The New America Foundation released a new poll today, conducted by J Street founding VP Jim Gerstein, that found — surprise! — Israelis are suddenly much better inclined toward President Obama than previous polls have shown. Noah Pollak explains how this happened:
Ben Smith concludes from this that “Obama’s numbers among Israeli Jews are likely even worse than a quite gloomy poll suggests.” Perhaps the most interesting part of the poll was the split between those Israelis who place themselves on the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum (43 percent) and those who place themselves on the left (20 percent). That’s sort of amazing in a country that was founded by socialists and dominated by socialists for the first 50 years of its history. The shift demonstrates how traumatic the collapse of the Oslo process and the outbreak of the Second Intifada were. Everyone convinced themselves there would be peace — the only skeptics were on the right. Now everyone’s on the right. Read Noah’s very thoughtful post here and a thorough write up of the results from Ben Smith here.
