Majority of Israelis Support Free Market Economics

This is the best news about the Israeli electorate I have heard in a long time, but it doesn't square with the previous survey known as the election. Every party (e.g. Shinui) and candidate (e.g. Netanyahu) associated with the free market was trounced:

About a third of all Israelis are content with their standard of living. This was revealed as part of the Social Responsibility Index at the Haifa Conference on Social Responsibility at the University of Haifa yesterday. The Index, which was presented by Prof. Arye Rattner and Dr. Meir Yaish of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa, reveals that 38.7% of Jewish Israelis are generally content with their lives. 35% of Jewish Israelis expressed contentment with their employment situation while 28% of the Arab-Israelis did. Over all, 31% of Jewish Israelis and 25% of Arab-Israelis expressed contentment with their standard of living. 16% of both groups expressed satisfaction with their salaries.

The Social Responsibility Index also reveals that 56% of both Jewish and Arab-Israelis believe that the way to get rich in Israel is through deceit and corruption. Only 9% of the Jewish poll respondents believe the government is doing the right things and only 11% believe that the government makes decisions that benefit the general public. Among Arab-Israelis, 8% believe that the government operates properly and 7% believe that the government makes decisions that benefit the general public. Only 5% of Israelis are content with the political system.

These numbers are staggering, and it probably explains the factionalist results of the previous election. When people don't trust the system in general, they tend to vote for narrowly defined interest groups to protect "their own."

The Index reveals that the majority of the Israeli public supports a neo-liberal economic policy. "The Israeli public believes equality means equal opportunity and justifies the existence of inequality which results from a lack of skills or individual drive to get ahead. The public's idea of the social service network that Israel is expected to provide looks more like the American model that provides limited socio-economic support than the Scandinavian model that provides widespread, total socio-economic security," said Prof. Rattner.