Poll: 77% of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world

Haaretz Last update - 16:53 23/06/2008
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent

A recent opinion poll conducted by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government found that 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world. The survey of 1,721 Israelis, both Arab and Jewish, also showed that 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to "be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities." The Kennedy School said in a statement that the poll produced a number of results it termed surprising, pointing to a higher level of co-existence than might have been anticipated.

The research comes at a period of simmering tensions in some sectors of the Arab-Jewish divide within Israel. The release of the poll coincided with celebrations, accompanied by widespread Israeli Arab boycotts, of the 60th anniversary of the state's declaration of independence. Israeli Arab MKs cited widespread discrimination as the cause of the boycotts. At the same time, MK Limor Livnat (Likud) proposed that the Knesset remove Arabic from its list of the country's official primary languages.

However, Professor Todd Pittinsky, research director of the Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership and lead researcher for the poll, said that the results pointed to a contrary phenomenon. Much media coverage focuses on the divisions between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel, and not enough on the sincere and concerted efforts to coexist peacefully, Pittinsky said in a statement. According to the poll, 68 percent of Jewish citizens support teaching conversational Arabic in Jewish schools to help bring Arab and Jewish citizens together. The data also showded that more than two-thirds of Israeli Jews (69 percdent) said they believed that contributing to co-existence was a personal responsibility.

"Every day, innovative experiments in coexistence are going on," Pittinsky said. "People on the ground in Israel are running community centers that enable cultural exchanges; in bilingual schools?like the Hand in Hand network of schools - young Jewish and Arab children become culturally conversant with each other. These deserve as much attention as rockets and roadblocks. They should be nurtured, studied, funded, and reported in the media. Ultimately the most successful efforts should be launched on a wider scale."

The study, conducted in Hebrew and Arabic with the assistance of University of Haifa researchers, was funded by the Alan B. Slifka foundation, which has sponsored a number of coexistence projects. "This report supports what we have long suspected?unity among Israel?s Jewish and Arab communities is not only attainable, but there is great public support for it," philanthropist Slifka said. "The critical next step is for Israeli policy makers to bring about the structural changes that the Jewish and Arab publics support, to reshape the educational, income, residential, and other divides that undermine national unity."