Here is a short yet important story in one graph:
Two years ago, the Pew Research Center asked the Jews of America a question: Do you think the current Israeli government is making a sincere effort to bring about a peace settlement with the Palestinians? The Jews had an answer, and not a positive one:
“About four-in-10 American Jews (38 percent) think the current Israeli government is making a sincere effort to bring about a peace settlement with the Palestinians, while 48 percent say this is not the case.”
The survey had more details pertaining to this question: “Jews of no religion” were considerably more skeptical of Israel’s effort than Jews by religion. Orthodox Jews had more confidence in Israel, and 61 percent of them thought the Israeli government is making a sincere effort to bring about peace. Just more than half of Conservative Jews (52 percent) thought likewise, but only 36 percent of Reform Jews had the same view.
Earlier this month, when Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) published the study my colleague Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Herzog and I authored, “Jewish Values and Israel’s Use of Force in Armed Conflict,” you could find the same question. Although our survey was not a scientific poll of the Jewish community (it was a short questionnaire that participants in the Jerusalem think tank’s dialogue were asked to answer), we wanted to test the same question and see how different the answer would be among the participants of JPPI discussions. Generally speaking, this is a group of much more connected Jews — almost all of our discussants visited Israel — and we wanted to see how responses might vary from the answer given by the general Jewish population sampled by Pew.
The result was somewhat surprising. The Pew poll and the JPPI survey provided a very similar result. That is to say: Even among the more connected Jews who take part in the JPPI process, confidence in Israel’s sincerity is eroding.
Enter Steven Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who also asked the same question, in the same words, in the Jewish Journal’s recent survey. The Journal’s poll focused on Iran, but it included other questions as well. And thus, it gives us an opportunity to compare not two but three occasions in which the same question was asked of American Jews. Note that it was asked at different times, and with different governments in power. Note that the change in time and context does not much matter.
Israel has a problem.
It has a problem not because it does not want peace. In fact, I think the perception of American Jews is wrong. But this does not much matter. Israel has a problem because it fails to present a case strong enough to convince other Jews that it wants peace. And as I wrote in the JPPI study, when Israel is not seen as making a sincere effort to have peace, it affects the way Jews think about Israel in other areas as well.
Specifically, in our study we found such an effect when we cross-referenced the responses to this question (of sincerity) with participants’ levels of agreement with two other survey statements: “In general, Israel uses military force only as a last resort,” and “Israel’s military did as much as possible to avoid civilian casualties in last summer’s armed conflict in Gaza.”
The bottom line is as simple as it is troubling. Those who feel that “the current Israeli government is making a sincere effort to bring about a peace settlement with the Palestinians” agree with the other statements far more than those who feel differently. In other words: When Israel cannot convince the Jews that it wants peace, it has a harder time convincing them that it attempts to act morally while at war.
