TRADITION AND MODERNITY: JEWISH RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN ISRAEL AND ATTITUDES TO THE PALESTINIANS
TRADITION AND MODERNITY: JEWISH RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN ISRAEL AND ATTITUDES TO THE PALESTINIANS

Summary/Abstract: The 2010 Index of Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel, among Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens, found that: 40% of Israeli Arabs believed the Holocaust never took place; 30% of Israel’s Arab citizens rejected the existence of the State of Israel in any form; while 66% rejected Israel as a Zionist State. On the Jewish side, 16.5% of the Israeli Jews were against Arabs living inside Israel and 32.6% were against Arabs voting in Israeli elections. In an Israeli government report from 2010, more than 20 percent of the Jewish population in Israel identified themselves as religious, almost all of them as Orthodox Jews. In another poll, conducted in 2011 by Minah Zemach, these same religious Jewswere to a great extent right-wing politically and had far more negative attitudes toward Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims than the non-religious Jewish public. No less than 60% of religious Jews in Israel were in favor of limiting the civil rights of the Arab citizens of Israel, including denying them the right to vote. It is this group of religious Israeli Jews that is my subject here.

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