On Friday, yet another poll on the Middle East was released. They seem to come in a very steady stream, and once you identify the questions, the results are almost entirely predictable.
But Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, regularly produces polls that are always worth looking at. Unlike most surveys of American views on US policy in the Middle East, Telhami tends to dig deep as opposed to simply establishing general opinions. The poll he released Dec. 5 includes some very interesting developments and reminders as to why things still aren’t changing—in the region or in Washington.
The most stunning development Telhami reported is that support among US citizens for a single-state in Israel and the Occupied Territories—where all would have full and equal rights—increased a whopping ten percentage points in the past year. The 34% who support that outcome now rivals the 39% who support two states, and it represents a jump of ten percentage points from a year ago.
What does this tell us? Most of the leading advocates for a one-state solution have based their advocacy on the idea that a single, secular and democratic state with equal rights for all represents the fairest, most just solution for all parties; that the two-state solution could not possibly fully address the grievances of Palestinian refugees; and that two states would leave most of the best land in the former area of pre-1948 Palestine in Israeli hands. (Two-state advocates have generally argued that partitioning the land was the fairest way to maintain security for Jews, who needed a state, and allow the Palestinians an opportunity to build an independent state of their own.)
Did a whole bunch of two-state advocates suddenly decide that the one-staters were right all along and that the single, democratic state was the more just option? This seems unlikely, especially since the two-state solution has been, and still is seen as the pragmatic choice.
No, that shift is the result of the despair that the collapse of the Oslo process has produced. Those shifting opinions are also coming from a realization that Israel is lurching ever rightward, making a two-state solution less likely in the near term, while settlements expand and make it increasingly difficult to conceive, much less achieve, two states in the longer term.
Of course, a one-state solution was never seen as a viable option among US citizens, much less in Washington. But now it has nearly as much popular support as two states, even while the discourse on Capitol Hill has not changed a bit. One reason for the split between the public and its representatives is included in this poll.
When asked whether the United States should favor one side or the other in the conflict, 64% said the US should favor neither, 31% said the US should favor Israel, and only 4% said it should favor the Palestinians. This is fairly consistent with long-term trends; most US citizens believe their government should be acting as a neutral arbiter in the conflict or not be involved in it at all, and polls have reflected this for a very long time.
But the minuscule figure who believe we should be favoring the Palestinians, as opposed to the significant minority that support favoring Israel, goes a long way toward explaining why policy and the Washington discourse is not following, even in a small way, the national discourse and gradually shifting views among US citizens. The Palestinians are a generally disliked group—essentially seen as “the bad guys.” Even among Democrats, who, for the most part, exclude those who base their support for Israeli policies on the Bible (most of these so-called Christian Zionists are overwhelmingly Republican), only 6% favor siding with the Palestinians, as opposed to 17% who favor siding with Israel.
You’ll be hard pressed to find another issue where public opinion among those who favor some type of intervention is so lopsidedly opposed to helping the downtrodden and dispossessed. For such an entrenched policy, which has the most powerful and active foreign policy special interest lobby pushing to maintain it, this lack of sympathy for the Palestinians is a major obstacle to change, no matter how much the discourse might shift.
That discursive shift has had the effect of seriously diminishing the positive view of Israel in the United States. The Netanyahu government has contributed more than its share to that cause, of course. But so have the efforts of Palestinian activists and other pro-peace groups who have made an issue of Israeli rejectionism and the flaws in US policy.
But none of that has changed the view of the Palestinian cause in the United States. As Telhami’s poll and a long line of polls preceding it imply, most in the US believe that Palestinians’ rights should be respected in the abstract, but Palestinians are still seen as the less sympathetic combatant in this conflict. And Israel’s diminishing image hasn’t changed that.
Nor is there sufficient support for punitive actions against Israel for settlement construction. Sixty-one percent of respondents in this poll said the US should do nothing or just stick to making statements against settlement construction. With a mere 39% supporting more concrete action, Congress will feel very safe in continuing its absolute opposition to any pressure on Israel to desist from this practice.
