The Israel Factor: Israelis want Hillary

I don't exactly know why Israelis want Hillary Clinton to be the next President of the US, but they do. One of our Israel Factor panel of experts remarked that Clinton is “best only among existing options. I don’t necessarily think she is the best possible president for Israel”. Another one warned that we have to “wait and see” what she does if elected President. A third one reminded me that Clinton is not a Netanyahu enthusiast. If she is elected, there could be trouble.

Moreover, there is still plenty of time for Israelis to A. learn more about the less-known candidates, and B. see what Clinton says about matters of importance to them. For example: what she says about an agreement with Iran if and when such an agreement is reached. A former senior official told me last week that “Clinton is the only hope” Israel has as it searches for someone that can still make a difference with the agreement.

And yet, our new Israel Factor survey leaves no room for mistake: our experts would pick Clinton (her ranking is 7.66 out of 10 – the highest of all candidates).

Surely, our experts are not representative of the Israeli public. We've seen in the past – and we can see it again in this spring 2015 Israel Factor survey – that our panel does not always agree with the Israeli public. When we offered our panel the statement “Obama is the worst ever President for Israel”, only one panelist agreed with it, and all the others disagreed. If you are readers of Rosner's Domain, you know that the Israeli public does tend to attribute to Obama the “worst ever” tag. In a survey that we published a week or so ago, 63% of Jewish Israelis called Obama the “worst” for Israel in the last forty years (since Carter – and including Carter).

So the panel is the panel, and the public is the public. They are different. As the survey we published revealed, today only one in ten Jewish Israeli respondents (9%) would call the US administration “pro Israeli”. 60% of respondents call the Obama administration “pro Palestinian”. Our panel would disagree. The panel believes that there is “a crisis in US-Israel relations”, but the experts put a fair share of the blame for this crisis on PM Netanyahu's shoulders. All of our experts except for one agreed with the statement “Netanyahu has damaged US-Israel relations like no other PM before him”. In explaining their misgivings, for example, in our question about Iran, they say that “Netanyahu failed in working closely with the administration to bring a better deal. He alienated the administration” and “his actions are terrible for Israel, [he] makes Israel seem paranoid, ungrateful, and war-mongering”.

So the panel does not give Netanyahu high marks for his handling of the relations, but it’s also not quite satisfied with Obama. No – the panel doesn't think Obama is the “worst ever” President for Israel, but it is critical of the administration’s actions. When it comes to Iran, most of the panel agrees that “the US has not shown full determination to fully remove the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons”, as one panelist put it. The panel is also suspicious of Obama's response to the outcome of Israel's elections. “Obama is now undermining the very fabric of the Israeli-American partnership on the matter of values, distancing himself from Israeli Democratic practices”, one panelist wrote. Another one asserted that “[Obama's] swipes were not only at Bibi but at two foundations of the relationship – Israel’s democratic character… and its role as a strategic asset”.

All this does not translate itself into suspicion of Hillary Clinton. True – four of our panelists disagree with the statement “Hillary Clinton would be the best president for Israel in 2016”. Namely, they think that someone else is a better fit for such description. But when we look at the overall marks that our panelists gave Clinton, she is, on average, above all other candidates, with Vice President Biden as second (7.12), and the two top Republican candidates (in this survey) only third: Jeb Bush and Lyndsey Graham with a 7 (Martin O'Malley's score is also 7).

Is this another testimony to the fact that our panel is to the left of the Israeli public? In this case, not exactly. A week ago, when I wrote about Menachem Lazar's survey, I promised to share more numbers from it in the near future – and this is a good opportunity to use one of them. In the survey (Jewish Israelis), we asked the public “which of the following candidates would you like to see as the next President of the United States” – and provided the respondents with just two options. Hillary Clinton – because the public knows her. And Jeb Bush – because the public has an idea of who he is. We thought that there is no point in letting Israelis choose from a list of names most of which they've never heard before (be it Scott Brown, or Jim Webb).

So what does Israel’s Jewish public want? In the case of the next US elections, it wants exactly what the experts want: Clinton. She got 42% of support in our poll, Bush is at 37% (21% had “no opinion”).

A reminder: in this survey we also asked Israelis to pick the “best for Israel” US President, and Bill Clinton came ahead of George W. Bush. So Israelis seem to be consistent: they prefer the Clinton family to the Bush family.

Some interesting data about this choice:

As you can expect, the same Israelis that picked Bill Clinton as “best ever” over Bush prefer Hillary Clinton to Jeb Bush: secular, centrist and leftist Israelis. Bush gets the religious vote (50% to 25%) and the rightwing vote (46% to 30%).

Young Israelis don't have clear preference: 41% for Clinton, 38% for Bush. This is interesting because a lot more of them picked George Bush over Bill Clinton as “best ever” President (39% for Bush, 28% for Clinton).  

In Israel, much like in the US, there is a significant gender gap between Clinton and Bush. Israeli women want Clinton (47% to 27%), while men pick Bush (46% to 38%).