@Jack,

You say, “I’m sure that most European Westerners acknowledge that the war in Iraq was illegal, and that drone strikes could be construed as illegal acts of war. Yet hardly anyone goes to the streets to protest. So, does that mean a majority of the people support it, or rather that a majority of the people feels powerless to do anything about it or propose an alternative.”

Your logic is terribly flawed. Drone strikes happen in another country, and citizens are indeed powerless to change those except through protest (even voting in a new leader won’t help, since both parties support drones). However, apartheid is a completely different matter, since this happens WITHIN one’s own country, and it can only be perpetuated as an organized SYSTEM of discrimination if the majority supports it through action or complicit acceptance.

You asked for the survey, so here it is in a nutshell, from one of BA’s links:

http://commentisfreewatch.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/1004082658.jpg

As I said before, and as I say again, the survey speaks for itself, and at a very high degree of statistical precision.

You say, “you’re not very willing to let this wonderful piece of evidence go that they are inveterate racists.”

Now I can see quite clearly that you have completely misinterpreted my argument. As I already argued above, the Israeli Jews are definitely not “inveterate racists” any more than anyone else in the world is, but for some reason they are responding in a very racist fashion, just as surveys of the Arab side have shown that Arabs in Israel, and especially in the occupied territories, respond in very racist ways against the Israeli Jews. My point all along (read my original posts above) is that we need to stop questioning the validity of reliable data, which is an unproductive dead end, and to start asking WHY does this racism exist?

Since Arabs and Jews are not remotely this racist anywhere else in the world (except perhaps when they get fired up about the racism in this region), we must ask ourselves, What is the root cause of this localized outlier of extreme racism? We must also ask ourselves, Why did Arabs and Jews suddenly start to behave this way and then continue for decades without end soon after the state of Israel was created? What exactly changed, given that before this time, the Arabs and Jews were living with each other for centuries on end in relative peace? Are the Arabs simply upset that their new country is called Israel instead of Palestine? Was a “racist virus” introduced into their water supply during WWII as an early experiment in biological warfare?

No one needs to hypothesize about absurd root causes, of course, since there are really only two working hypotheses: 1) Jews are “inveterate racists”, Arabs are “inveterate racists”, or they both are (i.e., “the OTHERS are racists” hypothesis); or 2) something in their environment, the system itself, is fundamentally wrong, thereby causing racist behavior (i.e., the “racist system” hypothesis). In other words, the root cause is either endogenous or exogenous, two mutually exclusive alternatives. The logical solution in case the first hypothesis applies is invariably to treat the assumed racists like racists, primarily via a two-state solution of dueling racist states, based on the logic that “we can never trust those racists who are out to get us within our own country” and “we can’t change the bigots/terrorists/racists that they are and always will be”.

By contrast, the solution in case the second hypothesis applies is simple: a genuine, inclusive democracy stripped of its racist founding principles and founded, instead, upon a powerful, living Constitution that all citizens can be proud of, in the same way that Americans are proud of the sacred principles in their Constitution protecting diversity, minority rights, and equality for all. The latter solution is no more a dream or fantasy than the reality it has become for millions who have settled in America — it truly is possible. It is based on the conviction that no group of people are “inveterate racists” and that the racist system itself is responsible and needs to be discarded so that a vibrant, diverse democracy can take its place. We have inspirational examples of such democracies coming into fruition across the world, sometimes after the most violent of internal conflicts (640,000+ died in the U.S. Civil War alone, for example, more than almost all future U.S. wars combined and without any modern weaponry). By contrast, I cannot think of even a single successful reconciliation in history based on the establishment of dueling racist states.

Technically speaking, though, it really doesn’t matter if there are two such democratic states or one, so I am not conceptually opposed to a two state solution. However, I am strongly in favor of a one state solution simply because I believe it is no longer possible to pursue a two state solution given the highly fragmented race-based settlements across the region and because such an inspirational Constitution would be completely hollow and disingenuous if it were first contingent on racial segregation. It doesn’t matter what the state is called — “Israel” is just fine — but we can’t keep pushing a racist two state solution that will only result in thousands of families being forced from their homes to create artificial borders separating artificially contiguous land masses. Unfortunately, the time for a two state solution has long passed. The only realistic solution is a one state inclusive democracy or a long future of atrocities — committed by both sides, of course, but no doubt most destructive to the side without political power.