All of this helps explain why, despite Israel’s reduced appeal in the United States and despite the increasing popularity of a solution that protects democracy rather than Israel’s Jewish character, nothing has changed in Washington. But if the mood among the US public continues in this direction, could that change?
It could, over time, especially considering the profound partisan differences in how Democrats and Republicans view the conflict. That should be a clarion call for those who still want to see a two-state solution emerge. Right now, Israel is pursuing various permutations of a single-state solution, but one where institutionalized discrimination privileging Jews over Arabs is strengthened. The Israeli right can push this agenda in the vacuum created by the apparent death of the two-state solution.
Yet the notion of two states need not die. The Oslo process was flawed from the very beginning. It was born out of documents and agreements that never explicitly stated that a Palestinian state next to Israel was a goal, nor did they offer any sort of human rights guidelines, let alone guarantees. Efforts in Oslo to restrict violence were horribly lopsided, with a laser-like focus on Palestinian violence while virtually ignoring the violence of the occupation itself, as well as that of many of the Jewish settlers. And while the very structure of the occupation provided both Israel and the United States with methods of coercion and pressure against the Palestinians, nothing of the kind was regularly exerted against Israel when it failed to fulfill the letter or spirit of agreements.
Oslo and the two-state solution became synonymous and, as a result, when the process failed, many came to believe that it was the very notion of two states that was fatally flawed. The despair leads more and more to abandon the two-state concept entirely. But that need not be.
It is entirely possible that one state is a better solution, or that Israeli settlement expansion through the West Bank and East Jerusalem already have too much momentum and have gobbled up too much land for a viable two-state solution to be possible. But the failure of Oslo, in and of itself, tells us nothing about whether a two state scenario could work. A two-state model—that includes basic standards of human rights and equal rights (political, civil and national) for all people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, including Gaza, and includes penalties for both sides for failures of compliance based on a broad but clear, internationally agreed upon vision of the final agreement—could still work.
Undoubtedly, support for a single, secular and democratic state is growing. As people of good will continue to work to resolve this long, bloody and vexing conflict, it is an idea that needs to be considered. It is increasingly popular and based on notions of fairness, and stands against myopic nationalism and ethnocentrism. But it shouldn’t be the only option. A two-state vision, one very different from Oslo, should accompany it. In addition to the conditions I mentioned above, it should also include agreements of cooperation on commerce, economics, resources (especially water) and security. It should not mean Palestine would be de-militarized and eternally vulnerable, enjoying only partial sovereignty. Instead, security for both states would be ensured, and prosperity for both states would be promoted, by interdependency, based on treaties and agreements.
Both two-state and one-state scenarios have weaknesses and inherent flaws that can doom them. Given the hopelessness with which Israelis, Palestinians and all who care about the issue are facing now, we need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While those who believe in such scenarios work to promote their one-state visions, two-state supporters need to immediately re-align their vision and reset the two-state idea. What’s needed in Israel and Palestine is not stubborn ideology, but a willingness to accept the best idea for moving forward. And the way to start doing that is by opening minds to new possibilities rising out of the inevitable failure of the process that laid exclusive claim to “peace” for twenty years.
Photo: The Shuafat refugee camp can be seen across the separation wall from the Pisgat Ze’ev Israeli settlement. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.
]]>Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, has just released a major new poll of US public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which Mitchell Plitnick will analyze on this site in the next few days.
The survey also contains some very interesting data that suggest Islamic State (ISIS or IS) is now seen as a significantly greater threat to the United States than Iran. The data and Telhami’s analysis appear in a blog post entitled “Linking Iran and ISIS: How American Public Opinion Shapes the Obama Administration’s Approach to the Nuclear Talks” at the Brookings website. (Telhami is a long-time fellow at Brookings, and the poll results were released there.)
