c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-American-Jewish support for the Middle East peace process has jumped significantly in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, according to an American Jewish Committee survey released today (Feb. 21).

Seventy-nine percent of those Jews polled in the January survey said they supported the peace process, an 11 percentage point increase from September 1995, the last time a similar poll was conducted by the American Jewish Committee.

David Singer, American Jewish Committee research director, attributed the sharp increase to”the sympathy factor.””The dramatic increase in support has far less to do with the actual unfolding of the peace process on the ground than with a sense of sympathy for Rabin and the policies he championed,”Singer said.

The new survey also showed that Orthodox Jews continue to differ with their more liberal co-religionists, with a majority of them still opposing the Israeli government’s handling of its ongoing negotiations with the Palestinians, Syrians and other Arabs.

But even among the Orthodox-who comprise less than 10 percent of the overall American-Jewish population of about 5.8 million-support for the process has increased.

In the January poll, 56 percent of the Orthodox Jews surveyed said they opposed the process, compared to 64 percent who were in opposition last September.

Just 8 percent of Reform Jews, 12 percent of Conservative Jews and 9 percent of those who labeled themselves”just Jewish”opposed the peace process in the latest survey.

The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.

Orthodox Jews generally have a closer connection to Israel than other Jews. For Orthodox Jews the land of Israel has great religious significance, which is not necessarily the case for less traditional Jews.

The new level of support for the peace process is almost as high as it was in the days immediately after the dramatic White House handshake between Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in September 1993. An American Jewish Committee survey at that time showed the level of support at 84 percent.

After that, American Jewish support for the peace process slowly declined, largely because of continued Palestinian attacks on Israeli Jews. By September 1995, support had dropped to 68 percent. That history of decline makes the latest findings even more significant, Singer said.”This is a clear shift in sentiment,”but one clearly linked to sympathy for Rabin and his policies, he said.”It’s a reversal of two years in which there was a steady decline in support.” However, one staunch critic of Israel’s handling of the peace process dismissed the new survey as”essentially meaningless.””What else would you expect other than a big sympathy vote when you poll voters just two months after an event as traumatic as the Rabin assassination?”said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.

Klein pointed to a survey question on attitudes toward the Palestine Liberation Organization’s efforts to control violence against Israeli Jews as evidence of the survey’s”mushiness.” Eighty-two percent of the respondents said the PLO was not doing enough to control”terrorist activity against Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian extremist groups.”Nine percent said the PLO was doing enough and another 9 percent said they were”not sure.” Klein said this”continued non-trust in the PLO”shows that American Jews are”saying more about their desire for peace than their real level of confidence in the peace process.” The survey results mirror similar findings in Israel, where support for the peace process has also increased sharply since Rabin’s death. Rabin’s successor, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, now has a 20 percent lead in the polls over opposition party head Benjamin Netanyahu, prompting Peres to call for early national elections in May in an attempt to obtain a mandate for going ahead with the peace process.

The American Jewish Committee is a 90-year-old Jewish civil rights and pro-Israel organization headquartered in New York. The group polled a total of 1,013 individuals”demographically representative of the United States adult Jewish population in terms of age, household income, gender and geographic region”for its latest survey.

MJP END RIFKIN