@Chameleon

See if you can read the Haaretz article now: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/apartheid-poll-errors-that-traveled-round-the-world.premium-1.472989

The problem is that sometimes I can read the article in its entirety and sometimes Haaretz wants me to pay. If you cannot read it let me quote the entire article so that you can read it in the comments section. Here it is:

Apartheid’ poll: Errors that traveled round the world

A well-constructed public opinion survey in terms of the Israeli public’s attitudes on racism and of the corrosive effects of 45 years of ruling another people could do much to advance a mature discussion of the problem. The recent Dialog survey, and Gideon Levy’s poor reading of it, gave us neither.

Twenty years ago, the American Jewish Committee commissioned the Roper Organization, a reputable polling firm, to gauge public knowledge about the Holocaust. One finding in particular grabbed headlines.
Twenty-two percent of the respondents — thirty-four if you counted those who answered ‘don’t know’ — were open to the idea that the Holocaust might not have happened. The question itself, to an untrained eye perhaps, seems straightforward enough: ‘Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?’ But the result was so shocking that, after the initial round of predictable handwringing passed, questions emerged on the methodology of the poll.
The question, when read, seems clear, but when Roper went back two years later and asked a similar number of people the same question with a slightly new wording – ‘Does it seem possible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened, or do you feel certain that it happened?’ – the result was more reassuringly lopsided. This time, only one percent said it was possible and only eight percent answered ‘don’t know,’ leaving a full 91 per cent certain that the Holocaust had indeed taken place.
Last week a news article in Haaretz – like Mark Twain’s proverbial lie – traveled halfway round the world. Splashed across the top of its front page in the Hebrew print edition was the provocative headline ‘A majority of Israelis support apartheid policies in Israel’.
The English online version, doomed to be permanently hyperlinked in every anti-Israel blog for at least the next five years, ran under the equally risible headline ‘Survey: Most Israeli Jews would support apartheid regime in Israel,’ [this headline has now been corrected to "Most Israeli Jews wouldn't give Palestinians vote if West Bank was annexed"]. Gideon Levy’s poll analysisencapsulates the intention and effect of the poll succinctly: ‘Nice to make your acquaintance, we’re racist and pro-apartheid. The poll … proved what we always knew.’
The poll had been conducted by Dialog and commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund. The New Israel Fund, beleaguered target of a recent right-wing witch-hunt, has distanced itself from the survey, with which it was erroneously credited with commissioning. Understandably so.
The survey and its presentation in Haaretz have all the hallmarks of a serious failure of oversight. There were four kinds of problems: misleading translations from Hebrew to English, sloppily-worded questions producing meaningless ‘findings’, dubious aggregations of the data that produced misrepresentations of opinion, and agenda-driven editorializing.
The adjoining graphic on the English edition, unlike the one in Hebrew, inexplicably leaves out the following findings which feature prominently in the Hebrew version: A majority of Israeli Jews report that they would not be bothered having an Arab neighbor in their building; a majority of Israeli Jews report that they would not be bothered if their children studied in a class with an Arab pupil; and a majority of Israeli Jews reject the proposition that Arabs not be allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. In all three cases there were worryingly large minorities who openly chose the more racist option.
