About half of Israeli Jews want to expel Arabs

Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, according to a survey on the political views of Jewish religious and secular communities.

The poll released on Tuesday by the Wash-ington-based Pew Research Center, a non-partisan thi-nk-tank, also found that many Israelis — Jews and Arabs — appeared to have lost hope for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Forty-eight per cent of Israeli Jews said they agreed with the statement that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, where they make up 19 per cent of the population of 8.4 million.

While 54 to 71 per cent of Jews who defined themselves as ultra-Orthodox, religious or “traditional” supported such a step, only about 36 per cent of the secular community did.

President Reuven Rivlin called the findings a “wake-up call for Israeli society”.

The survey also addressed the role of religion in a modern-day democracy founded as a Jewish state, exposing wide gaps between Orthodox and non-religious Jewish respondents.

According to the poll, 89 per cent of Israel’s secular Jews want democratic principles to outweigh Jewish ritual law when the two clash. An identical percentage of ultra-Orthodox Jews take the opposite view.

In addition, about 8 in 10 Arabs complained of heavy discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, the largest religious minority, while 79 per cent of Jews questioned said Jewish citizens deserved preferential treatment.