The Green Line and the Security Fence:

12
defense of the Israeli borders, and residents in the vicinity do not feel endangered by their
proximity. Location by Sea also assumes a “class” factor, since port cities in the past
were the bulwark of the working class. However, it is not a decisive factor, and, as we
shall see, two similar voters in Haifa and Ashdod have quite different priorities.
Because Israeli Arabs were expected to vote differently than the Jews, and because the
1995-1996 suicide explosions created psychological (personal security) problems within
the Jewish population alone, we decided not to introduce complicated, difficult to
interpret “mixed variables” but to restrict our analysis to the electoral areas with
predominantly (more than 90%) Jewish voters. 19 This cost us about 200 points in the data
set (about 9%). Another, more technical, problem was to exclude the “outliers” (cities too
far away from the GL, like Eilat or the Golan Heights), and we restricted our analysis to
cities within 60 km of the GL. This cost us another 170 points of data (about 7%).
Both restrictions – 90% and 60km – seem arbitrary, but allowed us to focus on the major
problem more closely. The first parameter (90% Jewish voters) is reasonable in itself
since we cannot completely reject mixed communities with a mixed, but predominantly
Jewish, population, while the second (60km) includes the major Israeli cities, Haifa in
particular. Changing the latter parameter from the 60 km to 100 km range shows a slight
decline of the P-factor and its significance.
2. Difficulties