Poll: More Israelis care about peace with Jordan than annexation
More Israelis care about maintaining peace with neighboring Jordan than they do about annexing West Bank territory, a newly released poll by Commanders for Israel’s Security found.
The group of former Israeli security officials opposes Israeli plans to annex West Bank settlements, but their poll of Israeli Jews, according to one of the poll’s three authors, Prof. Gilad Hirschberger, was done on the well known internet platform of the Mitgam Institute. The other authors were Prof. Camil Fuchs and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler.
“Annexation is not very popular,” said Hirschberger.
The group’s poll, conducted on April 21-22, found that only a quarter of Israelis favored annexation, while 96% thought peace with Jordan is important. But the survey for the most part did not distinguish between partial and full annexation of all of the West Bank.
Participants were also asked “should Israel annex territories in the West Bank, if annexation will harm relations with Jordan. Only a little more than a quarter [28%] think ‘yes’ and the rest are divided between saying ‘no’ [36%] and not being very sure [35],” Hirschberger said, when he presented the result at an Israel Policy Forum webinar on Tuesday.
“I think here many Israelis lack the information to understand how annexation may harm relations with Jordan,” he said.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the survey found that only 40% of Israelis favor a two-state solution.
Some 26% wanted annexation, 22% favored some form of separation and 13% preferred the status quo, according to the survey.
Out of those surveyed from the Likud, only 36% supported annexation, 25% said they wanted separation, 21% favored a two state solution and 18% said they wanted the status quo.
Some 70% from the Blue and White party, however, said they wanted a two-state solution, 20% favored separation, 6% went for the status quo and only 4% preferred annexation, the survey showed.
In tracking attitudes over time, the survey showed a drop in support for a two state solution from 47% in November 2918 down to 40% in April 2020. There has been a corresponding rise in support for annexation form 16% in November 2018, to 26% in April, the survey results showed.
Participants were then asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the context of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan. In that construct, support for annexation remained mostly the same, 27%. But unlike in other parts of the survey, the question was broken out into full annexation, which had 17% support, and partial annexation, which had 10% support.
The number of participants supporting at two-state solution, however, dropped to 20%. Another 25% said they favored the Trump peace plan.
Hirschberger said he attributed the drop in support for two-states at this stage in the survey to the inclusion of a question about support for the
Trump plan.
“You can see that the Trump plan takes a bite out of support for the two-state solution. This suggests that most Israelis understand the Trump plan as a two-state solution, and this is something that we need to keep in mind,” he said.
The survey also showed almost equivalent support for the Trump plan between the Likud party at 26%, and the Blue and White party at 27%.
Overall, however, the survey found that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was low on the list of issues that the Israeli public cares about, coming in seventh place on its list of issues. All these six topics felt more relevant to the poll participants; security, cost of living, corruption, social polarization, threats to democracy and issues of religion and state.
The priority list differed depending on political affiliation, with the Right most concerned with security, the Center with cost of living and the Left with threats to democracy.
“When we asked more directly, how interested are you in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... we can see that only 37% are interested in the conflict,” Hirschberger said.
With regard to COVID-19, the survey showed that attitudes toward helping Palestinians differed depending on the political map.
Some 84% of the left-wing respondents said that Israel should help Palestinians with a COVID-19 outbreak in one of their cities, compared to 67% in the Center and 47% on the Right.
In contrast, however, 52% of those on the Right thought Israel should help countries in the region with combat COVID-19.
Those who supported COVID-19 assistance to the Palestinians were more likely to be swayed by security issues and only after that morality issues, the survey found.
The survey was conducted among 1,009 Israeli Jews, of which 51% were women and the average age was 42. Out of those surveyed, 57% were secular, 18% were traditional, 14% were national religious and 11% were ultra-Orthodox. Some 16% identified as left-wing, 25% said they were centrist and 59% claimed to be rightwing. The margin of error was 13%.
The spread of people was based on the voting pattern in the September 2019 elections.