There is nothing more flexible, and more useful, than public opinion polls.

More than showing the public’s views, they reveal the mindset of those who commissioned the poll, and those who market it.

For example, Finance Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt this week to convince the government to call off the disengagement.

Netanyahu: Poll shows most Americans oppose pullout (Photo: AP)

He told ministers that despite a widely held misconception, American public opinion objects to the plan.

“I have a survey undertaken in the United States,” he said. “Most Americans oppose disengagement.”

He forgot to tell them who drafted the survey question, how, and why. The ministers, for their part, did not ask.

‘A bad deal for Israel’

The group behind the poll was the Zionist Organization of America. In recent years, the organization has expressed radical right-wing positions.

Its leader, Morton Klein, is a vocal opponent of diplomatic initiatives involving the Israeli and American governments. Among other things, he has done all in his (not too great) power to sabotage the disengagement.

If I correctly understand the announcement published by the organization on its website, this was the survey question: “Do you object to Israel×’€™s unilateral withdrawal from a section of Gaza and Northern Samaria and the forcing of 10,000 Israeli Jews from their homes and businesses?”

Overall, 63 percent of respondents said they oppose, while 16 percent said the support.

Klein then attached a lengthy, excited response to the findings:

“This national poll exposes the myth that Americans support the Gaza/Northern Samaria Withdrawal/Expulsion Plan,” he ruled. ” Americans realize that it×’€™s a bad deal for Israel to make these major concessions without getting anything in return. They also understand that this rewards the Hamas and Fatah suicide bombing terrorists whose counterparts are killing Americans every day in Iraq.” And so on.

At the same time, another Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League, undertook its own survey.

The group’s director, Abe Foxman, who visited Israel this week, provided me with the findings, 52 densely printed pages.

The question asked by his organization went something like this:

Israel recently decided to unilaterally evacuate its communities in the Gaza Strip without reaching a formal peace agreement with the Palestinians. Which of the following statements are closer to your views:

1. Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza is capitulation to violence and terror. Israel is forced to leave because it couldn’t curb terror.

2. Israel’s decision to withdraw from Gaza is a bold step to advance the peace process.

0verall, 71 percent supported the disengagement; 12 percent opposed it.

Americans don’t care

Someone is cheating here, the suspicious reader would say. How could it be that two surveys undertaken at the same time produced the opposite results?

But I say, everything depends on the way the question is drafted, particularly wit regard to an issue that interests Americans about as much as last year’s snow.

“Americans understand,” ZOA’s Klein says time and again.

Not only do Americans fail to understand, I say, they don’t even care. And they shouldn’t care.

The disengagement is a decision placed before us. Just us and our fate, no mother or father to oversee us. Certainly not a father of the ilk of Morton Klein, a name that even Netanyahu prefers to forget.

This column ran on July 11th, 2005

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