Israeli leaders must lead the public to peace |
|
By Dahlia Scheindlin, Egypt Daily News 19.6.2011 TEL AVIV: US President Barack Obama’s speech to the US State Department in May should have made Israelis happy. While presenting a new vision of US policy toward the Middle East, his Israeli-Palestinian policy was all about continuity. Obama urged a return to negotiations, just like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He insisted on Israel as a Jewish state, echoing Netanyahu’s demands, and gave no quarter to Palestinian unilateralism. Aside from the implication that Israel should leave the Jordan Valley, Obama’s speech could have come from the Prime Minister’s spokesperson. Yet Israel’s leaders seemed stunned by the explicit mention of the pre-1967 War borders with land swaps. Netanyahu, without addressing the land swaps, called the borders “indefensible” and repeatedly stressed that Israel would not return to those lines. Instant polling in Israel following Netanyahu’s trip to the United States showed that the Israeli people supported Netanyahu’s position, viewed the trip as a victory and gave Obama mixed reviews at best. But snap polls in the immediate wake of events can be misleading.
Were the Israeli people shocked? Do they support negotiations based on 1967 borders with land swaps? Ultimately, are Israelis more willing to make compromises than their current leaders? The answers are most likely: no, yes and yes — but that may not be enough to reach peace.
Israelis were probably less surprised by Obama’s 1967 reference than Netanyahu’s response implies. Surveys show that Israelis have basically accepted the concept of a Palestinian state (which is basically about the territory conquered in 1967) since the Oslo Accords of 1993. Support rose from roughly 20 percent in the late 1980s to nearly 60 percent by 1999, according to the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies.
So do Israelis support 1967-based borders with swaps? A survey in the daily paper Israel Today conducted after Netanyahu’s visit to Washington showed that 60 percent of Israelis opposed “Obama’s call for negotiations based on the 1967 [borders] with agreed land swaps.” But polling over the last decade shows that roughly half the Jewish population or more tends to support the 1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian state.
A Peace Index survey at Tel Aviv University in 2003 showed that 59 percent of Jews supported “1967 [borders] with adjustments”. From 2005 to 2007, surveys by the Truman Institute at Hebrew University found that about half of Israelis supported detailed descriptions of the borders and swaps (without using the term “1967”). In a 2009 survey for the peace organization One Voice, 52 percent of Israelis said 1967 borders with swaps was either “essential, desirable, acceptable or tolerable”. Only 39 percent of Israelis found this “unacceptable”.
Further, when borders are part of a larger comprehensive peace agreement, support rises. In 2010, two different surveys — one by the Geneva Initiative and the other by the polling firm Dahaf — showed 54 percent and 67 percent support, respectively, among all Israelis for similar full peace packages.
|
|
|
|---|