Even in the original Hebrew, it’s not clear what respondents are being asked to favor or oppose, and they are not given options that might clarify their choices. This is especially true on the annexation questions, which could be read as referring to three very different ideas — annexing the whole West Bank, annexing the settlement blocs, or annexing all the settlements without the Palestinian population centers.
On the question of separation of Israelis and Palestinians on roads in the West Bank, respondents were actually offered three choices: ‘it’s a good thing,’ ‘it’s a bad thing but there’s no alternative,’ and ‘it’s a bad thing and should stop.’ Haaretz in English reports the second option erroneously as ‘it is necessary’ and Levy aggregates, both in the text and in the accompanying graphic, the 24% who say it is good and the 50% who it is bad but there’s no alternative into ‘74% support separation’ (only 17% said it should stop). The natural aggregation would be that 67% say ‘it is a bad thing’, a figure that completely contradicts the conclusion of the text and graphics; perhaps Levy thought few readers would ever see the raw data, which was not linked to the articles.
It gets worse. One question asks if respondents support partially ‘transferring’ Arab-Israelis to the Palestinian Authority. This question introduces a very politically-loaded term from one context into a seemingly different one. In the 1980s there were right-wing fringe parties which advocated ‘transfer’ of Arabs to Jordan or other Arab countries in order to magically obtain a Jewish majority in the West Bank — a kind of ethnic cleansing that never garnered any real electoral support and for which there is negligible support in the public discourse. In the last decade, there has been a very different proposal in some right-wing circles to draw the international border between Israel and the future Palestinian state to include certain Arab population centers west of the Green Line in Palestine, and not as currently in Israel. What is the reader to make of 47% who say they support it or the 40% who say they oppose it? To which idea is the poll referring, and why is the provocative word ‘transfer’ used if the question actually refers to border adjustments?
Responses to the question as to whether de facto apartheid exists in Israel (not whether it should be implemented) are segmented into ‘in most ways,’ ‘in some ways,’ ‘there is no apartheid,’ and ‘don’t know.’ The question, as the data from the original poll show, was confusingly asked in the context of the remarks of a fictitious ‘American author’ (“the interviewees were asked whether “a famous American author [who] is boycotting Israel, claiming it practices apartheid” should be boycotted or invited to Israel”) and not, as the Haaretz headline presents it, as a standalone assessment of the situation in Israel. Again, Levy aggregates the two affirmative responses to yield 58 percent who believe there is apartheid in Israel, but the question does not make clear whether it is referring to just the State of Israel, the West Bank or both. As Levy himself points out, it’s not entirely clear that the Israeli public at large has any real understanding of what apartheid was, and in all likelihood is using it as a term of opprobrium for institutionalized racism of any kind.
Far from expressing support for apartheid, a majority of the Israeli public is sounding the alarm about something they are clearly very critical, if a bit ignorant, of — an ignorance further demonstrated by the confused responses to an unreported question testing their historical knowledge of South Africa.
In contrast to that, the question that is the basis of the screaming headlines does not even mention the word apartheid, but rather refers to voting rights in the event of an annexation which in the previous question confusingly refers only to settlements. It’s not easy to discern what kind of annexation is being proposed in the question, and anyway the majority clearly opposes it in any form.
The Israeli public is in need of self-examination in terms of its attitudes on racism and of the corrosive effects of 45 years of ruling another people. A well-constructed public opinion survey could do much to advance a mature discussion of the problem. This survey, and Gideon Levy’s poor reading of it, gave us neither.

