The Green Line and the Security Fence:

2
Under the supervision of the first author, a group of students in 2005 conducted a poll of
a group of 1,215 Israeli citizens to see if these issues could be clarified on the individual level,
avoiding the ecological inferences. The poll showed that the DGL variable appears to have the
most Wald-significant coefficient in the binary logistic analysis, several times greater than its
geographical analog. It is interesting that it has slightly decayed in magnitude with time, from
early (1996) to middle (1999) to more recent (2001) elections. We associate this decline with a
short period of peace from 1996 to 1999 and, after a new break of violence in 2000, an increased
feeling of security among the Israeli population since building the Security Fence came on the
agenda in 2001.
Introduction
In the introduction to his book, “Israel: Pluralism and Conflict,” Sammy Smooha, a
founding father of Israeli political science, wrote:
“The 4.6 million residents within ceasefire boundaries of Israel at the end of 1975 are
internally separated along five lines resulting in the following divisions: Palestinians –
Jews, Israeli Arabs – Jews, Druze – Christian – Moslem Israeli Arabs, religious –
nonreligious Jews, Oriental – Ashkenazi Jews…. Though there is a large and
expanding literature on Israel, with one or two minor exceptions none of the works has
focused on its multifaceted pluralistic structure. Furthermore, the five pluralistic
divisions are not given equal attention by Israeli sociologists. Palestinian-Jewish
relations, notwithstanding the headlines they capture, are rarely studied because of
their newness, sensitivity and perhaps inaccessibility.” (Smooha 1978, 2-3).
In this paper, we attack precisely the “inaccessible” issue: Israeli-Palestinian relations.
This issue left its distinct mark on the results of all Israeli elections. While it was known
to exist, until now it has eluded quantitative description.
True, the territories issue and performance of the Israeli leaders in the area of state
security, as seen by voters, were discussed constantly in the literature, and a steady