Briefly, the poll, which was conducted Nov. 14-19, found that nearly six times as many of the 1008 respondents said they believed that the rise of IS in Iraq and Syria “threaten(ed) American interests the most” in the Middle East than those who named “Iranian behavior in general.” Respondents were given two other options besides those to choose from: “the violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” and “instability in Libya.” Libya was seen as the least threatening (3%); followed by Iran (12%), Israel-Palestine (13%), and ISIS (70%). The only notable partisan difference among the respondents was that Republicans rated Iranian behaviour (15%) slightly higher than Israel-Palestine (11%) as a threat, while Democrats rated Israel-Palestine (13%) slightly higher than Iran (9%).
In some respects, these results are not surprising, particularly given the media storm touched off by the beheading of American journalist James Foley in August. A Pew poll shortly after that event showed growing concern about Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaeda and IS compared to “Iran’s nuclear program.” Thus, while Iran’s nuclear program was cited by 68% of Pew’s American respondents as a “major threat to the U.S.” in November 2013—behind Islamic extremist groups (75%), only 59% rated it a “major threat” immediately after Foley’s murder.
Still, Telhami’s results are pretty remarkable, if only because neoconservatives, Israel’s right-wing government and the Israel lobby more generally have been arguing since IS began its sweep into Iraq, and particularly since Foley’s death, that Washington should avoid any cooperation with Iran against IS, in part because Tehran ultimately poses a much greater threat.
In June, for example, John Bolton, an aggressive nationalist at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), insisted that Washington should ignore Iraqi appeals for help against ISIS and instead “increase …our efforts to overthrow the ayatollahs in Tehran” because “Iran is clearly the strongest, most threatening power in this conflict.”
In a New York Times op-ed in October, Israel’s Minister of Intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, appealed for Washington not to “repeat (the) mistake” it made in 2003 when it went to war in Iraq “…at the expense of blocking a greater threat: Iran’s nuclear project.”
“The Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, “remains the world’s foremost threat.”
And one month later, speaking to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America shortly after Foley’s execution, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned against any cooperation with Iran against IS: “The Islamic State of Iran is not a partner of America; it is an enemy of America and it should be treated as an enemy,” he declared.
At least for now, it appears these arguments have not made much headway with US public opinion. Here’s Telhami:
[T]he Obama administration appears to have decided to risk appearing open to an Iranian role in fighting ISIS, as it certainly allowed the Iraqi government to coordinate such a role, and Secretary of State John Kerry described it as a good thing. There is evidence from recent polling that this may not be unwise when it comes to American public opinion. Obama assumes that nothing he is likely to do in the Iran nuclear negotiations will appease Congressional Republicans and thus his best bet is getting the American public on his side. Evidence shows the public may be moving in that direction.
The starting point is not about Iran as such; it’s all about shifting public priorities.
The survey also asked respondents which of two statements (you can read them in full on Telhami’s blog) was closest to their views—that Palestinian-Israeli violence was likely to draw more support for IS among Muslims worldwide or that it wouldn’t have any appreciable effect on IS’ support. In that case, 30% percent of all respondents agreed with the latter statement, while 64% said the former was closer to their view. Remarkably, given their leadership’s strong support for Israel’s right-wing government, Republicans (71%) were more likely than Democrats (60%) to believe that violence between Israelis and Palestinians would boost support for IS.
Finally, respondents were asked to choose between four options as to which country or countries are “most directly threatened by Iran”—the US, Israel, Washington’s “Arab allies,” and “Other”. Overall, 21% of respondents named the US, and another 21% named Arab allies, while 43% opted for Israel. Twelve percent chose “Other.” The poll found little difference between Republicans and Democrats on the Iranian threat posed to the US—19% and 24%, respectively. The major difference was on the perception of the threat to Israel: 38% of Democrats said Israel was most directly threatened by Iran, compared to 54% of Republicans. (Only 31% of independents.)
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
After twenty years of futility, more and more people are coming around to the idea that the Oslo process has failed and that the basis of Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution needs to be re-thought. Funny, there are those of us who have been saying that for years now.
[...]]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
After twenty years of futility, more and more people are coming around to the idea that the Oslo process has failed and that the basis of Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution needs to be re-thought. Funny, there are those of us who have been saying that for years now.
