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of the case study, an auxiliary field survey employing both quantitative and qualitative attitudes was used. Through conducting street interviews and calling diverse focus groups into action, this research has proven the Israeli representation of patriotism to be one that lies within the three leading themes of the Zionist Israeli national legacy: military action, settlement, and immigration and its absorption.
After having shown patriotism as a social phenomenon both in its global representations as well as in the Israeli contexts, I then investigate the social and political factors that promote or set back patriotism. I do so by examining them within three spheres of reference. The first group is one in which factors that have mainly to do with one’s personal demographic traits are found: gender, age group, family status, education, income, ethnic origin, political attitudes, and religion. The second sphere is the social capital domain, embracing factors that relate to the sphere of friends and community: horizontal trust, social networks, and collective fear. The third sphere consists of factors that operate within the realm of state and its institutions: political trust and trust in governmental institutions, mainly those responsible for the country’s security.
In each of the three spheres, the independent variables have been compared to worldwide examples and measured in the Israeli case study. The National Security Studies Center in Haifa University has been leading a comprehensive semiannual survey among a representative sample of the general population of Israel. This large poll has been conducted for more than a decade now; at each point, 2,000 respondents were sampled, of which approximately 1,600 were Jews. This large source of data, from which records concerning the Jewish population were obtained, has enabled numerous, unique statistical analyses for each of the factors being investigated. The data were collected using large-scale telephone surveys of a representative sample of the adult Israeli population. The questionnaires were translated into Russian and then tested for validity and appropriateness to ensure that they accurately reflected the Hebrew version. All answers were entered into survey computer software and arranged in an SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) file. Further analyses that will be described later have been conducted by the SPSS software.