Who Are Israel’s Friends?

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
10 October '10

On Friday, I looked at the results of a new poll surveying voters’ opinions on Israel and, more generally, the Middle East. While Americans remain overwhelmingly pro-Israel and are troubled by Obama’s approach to the Middle East, there are significant differences between sub-groups of Americans. In this post, I’ll focus on the cross-tabs that highlight the differences in attitudes toward Israel among religious groups and those self-described atheists. The full cross-tabs can be found here.

I’ll begin with a general observation: almost all the support for Israel statistically comes from non-Jews. This is simply a mathematical reality. The poll sampled 1,000 voters, only 1.6 percent of whom were Jewish (slightly below the commonly used 2 percent figure). Fifty-eight percent were Protestant, and 25 percent were Catholic. That means the overwhelming number of those who support Israel, as is the case in the general population, are non-Jews.

However, this doesn’t mean religion is irrelevant. Take the question as to whether voters favor Israel using military force against Iran if sanctions don’t derail its nuclear program. Overall, 58 percent would approve. That number is 72 percent for Jews but nearly as high for born again Christians (67 percent). Among atheists? It drops to 40 percent. This pattern repeats itself throughout the poll.

On the question of how concerned we should be about Israel’s security, 100 percent of Jews said “very” or “somewhat.” The lowest/worst response was 88 percent (still high) from atheists, and the second highest/best response again came from born again Christians, with 94 percent.

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