New poll: 25% of U.S. Jews think Israel is apartheid state
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
Jewish opinion in the US, a country supporting Israel to the tune of around $3 billion a year, really matters.
It is shifting – and rapidly.
A new survey shows an astonishing quarter of the Jewish population supporting the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, rising to 38% among the under 40s.
The times they are a-changin’…
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Tue 13 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
New poll: 25% of U.S. Jews think Israel is apartheid state
A quarter of Jewish voters polled by the Jewish Electorate Institute said they believed Israel is an apartheid state. This number rises to 38% for voters under 40
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Encouraging. Hopefully these results will worry the Israeli government and opinion formers considerably … and begin to change their behaviour.
If a similar survey was done here, how likely is it that UK trends would mirror the US ones?
Better to read the much fuller Haaretz account of this survey and moderate the enthusiasm – the survey results overall show the importance of nuance, complexity and recognising that American Jews can be as contradictory and incoherent in their views as everyone else! Nevertheless, the trends are clear – Israel is losing its unchallenged grip on American Jews’ psyche, to a remarkable degree, and remarkably quickly.
Unfortunately, the results, were such a survey to be done today in Britain, would be less hopeful. Things ARE changing among younger British Jews, especially among younger practising Jews who are members of Liberal and Reform synagogues. But the changes are slower, and happening among a minority of British Jews, whereas in the US, it is the majority of the community that is rethinking and/or simply drifting away.
There is other interesting information in the poll too:
65% of those polled are not members of a synagogue or temple
60% support the two-state “solution”, 20% a secular democratic state and 19% (!) annexation of Palestinian territory and denying Palestinians the vote in national elections.
A massive 66% of those polled have a degree or higher degree (33% each).
As with all these polls, the issue of how pollsters identify Jewish is an issue. The methodology states that this was on (at least in part) the basis of first or last names and geography. Those thus selected were then asked if they identified as Jews. This method is likely to miss those people (like me) most assimilated and least imbued with Jewish culture and therefore probably least likely to have any emotional attachment to Israel, so I would expect that there is an underestimation here of the level of criticism of Israel in this survey. How big a difference that makes is anyone’s guess.
It would be interesting to see the results of a similar survey in the UK – but not until some means could be found to survey the Jewish “communities” properly. Asking those attached to synagogues would bring a very different answer from asking everyone who identifies as Jewish. I would guess that the majority of UK Jews are either secular or unattached – and thoroughly fed up with the BoD claiming to represent all of us!
Jewish Policy Research undertakes interesting research. ON a quick look a their site I can’t find anything exactly on this topic since 2010 (but I may have missed something) https://www.jpr.org.uk/publication?id=94