More Israelis would rather see Hillary Clinton as U.S. president than Donald Trump, but an even larger majority believes Clinton will put greater pressure on Israel to negotiate peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) than Trump, a new poll released Sunday found.
The poll was taken by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) and Tel Aviv University as part of their ongoing Peace Index and reported on by Haaretz.
43 percent of the Israeli public said they would prefer a Democratic Clinton presidency versus 26.5 percent who said they favor a Republican Trump presidency.
The survey results show a sharp reversal in party preference when compared with the previous presidential election. In October 2012, noted Haaretz, the IDI conducted a similar survey and found 57 percent of Israelis preferring the GOP candidate Mitt Romney over incumbent President Barack Obama’s 22 percent.
The majority for Clinton comes despite the belief among Jewish Israelis surveyed by IDI, 63 percent said that the Democratic nominee would, as president, exert more pressure than Trump when it came to getting Israel back to negotiations with the PA.
Only 8 percent said they believed Trump would be more forceful than Clinton when it came to the peace process.
Among Arab respondents, only 30 percent said they believed that Clinton would push Israel to the peace table more forcefully than Trump. A larger percentage of Arabs surveyed - 34 percent - said that they didn’t believe either presidential candidate would exert pressure on Israel.
The IDI survey was conducted between October 5 and October 9, before the most recent presidential debate and before the release of a video of Trump from 2005, in which he made lewd remarks about women.
Incidentally, the results of the poll were released after WikiLeaks uncovered an email from the Clinton campaign which shows that the Democratic candidate believes a peace process “for show” is better than no peace process at all.
The email was sent on March 23, 2016 by Clinton's senior foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan to both Clinton and John Podesta, chairman of her presidential campaign.
The email included a link to a New York Times article discussing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's apology for his Election Day statement that “Arab voters are coming in droves to the ballot boxes."
Next to the link to the article, Sullivan wrote Clinton and Podesta, "Unsurprisingly, Pragmatic Bibi makes an appearance."
Seven minutes later Clinton responded positively to Netanyahu's comments and wrote that Netanyahu's apology was "an opening that should be exploited," while tying it to the promoting of the peace process between Israel and the PA.
"A Potemkin process is better than nothing," she wrote.
The IDI survey found that most Israelis appear to believe a Trump White House is a highly unlikely prospect.
According to the survey, 55 percent of the Israeli Jewish public anticipate that Clinton will win the November 8 elections, with less than half that number - 25 percent - believing that Trump will triumph. Arab participants in the survey felt similarly - with 57 percent predicting a Clinton win.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Sukkot in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)