“There is a lot of news in Israel about what the Iranians think and want, but nobody asked them,” said Prof. Alex Mintz, an expert in political decision-making and strategic negotiation who heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, which carried out the survey.

Professor Mintz said he found the answers to several questions “encouraging,” particularly the number of Iranians prepared to give up military nuclear ambitions, an issue that has long topped Israel’s diplomatic agenda and that Israel views as a potential threat to its existence. Iran, of course, has long insisted that its nuclear project is meant solely for peaceful purposes.

A majority of those surveyed — about 70 percent — said they supported the talks now underway with the world powers on the Iranian nuclear program.

About a half-dozen Israelis of Iranian origin, who speak Farsi as a mother tongue, telephoned the 530 respondents in May and early June without revealing that they were Israelis or from where they were calling. The random phone survey was conducted across Iran. The respondents were evenly divided between men and women, and were from urban and rural areas. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus five percentage points. The response rate was considered high, at about 27 percent.

One of the interviewers described making the calls from the institute in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean coast. He said he would present himself as working on behalf of the research institute, whose name is similar to one in Tehran. Some seemed surprised at the questions, he said, and asked if the pollsters had permission to conduct the survey. “To some, we gave a false number in Tehran and said they could call back if they wanted, to build trust,” he said. Few said they would.