“But more important, the survey shows that a majority of Israeli Jews acknowledge that apartheid ALREADY EXISTS on multiple levels, which is far worse than mere verbal support.”

I’m sure that most European Westerners acknowledge that the war in Iraq was illegal, and that drone strikes could be construed as illegal acts of war.

Yet hardly anyone goes to the streets to protest.

So, does that mean a majority of the people support it, or rather that a majority of the people feels powerless to do anything about it or propose an alternative?

2. You claim “the survey speaks for itself”, but I haven’t seen the actual results of the survey. Have you. Because I only saw the interpretation Gideon Levy gave to it.

But maybe I overlooked something and you have a link to the survey itself in one of your contributions on this page somewhere.

See, you seem to conflate your interpretation of the survey with the survey results itself. A compounding problem is that you seem rather biased towards Israeli Jewish Zionists:

I’m guessing from the fervor and tenacity in your comments and the negative attitudes towards Israeli Zionists it expresses, you already thought you knew how these Israeli Jews feel about Arabs, Palestinians and the Two State solution

And since Levy’s/your interpretation of the results of the survey lines up nicely with your preconceived views of what’s going on inside these people’s hearts and minds, you’re not very willing to let this wonderful piece of evidence go that they are inveterate racists.

So, would you do us all a favor and give us a link to an English translation of the original survey, if someone hasn’t already? I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who missed it.

@Believing Atheist,

You previously said the following (three completely separate quotes):

“So it only gives the name of one Tel Aviv University professor”

“This is false. The article does not say the academics conducted the survey.”

“What a liar you are! You said: Once again, the survey was conducted by Jewish academics – at a much respected Jewish university, no less –and you said: particularly when the research is conducted by respected academics. WRONG!”

I think you can see how I may have interpreted a potential claim of yours that there could have been only one professional researcher behind the survey (and not multiple “academics” in the plural sense) without accusing me of lying or schizophrenia. When I look at the context of what you wrote, I can also see how you might not be making that claim, even though it is not quite clear either way, so I apologize for assuming that was your claim and wasting time on that issue. You can consider that my bad, and I will forget your last hyperbolic reply so we can move on.

With respect to the Haaretz “retraction”, you summarize arguments that no one can see in the link and without making any new arguments yourself. Therefore, your point here is so far moot until you can elaborate beyond the arguments you have already made.

THE SIKKUY SURVEY

You also say, “Prove it, instead of just claiming it with data [I think you meant "without data"]. I can prove you are wrong with data”.

First of all, I explicitly said I could not prove it, since I did not have the data. I merely said my argument was reasonable and logical based on the available data I had, and I stand behind that comment even with the new data at hand.

The “SIKKUY” survey you referenced does have some value on this point, so thank you very much for providing this additional data. Unfortunately, the methodology and sampling have a couple of serious flaws, per this quote from the English version of the report:

“Among the Jewish participants, eight focus groups met under the auspices of the “Mikud Institute” with a total of 55 adult participants. Subsequently, a quantitative survey of attitudes was conducted based on the findings of the qualitative research. The survey encompassed 550 adult citizens ages 25-50…”

from http://www.sikkuy.org.il/english/hasamim/shivion2011_english_abstract.pdf

So in essence, the researchers seriously disrupted the independence of the survey responses by first holding focus group sessions among a significant proportion of the participants. This methodology promotes both politically correct and groupthink survey responses “subsequently” after those sessions, as any organizational behavior textbook would explain. Moreover, as any citizen of a democratic country knows, one MUST believe in equality, especially after being put through a public indoctrination session, appropriately called a “focus group” in terms of how it focuses everyone’s responses to be more politically correct. The psychological principle of “cognitive dissonance” would strongly incent the focus group participants not to contradict their focus group responses on a subsequent survey, even if that survey were anonymous.

The second major flaw in this survey’s methodology is that the researchers excluded all Jews (but not Arabs) over 50 years old, which would exclude essentially the entire age group that is running the Israeli government. Quite ironically, those are the exact individuals with the power to establish a government based on equality for all its citizens, but they are also the group most likely to hold the traditional view of Israel as “a homeland for Jews”, NOT as a homeland for all its citizens.

And after all this response bias and selection bias, still 40% of the respondents do not believe in promoting equality of Arab citizens of Israel! Are we supposed to be comforted by the fact that a 40% rejection of the most basic democratic principle by Israeli Jews (that all citizens should be considered equal under the law) is OK, in spite of the clear attempt to bias this number down with the methodology employed? Should we again only be concerned once it tips past 50%? Really?

Now let’s take a closer look at the survey data you just brought into play. It seems that you handpicked the most favorable statistic from it. Here are some other stats from it:

“A clear majority of the Jews (74 percent) acknowledge the fact that Arab citizens suffer some degree of discrimination”, which corroborates the conclusion in the more recent survey that apartheid already exists in Israel. The threshold for apartheid is more systemic, organizationally supported discrimination, which explains why fewer acknowledge apartheid exists (58% in the other survey) vs. the lower threshold of “Arabs suffer from discrimination” (74% in the SIKKUY survey).