Ian Lustick, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, stated bluntly in an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday that the Oslo process was “…an idea whose time is now past.” Lustick’s controversial article urged new thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than trying to continue along a well-worn path that has not led to success or even hope in two decades.
“The question is not whether the future has conflict in store for Israel-Palestine,” said Lustick. “It does. Nor is the question whether conflict can be prevented. It cannot. But avoiding truly catastrophic change means ending the stifling reign of an outdated idea and allowing both sides to see and then adapt to the world as it is.”
Lustick made it clear that two states was still an option, just not in the form that the Oslo process had heretofore envisioned. His point was that the current process has failed and that all viable options must now be on the table, in whatever formulation of states. “It remains possible that someday two real states may arise,” Lustick wrote. “But the pretense that negotiations under the slogan of ‘two states for two peoples’ could lead to such a solution must be abandoned. Time can do things that politicians cannot.”
But David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, accused Lustick of “…dispens(ing) with the foundational Jewish link among a people, a land, and a faith.” He bases this on his highly selective quoting and interpretation of Lustick saying, as Harris puts it, that “Zionism… has become ‘an outdated idea,’ and Israelis should accept that ‘Israel may no longer exist as the Jewish and democratic vision of its Zionist founders.’” Harris does not explain how this in any way means Lustick is denying a Jewish link between Jewish people, their faith and the land in question. But Harris has never been one to allow facts or critical thinking to factor into his arguments.
At the neoconservative magazine, Commentary, Jonathan Tobin lays the entire blame for the failure of the Oslo process at the feet of the Palestinians. “So long as the Palestinians are unable to re-imagine their national identity outside of an effort to extinguish the Zionist project,” wrotes Tobin, “and to therefore recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn, negotiations are doomed to fail.” Tobin goes on to assail Lustick as “conceited” and “dishonest.” In his view, the ultimate flaw in Lustick’s thesis is that “…his determination to ignore the nature of Palestinian intolerance for Jews causes him not only to misunderstand why peace efforts have failed but also to be blind to the certainty that the end of Israel would lead to bloodshed and horror… Israelis understand that they have no choice but to survive and to wait as long as it takes for the Palestinians to give up on dreams of their destruction.”
Other observers, however, offer a more sobering assessment that supports Lustick’s main point: the peace process as we have known it has failed and new approaches must be considered. In the twenty years of the Oslo Accords, the United States was unable to create the sort of breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinians that the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 promised. Instead, the peace process itself has become a sort of trap.
“The peace process itself has become an institution,” said Leila Hilal of the New America Foundation and a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, speaking in Washington. “All incidents are fitted into this prism of the peace process, waiting for a bilateral agreement to end the conflict.”
Hilal’s point touches on the same key issue Lustick addresses. The entire underlying structure of Oslo was flawed from the outset. The disparity between a regional superpower and a stateless and powerless people makes the notion that the conflict must be resolved via bilateral negotiations between these two wildly asymmetrical parties an absurd myth that blocks any hope of progress. That’s precisely why the Palestinians keep complaining that the United States is not playing a role in the current talks while Israel is perfectly content with their patron playing the role of host and observer but not mediator.
Shibley Telhami, the noted pollster University of Maryland professor contended on the same panel as Hilal that
It is impossible for the US to effectively negotiate Palestinian-Israeli peace without a president backing it and who believes it is strategically important for the United States… After 1973 and the Arab oil embargo, it was easier to make the case that the U.S. had interest in peace because it had interest in good relations with both Israel and Arabs. But by the time of (Bill) Clinton’s election, the Cold War had ended, foreign policy was not the central issue and his administration was not looking at this as a national security issue.
All of this sets up conditions that have led to twenty years of stalemate and left little hope that the situation between Israel and the Palestinians can improve. Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace stated bluntly that “Left to themselves, the parties are incapable of coming to an agreement. They need a guiding hand. Today, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in particular there is a system of occupation and settlement that has endured for almost half a century. There has been no agreement of any consequence since 1995, but the system remains intact.”
