Israel is a more-or-less democracy in a region where that is quite scarce. For a long time, most of the Arab league was aligned with the Soviet Union, and Israel was the only and primary counterbalance.

That kind of inertia takes a long time to unwind, even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, and several of those Arab League members have made permanent peace with Israel.

In conclusion, I don’t think Israel “has anything” on the United States. I think the plight of a few million stateless Palestinians is not enough to override the various realpolitik concerns that the United States has in the region.

And really people are not making phone calls nearly as much as they used to. The pollsters need to find a reasonably unbiased method to sample people on other communication methods.