Israel - Polling the "Center/Centrist"

Jonathan Lis..
Haaretz..
18 December '12..

Two-thirds of centrist voters - defined as Labor Party and Yesh Atid supporters - would not support a party willing to compromise on Jerusalem, according to a poll commissioned by the rightward-leaning Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

And half of Labor Party voters prefer "defensible borders" - defined in Israel to include the Jordan Valley and large settlement blocks - to peace agreements, according to the poll commissioned by the Jerusalem Center, which is headed by the popularizer of the defensible borders concept, former ambassador to the United Nation Dore Gold.

(The polls Friday show a combined 27-28 seats for Labor and Yesh Atid however it is not very clear what defines "Center" or "Centrist", although these titles certainly serves someone's agenda. Interesting responses. Y.)

The poll, conducted during November by Mina Tzemach's Dahaf institute, will be presented next Thursday at the Jerusalem Center's annual meeting. The findings often reveal surprising positions of centrist and rightist voters regarding Israel's foreign and security policies, as about 20 percent of centrist voters hold hawkish position, while some 20 percent of rightist voters tend to support more dovish policies.

Half of the centrist voters said they would not vote for a party willing to evacuate the Jordan Valley. Also, 80 percent of Labor supporters and 62 percent of Yesh Atid voters attach importance to the fact that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, while 60 percent and 71 percent respectively do not believe that retreating to the 1967 borders and the partition of Jerusalem will lead to peace.

Poll Me Once, Poll Me Twice

Noah Pollak
Contentions
07 August 09

Since its founding, J Street has employed polling as a central tactic in its effort to convince people that American Jewish opinion on Israel is ideologically aligned with its own far-Left views. The three-step is simple but shrewd: if Jewish opinion does not support your agenda, 1) create some polls to show that it does; 2) declare yourself the new mainstream; 3) accuse the traditional organizations of being the real extremists.

Much skepticism of J Street’s polls has accompanied their release, and many have pointed out their clever, results-oriented phrasing. But this hasn’t diminished their ability, when people accuse them of advocating an agenda that has little support among American Jews, to point to their own polling and declare themselves the true representatives of Jewish opinion.

J Street’s polls have always been conducted by Jim Gerstein, who runs a far-Leftprogressive political consultancy in Washington. As J Street says on its polling pages, “Survey analysis from Jim Gerstein, Principal at Gerstein | Agne, the firm that commissioned the poll.”

Now J Street is an advocacy organization, not a newspaper or a judge, so it need not police its conflicts of interest with fastidious rigor. But Jim Gerstein is not simply a principal at the firm that conducts polls for J Street. He was J Street’s vice president.

You’d never know this from J Street’s staff page or the voluptuous promotion that accompanies the release of a J Street poll. You wouldn’t know it from all the mentions of Gerstein on J Street’s website, in which he is always portrayed as an independent actor. In order to know that he was J Street’s founding vice president, you’d have to look at J Street’s 990 IRS form.

So J Street not only commissions polls—it writes the questions, conducts them, analyzes the results, and then carries out promotional campaigns with the findings. If you were wondering how it was possible that J Street could repeatedly produce “polling data” that almost perfectly complements the group’s political agenda, now we have one important clue.

.