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No, Half of Israeli Jews Don’t Favor Mass Expulsions of Arabs

March 10 2016

Since the Pew foundation released the results of a major survey of Israeli public opinion, many reporters have made much of the purported datum that roughly one in two Israeli Jews favors driving out the country’s Arabs. But as Nathan Jeffay explains, a double error is at play here: the Pew researchers asked a poorly formulated question that could mean several different things in Hebrew (as also in English), and the media ignored these ambiguities:

At first glance, the question seemed straightforward. People were asked if “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” But this actually left a lot for the respondents to define for themselves. Did they respond in relation to all Arabs, as one would gather from the way results have been presented? Or were they thinking about specific cases, such as Arabs who sympathize with terror or . . . the families of terrorists who carry out attacks? . . . Every respondent will have interpreted the question in his own way. . . .

The definite article is extremely important in Hebrew. If Pew was interested in what Israeli Jews think about the presence of Arabs, it should have asked about “the Arabs” not “Arabs.”. . .

But beyond a general fluffiness with the question, there was a deeper problem with the concepts that it probed. The meaning of “expulsion” was clear, but what was meant by “transfer”? The leading Israeli pollster Camil Fuchs, who was not involved in the Pew research, said he understood the word ha’avarah (“transfer”) to refer to a process by which nobody leaves their homes, . . . [namely] the proposal to redraw borders in order to place some Israeli Arabs under Palestinian jurisdiction. . . . President Barack Obama has advocated [such a policy] as a way to make a peace deal realistic.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Ethnic Cleansing, Israeli & Zionism, Israeli Arabs, Israeli society, Translation

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic