Israel and Palestine together

Israel and Palestine together are no bigger than greater Los Angeles nearly half of Israeli Jews say they will not live in the same building as an Arab. 96% of Israeli Jews wanted a “democratic” state and 85% wanted it “Jewish”. Yet where democratic freedom and Jewish law clashed, only 54% said they would protect democratic freedoms. By 2015, a Pew study found that 48% of all Israeli Jews agree with the statement: “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel”. Some 42% of Israelis, the so-called centre, say, not without humility, that all they want is for Israel to have a “Jewish majority”.  Israel’s strongly Orthodox Jews – both National Religious and Haredi – have increased from about 10% to at least a third of the Jewish population. Arnon Soffer argues that Israel will be a majority Orthodox state by 2030. Thirty years ago, about 70% of Israeli students attended the secular stream. Today, just 39% do. assassin, Yigal Amir, pardoned.Jerusalem is ground zero of an emerging Orthodox alliance: more than 45% of schoolchildren in Greater Jerusalem are now Haredi, a number often linked to the estimated 200,000 mainly secular Jews who have left the city for the coastal plain over the past generation. In Jerusalem, about 30% of schoolchildren are Arab, while about 13% are National Religious. That leaves about 12% in secular schools, which Haredi activists may harass and take over when their neighbourhoods outgrow their own. Thirty-four percent of Israelis say that Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture. About a third of Israeli Jews would have Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, pardoned.More than 70% of Israeli Arabs say they would prefer to live in Israel than a Palestinian state. The vast majority of Israeli Arabs are now third-generation Israelis. Many have assimilated. Their resentment is toward a pervasive legal structure that discriminates in favour of Jews. The Greater Israel confederation advocated by Israeli Arabs may well be the only way to make two states work.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/20/the-fight-to-define-the-very-essence-of-israel