showed that a majority of the West Bank Palestinians would accept
a Palestinian state in the occupied territories alongside Israel. In
contrast, the survey, in which 2,000 people were polled, indicated
that the Israeli Jews were deeply divided, and that no solution
mustered a clear majority among them.
31
In 1988, a new radical right-wing party, Moledet, was launched,
for which the transfer of Palestinians was central. Moledet not only
won seats in the Knesset elections of 1988 and 1992 but was also
part of the coalition that governed Israel between 1990 and 1992,
thus (unlike Kach) gaining legitimacy as a respectable parliamentary
party. Also in 1988, a ‘highly reputable’ poll, conducted by the Israeli
Institute of Applied Research and the Hebrew University Commu-
nication Institute, found that 50 per cent of Israeli Jews thought that
the population of the West Bank should be ‘caused to leave’ in order
to preserve Israel’s Jewish character. The survey also revealed that a
third of those saying they supported the ‘transfer’ solution described
themselves as Labour Party voters. Commenting on these findings,
the moderate Labour MK Abba Eban said that the results ‘represent
a disturbing movement in Israeli public perception away from both
reality and morality’.
32
This was another indication as to how widely
the transfer concept was held in Israel and the fact that it was not
merely confined to supporters of the right and the radical right
(Moledet, Tehiya, Tzomet, etc.). Another survey by the pollster
Hanokh Smith carried in Haaretz on 9 November 1989 suggested that
the proportion of Israeli Jews supporting transfer had risen to 52 per
cent. Eight months later, on 6 June 1990, the daily Ma’ariv revealed
the results of another poll which showed that 59 per cent of Israeli
Jews supported transfer, the highest proportion ever recorded.
33
A
year later a survey carried out by the Institute of Applied Research
found that 43 per cent of those questioned were in favour of
transfer.
34
However, two years later, in March 1993, ten months after
the election of the Labour-Meretz government, a public opinion
survey regarding Israel’s handling of the Palestinian intifada, carried
out by the Israeli political scientists Gad Barzilai and Efraim Inbar,
found that public support for the ‘massive uses of force against the
entire Palestinian population and their expulsion’ did not exceed
30.7 per cent. In socioeconomic terms, respondents in this extreme
hawkish group were generally less educated, non-secular, of lower
income, Sephardi and, more often, male.
35
From the findings of these numerous polls it would be possible to
suggest that from the mid-1980s until the eruption of the intifada in
The Public Opinion Debate 205