Last week, the Jerusalem Post reported the news that only 4% of Israelis think that Barack Obama is pro-Israel, down from 6% in June. The poll, conducted by the Israeli public opinion outfit Smith Research, found that 51% think the Obama Administration is pro-Palestinian, 35% believe it to be neutral, and 10% have no opinion. But before we conclude as the Jerusalem Post has that Obama’s support has “fallen” to four percent over the last two months, we must be sure that robust methods have been used. And in the case of the Smith Research polls we run into a few problems.

First, these results are based on the responses of only five hundred people. The laws of probability dictate that whether you are surveying a small population or a large one, the sample size of the poll will be the main influence on its margin of error. Just because Israel’s population is much smaller than the U.S.’s does not mean that a sample of five hundred will be as accurate as the more common samples of one thousand respondents.

In the case of the two Smith Research polls, the margin of error is 4.5%. What this means is that the August poll is just as likely to have returned a result at any point in a 9% range as it was to have a result of 4% believing Obama to be pro-Israel. It was just as likely to have found that 1%, or 6%, or 0%, or 8% shared this view. The June result of 6% is well within the poll’s margin of error. This means that there is no statistical difference at all between the two polls, yet in the first sentence of the Post piece we read that “The number of Israelis who see US President Barack Obama’s policies as pro-Israel has fallen to four percent.” This is either an embarrassing lack of understanding of how polls work, or an attempt to manipulate the public.

These problems pale in comparison to a much larger flaw: the intentional creation of an unrepresentative poll. While the headline of the article “4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel” notes that only the opinions of the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel were considered, its first sentence does not. Arab Israelis, who make up 20% of the population, have been erased. While their views are very likely to be different from those of their Jewish compatriots, it is mind boggling to pretend they do not exist. Imagine a U.S. poll which ignored African-Americans, because they vote Democratic, or a Canadian poll that didn’t survey French Canadians, because they are separatists. In the North American political culture, these would be correctly identified as racist ideas. That Arab Israelis can be so blithely left out of a mainstream survey is deeply troubling.

Even if we accept the results of the Post poll, we still have to wonder why Jewish Israelis have such a low opinion of Barack Obama’s policies. Obama has been a strong friend of Israel. He denounced Hamas and Hezbollah. He supported Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, and last winter’s attack on Gaza. He has repeatedly insisted that Israel, which he calls “our strongest ally in the region,” must remain a Jewish state. His Israel policy differs from his predecessor’s only in that he has argued for a freeze on construction of new settlements in the West Bank. If Obama is demoralized about his tough summer at home, remembering that Israel has no electoral votes could do something to console him.