The statistic […] is rarely described in its context as Newport’s back-of-the-envelope estimate, based on only 128 Jewish-by-religion respondents over five years. Instead, it is regularly repeated as a truism, cited as evidence that American Jews who are more ambivalent about Israel are an insignificantly small minority in the community.

Soon after Newport published his piece, Forward Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon admonished non-Jewish progressive leaders not to use the supposed 5% of “[a]nti-Zionist Jews” as cover for movements that are unwelcoming to the 95% of Jews who have favorable views toward Israel. Tablet senior writer Yair Rosenberg encouraged people to “get out of [their] Twitter bubbles.”

The Newport calculation is just one of several statistics that Jewish commentators frequently cite as evidence for pro-Israel consensus in the Jewish community. Yet as this case shows, many journalists, pundits, and even academics often misunderstand polling methodologies, resulting in serious miscommunication of these results to the public. In Newport’s figure, the size and composition of the sample is suspect.

But even polls that specifically sample American Jews, rather than Americans generally, can have shortcomings due to the wording of their questions. Most surveys that ask American Jews about Israel/Palestine implicitly assume that a respondent’s relationship to Israel is generally positive and relatively uncomplicated, while also operating within the rapidly fading framework of a conventional two-state solution.

At the same time, questions usually do not directly measure other values that American Jews might hold, such as concern for democracy or Palestinian human rights. Limitations and biases of existing polling—combined with miscommunication of results in the press—make it easy for Jewish leaders to dismiss those who dissent from the establishment consensus on Israel. In the process, the public is deprived of a more accurate snapshot of trends in American Jewish perspectives on the Jewish state.

[…]

The […] wording of the question could skew results, especially since the meaning of the term “pro-Israel” has long been subject to debate. Someone who is critical of Israeli policies but ambivalent about the label “pro-Israel” might choose “Generally pro-Israel but also critical of some of the current Israeli government’s policies,” since it might be the option that most closely reflects their overall opinion. But they will still be lumped into results that count how many American Jews are “pro-Israel.”

“Push-polling is when you design the questions in such a way in order to convey to your respondent that there is a right answer and you must select it […] A question like this isn’t quite [push-polling], but it’s adjacent to it,” Boxer said of the question. He believes that there was a measure of “social desirability bias” affecting the answers, a term which describes the tendency of respondents to adhere to socially accepted opinions when answering questions. “[I]n the Jewish community, it is just expected of us that we are going to be more pro-Israel. Even more pro-Israel than most of us already are,” he said.

Boxer also pointed to the “unbalanced” nature of the answers: “You can be pro-Israel in this way, and you can be pro-Israel in that way, and you can be pro-Israel in the other way. But there’s only really one aspect to being not pro-Israel,” he said. “It’s nuanced a little bit on the pro-Israel side. Not enough, really, but there’s some effort there. There’s no effort on the other side.”

Zionism is the belief that Jewish people should have good things.

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