moving to E.Jerusalem and living there, right?

No - I'm not part of that 55% - I think that's ridiculous.

I'd say that's worse than the 55% of Israelis polled.

if they're prepared to buy the land and live there as Palestinians rather than occupiers, I have no problem with it.

So it's got little to do with the political slant the site has. What I find concerning is the polls that show a far too large number of Israelis, especially immigrants, support such things.

Talkbacks generally seem to attract people with extreme viewpoints, regardless of the slant of the source. I would argue that extremist RW settler sources such as the one posted on the OP have even more of these sorts of comments than sources that are not so far right. In any case, I wouldn't take those comments as being particularly representative of public opinion.

Considering your characterization of Avigdor Lieberman and the fact that so many immigrants from the FSU supported him, I'm not sure why you would be surprised by the results of this poll which, if you will note the methodology, deliberately over-sampled that particular population.

That will tell you what I think about them. In the case of wanting to encourage Arabs to leave Israel, that attitude does seem to be reasonably representative of public opinion, given the opinion polls.

I didn't say I was surprised by the results of the polls. I said I was concerned. Why would you misread what I said as me saying I was surprised?

Also, I don't see anything in the article about methodology, but it does say this is a yearly one, so if you think this polling organisation aren't to be trusted when it comes to their polls, could you please explain why?

I'm sure your concern must predate reading the results of this poll since there is nothing surprising in the results.

My other comment about the FSU population was based on a misreading of the PDF on the IDI website. They actually did a second survey specifically with that population to get their responses to certain question and used an expanded number for that survey.

I remember a poll from awhile back that sited a lower number that believed Israeli Arabs should be "encouraged" to leave