Author: The LSESU Near Eastern Studies Society (NESS) Research Team

The LSESU Near Eastern Studies Society (NESS) Research team asked 1.6 % of the LSE student population to complete a 29 questions survey mixing opinion and knowledge questions on the Arab-Israeli conflicts. We are now able to publish selected results and our analysis of them.

Methodological questions

As students in social science we are aware of the numerous biases a survey like the present one may be subject to. We tried as far as we could to avoid them, but we acknowledge the necessary partially unsuccessful nature of this task. As part of our attempts to make the study as transparent as possible, we made sure to avoid definition discrepancies between respondents. Indeed, when people don’t have same definitions of the terms of the questions, they might end up responding to entirely different question, biasing the interpretation of the results. We tried to reduce this possibility by required that the respondents clarify their definitions before answering sensitive questions. For instance, we asked how subjects defined the word “apartheid” before asking the question about Israel being an apartheid state or not.

In the same spirit, we took care to avoid the so-called “framing effects” in our question formulations. In order not to reify oppositions and confine the respondents in binary alternatives (e.g. pro-Israel/pro-Palestine), we systematically allowed them to opt for a “It’s more complex than that” option when appropriate, and proposed nuances (“rather pro-Palestinian”, “rather “pro-Israeli”). We also tried not to impose questions and force people to give on opinion on problems they had never thought of by often providing an “I don’t care” option.

Overall, many have reproached us the length of the survey (29 questions, some requiring to enter text), but this is due to our concern to deactivate common biases and to make sure that what we were measuring what we wanted to measure.
These rather straightforward but necessary clarifications being made, we can now turn to the actual results of the survey.

The Israeli Apartheid Week

LSE students seem to be mixed feeling about the Israeli Apartheid Week organized on campus every year. 51.1% of students declare themselves in favor of it while 48.9% claim to be against it. This result is to be put in perspective though. Surprisingly, a significant number of students skipped this question, but left abundant comments evidencing more nuanced views. Many recognize and stress the importance of the “basic fundamental right” to protest while questioning the way it is dealt with during this particular event. Some show concern about the “counter-productive” effect of this type of action and see it as overly confrontational. Others express the view that some students may feel targeted and ill at ease during this week. Overall, there seem to be a certain degree of approbation for the existence of the event but strong reservations on its organization and general “tone”.

Perception of the media coverage: an illustration of the “Hostile media effect” 

Most respondents consider the media coverage of the conflict to be biased (81.6 %). However they disagree on the side towards which they believe the media lean. Pro-Palestinian supporters tend to see the coverage as biased in favor of Israel (89%), while pro-Israeli respondent think it is the opposite (82%).

These facts powerfully illustrate what the psychologists Vallone, Ross and Lepper have called the “hostile media effect”, which describes the situation when partisans of opposite views perceive identical news coverage of a controversial issue as biased against their own side.

An over-estimated death toll

We asked the students how many casualties there were since 1948 (creation of the state of Israel and first Israeli-Arab war) on both sides (question 13). A vast majority of respondents greatly over-estimated the conflict’s death toll, 67% of them responding 258,500 or 1,456,500 or 4,578,500, whereas the actual figure is 21,500 casualties.  Only 33% of respondents gave the right answer, and the most given wrong answer was 1,456,500. Most students thus thought that the Israeli-Arab conflicts death toll was 10 to 200 times higher than in really is.

The question of the explanation of this distortion between the perception and the reality lies beyond the scope of this study but one can link it to an observation made above. The conflict we are dealing with is a highly passionate one. The passion it unleashed, the sense of revolt people seem to feel and the symbolic importance attached to it apparently lead them to make it a bloodier conflict than it is. The question remains though. Why? Is it due to an over-exposure in the media? Or is it the other way round, i.e. the over-exposure is the result of the passion it triggers?  Should one look for a deeper explanation for the particular place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict holds on the international stage? There is definitely a need for further research here.

The more ignorant the more extreme

Let us now turn to what is probably the main finding of our survey. It seems that we evidenced an inverted correlation between the knowledge level of the respondents and the extremeness of their opinions. In other words, the less one knows about the conflict, the more extreme his/her views are.

Of course, we had to opt for certain criteria to determine the level of extremeness of each statement. We are aware that this choice has by definition an arbitrary dimension, as there exists no absolute scale to rank the radicalism of opinions, which are by essence a matter of perspective and ideological framings. However, considering that extreme and moderate statements are relative to one another;  that extremeness is only what is constructed as extreme at a given moment by a majority of people and/or by authorities regarded as legitimate in the subject matter; and that it by no mean implies that being extreme or moderate has anything to do with the political or moral value of the claim (a mainstream view can be wrong and a radical one can be right and just)  we decided to proceeded along the following two lines. When it was possible, we scaled opinions in relative terms as opposed to absolute ones. We indeed considered fair to assume that claiming to be “fully pro-Israel” is somehow more extreme than to assert that it is “more complex than that”. For the questions that were non-adapted to this treatment, the degree of extremeness has been determined according to the extent to which a given stance differs from “mainstream” ones, the term “mainstream” being defined as the stance taken by a majority of states, recognized international institution and international actors. For instance, since the principle of a Palestinian state is in broad international agreement (most countries and major institutions being in favor of it), respondents who deny this legitimacy would be considered more extreme than those recognizing it. Similarly, the view that Israel is an apartheid state being rather marginal on the diplomatic official stage and in international institutions (again, this has no implication for the legitimacy of the claim itself), respondent holding this view will be considered as evidencing an element of extremeness.

We contrasted people’s answers to the knowledge questions and to the opinion questions, trying to identify a relation between both and we concluded that people doing well at the knowledge questions tended to give more balanced and moderate views than those giving wrong  answers.

We then calculated that the average factor linking ignorance to extremeness and knowledge to moderation (conflated) was of 2.3. Which means that, in average a person with lacking knowledge will have more than twice as much chance to hold extreme opinion than a person with good knowledge.

For instance, people having erroneous definition of Zionism (who define it as an “extreme religious belief”; “hyper-nationalistic ideology”; “The religion of Judaism”; or else “pigs”; as opposed to a late 19^th century nationalist ideology) tend to believe more that Israel is an apartheid state (1.2 times more often), claim to be “fully” pro-Palestinian (2.5 times), be five times more supportive of Hamas etc. Likewise, people calling themselves “fully pro-Israeli” or “fully pro-Palestinian” have 60% more chance to give wrong answers on knowledge question. They would, for example, be more likely to ignore the existence of Israeli Arabs or be unaware of the differences between Hamas and Fatah (the latter ruling in the west bank after being expelled from the Gaza strip by the former in the aftermath of the 2006 legislative election).

The above remarks are only selected highlights drawn from the survey responses. A more complete analysis will be presented and discusses the framework of a coming workshop organized by LSESU NESS.