Israeli-PLO Agreement Follows Evolving Public Opinion on Both Sides

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Many observers think that the Israeli people are divided half and half. I think that every Israeli is divided. "

—Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, quoted in Washington Post, Sept. 5, 1993

Both Israelis and Palestinians have been ready for a peace agreement for far longer than outsiders imagine, public opinion polls show. Even before the agreement was finalized, 52.8 percent of Palestinians under occupation supported the Israeli-PLO agreement, according to the East Jerusalem newspaper An-Nahar. The poll, published Sept. 1 by the pro-Jordan Arabic newspaper, also showed strongest support among those most directly affected, with 70 percent of Gaza residents and 75 percent of Jericho residents supporting the agreement. Of other West Bank residents, 45 percent supported the agreement.

Among Israelis, a Gallup poll commissioned by the opposition Likud bloc during the last week of August showed 48.6 percent opposed to the agreement and 44.3 percent supporting it. However, more favorable results were recorded by a poll published at the same time in the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Ahronot. It showed 53 percent of Israelis favoring and 45 percent opposing the agreement.

A poll taken during the first week in September showed 57 percent of Israelis in favor of the agreement, 41 percent opposed, and 2 percent with no opinion. A mid-September poll of 523 Israeli Jews by the marketing agency Dahaf for Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest newspaper, showed 61 percent supporting the agreement, 37 percent opposed, and 2 percent expressing no opinion. A mid-September poll by the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research showed 62 percent of Israeli Jews in favor of the Gaza-and Jericho-first approach to Palestinian self-rule, with 38 percent opposed.

This steady increase among Israelis of support for the agreement prompted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to predict on Sept. 19 that eventually it would win the support of 75 percent of Israelis. The recent figures showing steady growth of support for the agreement are consistent with long-term trends toward compromise among Israelis. A study published earlier this year by Israeli political scientist Asher Arian indicated that 60 percent of Israelis were prepared to give up some occupied territories for peace, compared to only 40 percent in 1986.

Acceptance of the PLO also has increased among Israelis. In a 1989 survey only 28 percent of those questioned favored direct talks with the PLO. In a survey conducted by the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv during the first week of September, 46 percent of respondents favored mutual recognition.

Among Jewish settlers in the Israeli occupied territories, however, 70 percent told Yediot Ahronot they would never leave. But only 2 percent said they would take up arms, even against the Israeli army, to keep the land.

Those who support the plan, according to Washington Post Jerusalem correspondent William Claiborne, tend to vote for the Labor party or its leftist ally in the governing coalition, Meretz. Those who oppose the peace agreement come largely from the rightist Likud bloc, the nationalistic Tzomet party, and the religious or ultra-Orthodox parties. In an earlier poll of 500 Gaza Palestinians conducted in late June by the Center for Social Development, An-Nahar reported:

59.2 percent of Gazans said the intifada should be escalated, using all means possible.
66.7 percent said the intifada should be escalated, even as peace negotiations continued.
84.9 percent thought the PLO should have a major role in the Washington peace talks, while only 14.2 percent thought the PLO should be kept in a secondary role.
57 percent wanted to see a type of self-government that would lead to confederation with Jordan.
16.1 percent thought the Labor government was better than a Likud government; 12 percent thought a Likud government would be better; and 60.3 percent saw no difference between the two.

Although some Israelis predicted the country's die-hard Jewish supporters in the United States would find it difficult to accept recognition of the PLO and a land-for peace deal after years of attacking U.S. Leaders who supported either, surveys of American Jews indicated otherwise.

At a three-day conference on North American Jewry's relationship to and vision of Israel held at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba last June, Hebrew University sociology professor Steven M. Cohen reported that "Israel can get away with whatever it damn well pleases and still enjoy the support of American Jews. " He based his conclusion on American Jewish Committee surveys which indicated no decline in attachment to Israel by American Jews between 1983 and 1991, despite the hard-line policies pursued by Likud governments throughout that period.

A Conditional Blank Check?

Some, but not all, speakers at the conference, sponsored by the American Jewish Congress and Ben-Gurion University's Center for the Study of North American Jewry, maintained that Israel could lose its blank check from American Jewry with actions contrary to American expectations.

"What is decisive is a commitment to democracy in a fundamental way," according to American Jewish Congress Executive Director Henry Siegman. An antidemocratic government in Israel, he said, "would lead to massive disaffection."

Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna maintained that "the American image of Zion [has been] a projection of America as it ought to be, a Zion that reveals more about American Jewry's ideals than about the realities of Eretz Yisrael." Early American Zionists linked their cause to U.S. ideals of democracy, liberty and social justice, working to create "a model state cast in the image of America," Sarna said.

