Half of Israelis: Trump plan intended to help Netanyahu win,
IDI poll finds probe of PM top issue for voting
US President Donald Trump introduced his “Deal of the Century” plan last week to interfere in the March 2 election and help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerge victorious, about half the respondents said in a new poll the Israel Democracy Institute published on Monday.
The poll found that among the general public, 49.9% see the plan’s presentation at the current time as deliberate interference in Israeli politics, 22.2% said they do not agree so much, 13.5% do not agree at all, and 14.4% said they did not know or refused to answer.
The sectors who most thought Trump was interfering were left-wing Jews (78%), centrist Jews (69%) and Arabs (68%). Only 33.5% of self-defined right-wing Jews saw the plan’s announcement as interfering in Israeli politics.
The poll asked Israelis what issue would most affect their voting. Netanyahu’s criminal investigations were in first place (32%), followed by the cost of living and housing (21.3%), the security situation (17.1%), matters of religion and state (10.4%) and Jewish-Arab relations (7.2%). Ahead of the September election, the security situation came first, the cost of living was second, and housing and the Netanyahu investigations were third.
A poll segmented by voting intentions in the approaching elections revealed that voters for Labor-Gesher-Meretz and Yisrael Beytenu are least satisfied with their party’s list of candidates for the Knesset. The most satisfied are voters of the Joint List and Blue and White.
Asked whether people should vote for one of the large parties and not for a small one to bring about a decisive result in Israel’s third election in under a year, 57.1% of the public agreed, 34.5% disagreed and 8.4% did not know or would not respond. Unsurprisingly, most of the support came from those who intend to vote for Blue and White or Likud, and most of the opposition came from voters for the smaller parties.
Since the April 2019 elections, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) has been monitoring to what extent Israelis think the publicized election results matched the actual voting or were manipulated in one way or another in the official reporting. The study found a considerable percentage of people do not believe in the propriety of the Israeli elections and do not think the results that are published are genuine.
Among the general public, 17.7% said they have full trust in the results, 40.1% had a lot of trust, 27.1% had little trust, 9.7% had no trust, and 5.5% did not know or refused to answer.
A clear-cut majority of the Israeli public (68.8%) thinks the day of the elections should count as a vacation day only for those who can prove that they have fulfilled their civic duty and voted, while 25.5% disagree and 5.7% did not know or declined to respond. Support for this notion ran very high among Jews (75%), while more than half the Arab interviewees opposed it (51%).
The survey results show that a 54.7% majority of the Israeli public oppose fines for those who do not vote in the elections, while 38.3% support them, and 7.1% did not know or did not respond.
The poll of 762 respondents, representing a statistical sample of the Israeli adult population, was conducted from January 26-28. The maximum sampling error for the entire sample was 3.7% at a confidence level of 95%.