JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, according to a survey on the political views of Jewish religious and secular communities.

The poll released on Tuesday by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank, also found that many Israelis – Jews and Arabs – appeared to have lost hope for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Forty-eight percent of Israeli Jews said they agreed with the statement that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, where they make up 19 percent of the population of 8.4 million.

While 54 to 71 percent of Jews who defined themselves as ultra-Orthodox, religious or “traditional” supported such a step, only about 36 percent of the secular community did.

President Reuven Rivlin called the findings a “wake-up call for Israeli society”.

The survey also addressed the role of religion in a modern-day democracy founded as a Jewish state, exposing wide gaps between Orthodox and non-religious Jewish respondents.

According to the poll, 89 percent of Israel’s secular Jews want democratic principles to outweigh Jewish ritual law when the two clash. An identical percentage of ultra-Orthodox Jews take the opposite view.

In addition, about 8 in 10 Arabs complained of heavy discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, the largest religious minority, while 79 percent of Jews questioned said Jewish citizens deserved preferential treatment.

“It pains me to see the gap that exists in the public’s consciousness – religious and secular – between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state and as a democratic state,” Rivlin said in a statement after receiving the report. “A further problem is the attitude toward Israel’s Arab citizens.”

In the poll, 9 percent of Jews identified themselves as ultra-Orthodox, 13 percent as religious, 29 percent as ‘traditional’ and 49 percent as secular.

It found devout Jews largely lean to the right politically, while secular Jews mainly see themselves as centrists.

Among the many divides on social and religious issues, the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox and religious Jews supported a long-standing shutdown of most public transportation on the Jewish Sabbath, while 94 percent of secular Jews took the opposite view.

Most secular Jews saw themselves as “Israelis first”, while 91 percent of ultra-Orthodox and 80 percent of religious Jews in general said they were “Jews first”.

About 40 percent of Israeli Jews believe a way can be found for Israel to co-exist with a future Palestine, while a similar percentage believe this is not possible, according to the poll.

Among the Arab population, about half saw such co-existence as possible, compared with 74 percent in 2013.

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014, just before a seven-week war between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.

The researchers conducted 5,601 face-to-face interviews with 3,789 Jews, 871 Muslims, 468 Christians and 439 Druze in Israel from October 2014 to May 2015.

(Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli security forces shot dead three Palestinian assailants in separate incidents in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank on Friday, police and the military said, as a wave of heightened violence persisted into its fifth month.

In Jerusalem, a Palestinian man stabbed two police officers outside the walled Old City before they opened fire and killed him, police said.

A few hours later, in the West Bank, a Palestinian man tried to ram his car into a group of Israeli soldiers who then shot him dead, the military said.

A third Palestinian man was killed by Israeli soldiers in a clash elsewhere in the West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said. An Israeli military spokeswoman said he was armed with an automatic weapon and fired on the troops during a riot.

Since October, stabbings, shootings and car rammings by Palestinians have killed 28 Israelis and a U.S. citizen. Israeli security forces have killed at least 167 Palestinians, 110 of whom Israel says were assailants, while most others were shot dead during violent anti-Israeli protests.

The bloodshed has raised concern of wider escalation a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided.

Briefing the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. envoy on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, said he was concerned the bloodshed may be entering “a new troubling phase”.

Mladenov called on both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to provide “a political horizon to their people” and reject incitement by what he called radicals in their own camps.

Tensions have been stoked by various factors including a dispute over Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound and the failure of several rounds of peace talks to secure the Palestinians an independent state in Israeli-occupied territory.

Palestinian leaders have said that with no breakthrough on the horizon, desperate youngsters see no future ahead. Israel says young Palestinians are being incited to violence by their leaders and by Islamist groups calling for Israel’s destruction.

Security officials have also pointed to economic hardship and social media as playing a role in triggering attacks.

Many Palestinian attackers have been teenagers.

On Thursday two Palestinian 14-year-olds stabbed and killed an Israeli, who also had U.S. citizenship, in a supermarket in the West Bank before an armed civilian shot and wounded the teens.

“This horrific incident again underscores the need for all sides to reject violence, and urgently take steps to restore calm, reduce tensions, and bring an immediate end to the violence,” the U.S. State Department said.

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Alison Williams)

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian 17-year-old in the occupied West Bank on Friday, hospital officials said, and the Israeli military said he had been about to throw a petrol bomb.

More than four months of intensified violence in the region have raised concern of wider escalation, a decade after the last Palestinian uprising subsided.

The Israeli military said soldiers spotted the youth holding a lit Molotov Cocktail and about to throw it at vehicles traveling along a main West Bank highway where Israeli cars are often targeted by Palestinians hurling rocks and petrol bombs.

“The force responded to the immediate threat, prevented the attack, and shot one of the assailants,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said. The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed his death and age.

A wave of stabbings, shootings and car-rammings carried out by Palestinians has killed 27 Israelis and a U.S. citizen since October. Israeli forces have killed at least 156 Palestinians, 101 of them assailants, according to authorities. Most of the others died during violent protests.

The bloodshed has been partly fueled by Palestinian frustration over long-stalled peace talks which have failed to deliver them an independent state and anger at perceived Jewish encroachment on a contested Jerusalem shrine.

(Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Maayan Lubell; Editing by Dominic Evans)

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli court jailed two Jewish youths on Thursday, one for life and the other for 21 years, for the murder of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem, a crime that helped trigger the 2014 Gaza war.

The youths – unnamed because of their age – and a man, who organized the murder, were found guilty in November of the abduction, bludgeoning, strangling and burning of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair on July 2, 2014.

All of them had confessed and said the murder was revenge for the killing of three Israeli youths by Hamas in the occupied West Bank days beforehand, prosecutors said.

The incidents raised tensions, and a seven-week Israeli offensive against the Hamas-run Gaza Strip began on July 8 after cross-border Palestinian rocket attacks and an Israeli roundup of suspected militants in the West Bank.

Tensions are intensifying again, with a wave of Palestinian street attacks against Israelis now in its fifth month, fueled in part by Israeli building on land the Palestinians want for an independent state, stalled peace talks, and Muslim anger at perceived Jewish encroachment on a contested Jerusalem shrine.

Abu Khudair’s father, Hussein, told reporters at Jerusalem District Court that the family wanted an appeal to the Supreme Court to give the youngest defendant a life prison term as well. The boys were 17 and 16 when they murdered Abu Khudair.

“If there is no apartheid or racism (in Israel), you will have to do this,” Hussein Abu Khudair said, saying authorities had been easy on the teenager because he is a Jew not an Arab.

The state had sought life prison terms for both teenagers, but voiced satisfaction with Thursday’s sentencing.

“I hope that the message will be relayed that actions of this kind are revolting and that we as a society will not accept them,” prosecutor Uri Korb told reporters.

The man who organized Abu Khudair’s murder, Yosef Haim Ben-David, lodged an insanity plea that has held up his formal conviction and sentencing. A court review of his psychological competence is scheduled for next week.

Korb said that it was too early to know whether the state would appeal the lesser sentence of the younger teen and that the state hoped to quash Ben-David’s insanity plea, see him jailed for life and “bring closure of this in the near future”.

Avi Himi, lawyer for the younger teenager, said he would advise his client to appeal. “I believe the minor did take part in the incident but not in the actual murder and should therefore have been acquitted of the murder charge,” he said.

A lawyer for the older youth did not immediately comment on his client’s sentence. Life terms in Israel have often been commuted to 25 years’ imprisonment, with reductions of terms possible under individual parole considerations or clemency.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Louise Ireland)