AMERICAN VIEWS OF ISRAEL BY RELIGION 1974-1994

Selections between -5 and +5 to correspond to respondents' views of various countries. These are for Israel by major religious group for the 13 years this question was asked.

Respondents were asked to select a number from 1 to 5 or -1 to -5 corresponding to their views of various countries. Data here are extracted for Israel by major religions. The question was asked 13 times between 1974 and 1994. Survey pool included 3,854 Catholics, 344 Jews, 1,133 "None", 4,666 Protestant fundamentalists, 1,945 Protestant liberals, and 2,890 Protestant moderates. The data show the average response for each group for each year the question was asked. Then the average was taken of all the years for each group. Jews had, by far, the highest average opinion of Israel at just over +4, followed by Protestant fundamentalists at just over +1. "None" had the lowest opinion of Israel at .45--still positive, but just barely. Looking at variance, the steadiest in their opinions of Israel were the Catholics and Protestant moderates. Protestant liberals were all over the place--sometimes leading all other gentile religions, and sometimes trailing all of them. Looking at correlation between each and then averaged by group, all the gentile religions tracked very closely, while Jews tracked almost completely independently. For example, there is a spike among all gentiles in 1991, but an actual drop among Jews, which is interesting, because 1991 was the years Iraq was lobbing SCUD missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa. They all had a very slightly negative slope.