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

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

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF