Un­sur­pris­ing but im­por­tant new poll that re­veals the deep racism within Is­rael (so often ig­nored in West­ern media cov­er­age of the coun­try).

Mairav Zon­szein re­ports for 972:

Ac­cord­ing to a poll* re­leased Sun­day, a ma­jor­ity of Jew­ish Is­raelis (57 per­cent) be­lieve Is­rael should de­ter­mine its bor­ders uni­lat­er­ally ac­cord­ing to the cur­rent route of the sep­a­ra­tion wall, which cuts deep into the West Bank, wind­ing through Pales­tin­ian land well east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (Green Line).

This con­firms that 1) Is­raelis are ad­mit­ting the coun­try does not have de­fined and rec­og­nized bor­ders 2) Is­raelis are per­fectly happy (in­clud­ing 87 per­cent of Meretz vot­ers) push­ing for­ward uni­lat­er­ally de­spite re­peated claims by both the Is­raeli and U.S. gov­ern­ments that no uni­lat­eral steps should be taken by ei­ther side in the con­flict, and  3) Is­raelis don’t care that the ban­tus­tans cre­ated by the sep­a­ra­tion wall and the set­tle­ments are un­ac­cept­able to Pales­tini­ans or the in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity, thus ig­nor­ing the im­prac­ti­cal­ity of this op­tion as a long-term so­lu­tion – not to men­tion an un­just one.

But what is even more telling and in­ter­est­ing about the poll is that while 61 per­cent sup­port a two-state so­lu­tion (39 per­cent op­pose), a sub­stan­tial 23 per­cent said they sup­port a bi-na­tional state “with­out giv­ing Pales­tini­ans full civil rights” (up sub­stan­tially from last year’s 13 per­cent). In other words, this can be un­der­stood to mean that 23 per­cent of Jew­ish Is­raelis want to live under an Is­raeli apartheid regime where Pales­tini­ans are in­sti­tu­tion­ally dis­en­fran­chised – though the poll does not men­tion the word apartheid any­where.

The poll also men­tions that 13 per­cent think the sit­u­a­tion should re­main as it is (“de facto Is­raeli con­trol of Pales­tini­ans with­out an­nex­a­tion of Judea and Samaria”), which means main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo. The sit­u­a­tion we live in right now is de facto a bi-na­tional state (or ‘one state’), in which every per­son be­tween the Jor­dan River and the Mediter­ranean lives under vary­ing de­grees of Is­raeli rule, so I think it is fair to add this 13 per­cent to the 23 per­cent  –which es­sen­tially means that a whop­ping 36 per­cent of Jew­ish Is­raelis sup­port Is­raeli con­trol of the West Bank with­out Pales­tin­ian civil rights – what I think can safely be called apartheid.

This may not come as such a sur­prise to some – as back in Oc­to­ber, we re­ported about a Haaretz poll that showed if Is­rael an­nexed the West Bank, a ma­jor­ity of Is­raelis would not want Pales­tini­ans to get the right to vote for Knes­set.

It should also be noted that the seven per­cent of the polled Jew­ish Is­raelis said they sup­port giv­ing Pales­tini­ans full civil rights within a bi-na­tional state – not so tiny con­sid­er­ing how mar­gin­al­ized the left-wing one-state vi­sion is in Is­rael.

The ques­tions in the poll about the bi-na­tional state are worded thusly (trans­lated from He­brew): “Which of the fol­low­ing sce­nar­ios would you pre­fer in order to main­tain Is­rael’s char­ac­ter as a Jew­ish and de­mo­c­ra­tic state 20 years from now?” I think this word­ing is quite telling since the very no­tion that we need to try very hard to “keep” Is­rael Jew­ish and de­mo­c­ra­tic in­her­ently re­flects that being both Jew­ish and de­mo­c­ra­tic isn’t re­ally work­ing out.

The poll was com­mis­sioned by an or­ga­ni­za­tion called Blue White Fu­ture, who pub­lished it in He­brew. The poll ques­tioned 500 Jew­ish Is­raelis, rep­re­sent­ing the adult Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion of Is­rael.

*The poll can­not be found on­line but here is a copy of it in He­brew.

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