“Among Arab citizens there is sweeping support for economic, political and social integration (88 percent, 81 percent and 78 percent, respectively). Among Jews the numbers are lower (particularly disturbing is the statistic regarding support for political integration of Arabs – only 52 percent).” In other words, 48% of the Israeli Jews in this survey do NOT support political integration of Arabs into Israel, which logically means they must support political apartheid. Even without the clearly biased methodology pulling this number down below a technical majority, this number is still shocking, since it contradicts the most non-negotiable principle of democracy. By contrast, what is interesting to note is how overwhelming the support is among Israeli Arabs for all forms of integration, including political. So much for the ridiculous canard about how all Arab Muslims want to push the Jews into the sea, or to pursue some other absurd “Islamic supremacy” agenda!

“The inequality of Arab citizens disturbs over half of the Jewish population in Israel (53 percent).” In other words, 47% of Jews are NOT disturbed by Arab inequality, and some of those who are disturbed are no doubt “disturbed” only because of the disturbing blowback on Jews that such inequality inevitably causes. This statistic is shocking.

On a seemingly positive note, the majority of Jews support “economic” and “social” integration of Arabs, but this means nothing in my opinion. Even slaves can be well integrated into an economy and into the social fabric of a society if they are given the correct “status”. Therefore, even ardent Zionists could agree to such “integration”. The only thing that really matters is integrating politically, since that represents power and basic human rights for all citizens, what Israeli Jews have not been willing to share and grant, respectively, in their long promised –and long overdue –Constitution.

Overall, this SIKKUY survey is quite lean on quantitative facts and much richer on qualitative summaries. This was indeed a noble effort by the researchers. However, it appears to have been designed to build consensus between adult Arabs and young adult Jews in Israel rather than to measure individual attitudes of all adult Arabs and Jews (including those Jews over age 50 who are predominantly in power and more “traditional”) independent of that consensus building process. Perhaps most important, it does not contradict the Dialog survey. It supports it.

@Chameleon the shape-shifter

The survey has been retracted by Haaretz. This is what Haaretz says:

The survey and its presentation in Haaretz have all the hallmarks of a serious failure of oversight. There were four kinds of problems: misleading translations from Hebrew to English, sloppily-worded questions producing meaningless ‘findings’, dubious aggregations of the data that produced misrepresentations of opinion, and agenda-driven editorializing.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/apartheid-poll-errors-that-traveled-round-the-world.premium-1.472989

You Say: Thank you for that clarification, and thank you for just conceding my point. Your previous rebuttal is now totally moot, since you now agree with my point that multiple professional academics were responsible for this survey.

For that to be true, you must prove where I said only one academic was behind the survey. You can’t. So you are just debating with an imaginary person in your head. I suspect you are a Schizophrenic and your own delusions and incoherence amplify my suspicion. Either that or you are a downright liar. And no it’s not a ad hominem, it’s fact.

You say: Although the survey may have only referenced “government hiring”, that does not give you the logic or the data to claim that the majority of Israelis would not favor discrimination in other jobs as well.

Prove it, instead of just claiming it with data. I can prove you are wrong with data:

A survey conducted by the “SIKUY” association, which no one can accuse of harboring any right-wing inclinations, found that “60% of [Israeli] Jews believe that promoting the equality of Arab citizens is in the interest of the state.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/haaretz-gideon-levy-and-the-israel-apartheid-canard/

@Believing “Post-Zionist” (my apologies for my lack of precision),

You say, “Never made that proposition. Said we do not know who the other academics behind the survey were, since their names are not given.”

Thank you for that clarification, and thank you for just conceding my point. Your previous rebuttal is now totally moot, since you now agree with my point that multiple professional academics were responsible for this survey.

You say, “The only place where Israelis do favor discrimination against Arabs is in government hiring.”

This is not only a naked claim with zero factual support, it is illogical. Although the survey may have only referenced “government hiring”, that does not give you the logic or the data to claim that the majority of Israelis would not favor discrimination in other jobs as well. Common sense logic would support an argument quite contrary to your claim. What is even more shocking is that a democratic government should be leading by example with non-discriminatory hiring, but a clear majority of Israelis actually want their government to follow a system of apartheid in hiring.

Your final argument is just another pathetic “half-full” argument. It’s as if your “post-Zionist” fantasy is all well and good and no one will be truly oppressed or discriminated against as long as the percentage doesn’t tip from 47% to 51%. Are you really that delusional? And do you really believe that less than 3% of Israeli Jews did not lie about their own hate and opposition to having any Arab neighbors?