This helped to "defuse the sensitive issue of dual loyalty" and "worked to strengthen the position of American Jews by permitting them both to bask in the reflected glory of those engaged in building the state and to boast of their own patriotic efforts to spread the American dream outward," Sarna said. The result was disappointment for American Jews when their idealized version of Zion came "face to face with the unpleasant reality."

Other speakers, according to Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent Cynthia Mann, also referred to the "unpleasant reality" of Israeli social and political life. Speakers observed that U.S. Jews are not aware of the absence in Israel of a "cultural tradition of tolerance and pluralism," Mann wrote. "They are thus surprised by the consequent polarization and tension between the secular and the religious as well as among different ethnic groups."

Describing Israeli assessments of the American Jewish community, Allon Gal, Ben-Gurion University associate professor of Jewish history and American civilization, told the conference that U.S. Jews require an "enlightened Israel," and a "democratic and humanistic Israel."

Studying in the U.S. at Brandeis University from 1969 to 1975, Gal, who is founder-director of Ben-Gurion University's Center for the Study of North American Jewry, concluded that Israel can be inspired rather than alienated by the values of North American Jewry and its idealized vision of Israel. "Such an interaction can help Israel be true to itself," he predicted. "I respect the [American Jewish] community and I care about it beyond its money and its political lobbying. . . Their visions and their expectations are meaningful to me."

In a prophetic article written for Israel's 45th anniversary of independence last May and printed in the May 7, 1993 issue of the Detroit Jewish News, the magazine's Israel correspondent, Ina Friedman, wrote: "Last winter the notion of a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was the talk of the town. Now, in the wake of the month-long closure of the occupied territories, the latest buzz word is 'separation' between Israelis and Palestinians.

"Though the thrust of this trend may sound like political faddism," Friedman wrote, ''on a deeper level Israel appears to be coming face to face with an acceptance of its limitations so familiar to people in their 40s." In support of her thesis that Israelis as a nation have progressed from infancy through their teens and young adulthood to a yearning for tranquility and normality, Friedman cites figures gathered by Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling and published in the Hebrew monthly Politilca showing that the relationship to family is the leading component of the contemporary Israeli's self-identity.

U.S. Jews might be surprised and disappointed to learn that only 17.6 percent of Israeli Jews ranked "Israeli" as the leading component of their identity, while 28.3 percent ranked it as of no importance at all.

After family membership and national identity, Israelis ranked their professional and sexual identities, and only then did they list their ethnic, religious and political identities. Further defying the stereotypes, Kimmerling's statistics revealed that an overwhelming 75.3 percent of Israeli Jews ranked their "ethnic identity" (Sephardi "Oriental Jew" or Ashkenazi "European Jew") as of no importance. No other category on Kimmerling's list was so massively rejected.

Next least important was "political identification," meaning, in Friedman's words, that "the Age of Ideology is over in Israel. Politics has earned itself a bad name, and political causes no longer draw crowds on the streets to demonstrate. Admittedly, pockets of political 'messianism' have survived, primarily among the religious settlers in the territories. In fact, the settlers (and particularly their teenaged children) are conspicuous among those opposing the policies of the Rabin government," Friedman wrote.

"But at 45, Israel seems a bit tired, staid, interested in celebrating itself modestly and, above all, with a minimum of wrack and ruin. Some people find that disappointing. Others think it more refreshing. "

These observations, merely academic when they were recorded only four months earlier, suddenly provide assurance that Israelis were more than ready to accept the Yitzhak Rabin-Shimon Peres deal with Yasser Arafat's PLO. Even the Jewish settlers, with the exception of a fringe 2 percent, pledge that they will resist dispossession, but without a civil war of Jew against Jew. Likewise, American Jewish sociologists predict that, in spite of their past heated rhetoric, American Jewish leaders will support anything any democratically elected government of Israel accepts.

With the exception of the Iran-influenced Islamists, Arab leaders, from the oil-rich Gulf emirates to the crowded slums of Egypt and North Africa, have long made it clear that they will welcome any settlement agreed to by Yasser Arafat's PLO, "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people." Whatever misgivings they may have about Arafat's ability eventually to extend Palestinian self-determination to all of the lands seized by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, most are keeping to themselves.

Palestinian opponents of the agreement are largely found in the camps inside and outside the occupied territories for refugees from areas like Jaffa and Haifa that, under any plan, would stay within Israel's Green Line. Even they, however, have vowed that there will be no civil war among Palestinians as they wait to see whether' as its proponents insist, the plan is the first step toward liberation of all Palestinians under occupation or, as they fear, an Israeli trick to preoccupy the Palestinians with the task of governing unruly Gaza while Israel consolidates its hold on the areas it covets in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Barring political trouble making within either Jewish or Palestinian communities, or obvious acts of bad faith between their accepted leaders, the initial waiting may be relatively tranquil while both sides watch to see how Palestinian self-rule develops. Already the problem, like Israel itself, is well past middle age.