At the end of the day, the survey speaks for itself, with a standard error on all questions of no more than 2.23%. And if any significant proportion of respondents lied about their own prejudices or they feigned neutrality (as some questions indicate, which would be quite typical for such surveys), then the racist reality is significantly worse than what was measured. Moreover, this survey has the imprimatur of respected academics, a respected university, and a respected survey organization behind it. The facts are clear and unassailable that there is widespread acceptance and complicity by Israeli Jews to commit flagrant discrimination against its own Arab citizens — even a strong, widespread desire to strip them of Israeli citizenship and to expel them from their own homes and their own country, just to fulfill or maintain the racist ideology that is at the foundation of the state of Israel.

There is MAJORITY acknowledgement by Israeli Jews that Israel ALREADY FUNCTIONS as a racist, apartheid state on many levels, with greater than a 99.9% statistical confidence level backing up this conclusion. If, like you, a majority of Israeli Jews supposedly doesn’t want to SUPPORT a racist, apartheid state (contrary to what the data implies), then they need to express that genuine intention by taking the advice of all democracies throughout history. They need to grow up, become a democracy with a Constitution that strongly protects diversity and all minority rights, and to discard their racist founding principles. It really is that simple. But if a majority truly doesn’t support the apartheid status quo in Israel, as Israeli Jews acknowledge already exists today, then why has that majority yet to produce this non-negotiable founding Constitution – as they promised, and utterly failed, to do decades ago – which would give them the most basic eligibility to be called a democracy?

Israel is very good at selling the world on a “democracy” that simply has no substance. But the gig is coming to an end. The world is not going to be bamboozled by a fraudulent democracy much longer. The world will not continue to buy burgers without any beef.

Believing Atheist and Chameleon;

I would like to ask you to stop the name calling and the accusations, put your animosity aside for the moment, and concentrate on content of the arguments.

Both of you make several points that are worthwile, and some points which are less convincing.

If one wants to arrive at the truth in a conversation, it’s worthwile to acknowlegde the strengths in the arguments of the opposite side and recognize the weaknesses one’s own case.

Now, a major point, which Noam Shelef (oh, he’s a Jew, so he must be one of those horrid *Zionists* right?) draws attention to, is that the way the people in the survey got to answer that they wouldn’t like Arabs to have the right to vote if Israel were to annex the West-bank, is by canceling out the possibility of a two state solution in the question.

So it’s like you ask an Israeli Jew what should be done about the matter the West-bank and the Gaza strip.

- “Well, I guess it’s only fair if they had their own state.”

- But what if that wasn’t possible. Suppose Israel annexed the Gaza strip and the West-bank

- “.. But that would be a terrible idea!”

- Yeah, okay, but bear with me here. Just suppose that were to happen…

- “.. Uh, okay…”

- Do you think that, given that circumstance, Arabs should be given an equal vote?

- “Well, uhm.. no I don’t think that would be a very good idea. I read some weeks ago they did a survey among Palestinians and it turned out most of ‘em see the Palestinian state as a first step to recover all of Palestine. That way there would be no autonomy for the Jewish people, and we all have seen in Europe for the last 2000 years how that turned out. So with a majority of Arabs deciding the Knesset vote, I’d be very grim about the fate of the Jewish people living here. So I guess if that if Israel ever were to annex the West-bank, which I’m not in favor to begin with mind you, it would be impossible for us to give them equal right to vote.”

Now, even if a majority of Israeli Jews reacted in such a fashion to such a hypothetical: is it really fair to say (like Gideon Levy does) that the majority is in favor of an Apartheid state?

On the other hand, and here Shelef agrees with Chameleon: the fact that a full one third of Jewish Israeli’s wants to strip the Arab Israeli’s of their voting rights, even though these are legal citizens, is a real reason for concern.

And reading reports from all corners and avenues about Arab life in Israel and the annexing of parts of the West bank and life there, one can hardly fail to notice that Israel is in fact turning more and more into an Apartheid state. There’s simply no denying this.