Aronson also pointed out that even the oft-cited decision by George H.W. Bush to cut loan guarantees if Israel didn’t curb settlement activity was an incidental tactic, and only policy change can actually create incentives for Israel to get serious about compromising with the Palestinians. Governments are not supposed to make concessions unless they have to. Until U.S. distaste for the settlement project and other odious Israeli practices is incorporated concretely into policy, things won’t change. This is true for other actors, like the EU, who have already shown what a tiny policy move — in this case, a policy of refusing to fund projects done in partnership with Israeli settlements, which means very little on the ground but has provoked a virtual tantrum from Israelis in and out of government — can do.
Neither in Israel nor in the Occupied Territories was there any hint of marking the twentieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, a telling point that reflects how this one hopeful event is viewed today by both parties. For Israel, the issue of the occupation has taken a back seat to broader concerns in the region, particularly with regard to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and economic concerns. But even for the Palestinians, the entire concept of the two-state solution has been thrown into question by the failure of the Oslo process.
The current round of talks are not just a microcosm of the twenty years of Oslo; they’re a magnification of it. After months of Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts focused on just getting the two sides to talk, they cannot agree on even the basic outlines of what they should be talking about. The U.S. envoy, Martin Indyk, has been to only one meeting with the two sides in that time.
All of this is why Lustick is saying a new approach is needed, from the ground up. It must not be built on the ashes of Oslo and rather must be an entirely new structure. Harris, Tobin and their ilk do not bash Lustick because he “hates Israel,” but because they are quite content with the status quo and wish to defend it. Those who wish to see millions of Palestinians living under harsh Israeli military rule freed; the rights of millions of dispossessed Palestinians addressed; and, perhaps most of all, those who wish to defuse this powder keg, especially in light of so many other explosions that have nothing to do with Israel enflaming the region, need to pay heed to Lustick’s words. Oslo is dead, killed by its own birth defects. It’s long past time for something new.
]]>by Jim Lobe
If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as
by Jim Lobe
If you want to get some insight into how the Washington Post’s editorial board increasingly thinks of the world and the U.S. role in it, editorial page editor Fred Hiatt’s column in Monday’s newspaper provides a good idea. While Hiatt is generally not as ideological as his deputy, Jackson Diehl (although he did hire Jennifer Rubin), his basic belief in U.S. exceptionalism, his rejection of “retrenchment” and “limitations” (on U.S. power), and, above all, his implicit equation of international “engagement” with military intervention demonstrates how his version of liberal internationalism is so easily co-opted by neo-conservatives:
But the dominant impression among foreign officials [read Hiatt himself] is of a policy of retrenchment. They see a steady reduction in the size of U.S. armed forces that will mean less ability to intervene and influence. They watched Obama withdraw all troops from Iraq, failing to negotiate an agreement that would have preserved some U.S. role in that now-unraveling country. They see him preparing to withdraw most — or all, his spokesman has said; the size of any residual force has not been announced — troops from Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]
Consider the logic of this passage. He seems to be saying (through his unnamed “foreign officials”) that U.S. influence in world affairs is directly correlated with the size of its military and the willingness of its commander-in-chief to use it to intervene in foreign countries. In this very Kaganesque view of the world, hard power is really the only power that really counts. The notion that military power must necessarily rest on a strong economic foundation — or even that “soft power” may also play an important role in gaining influence overseas — seems to him or his foreign officials to be secondary at best.
He goes on to cite the U.S. intervention in Libya as “a case study in the policy of limitations” to which Hiatt now strongly objects.
Obama acted only when pressed by French and British allies and then insisted on withdrawal instead of committing to help a new government establish itself. The predictable result is an unstable country, riven by militias and posing an increasing danger to its neighbors through the spread of arms.
And then, of course, he blames Obama’s failure to intervene decisively in Syria last year for “the degenerat[ion] [of the conflict] into something so savage that it’s no longer clear what, if anything, might help.”
The question these observations raise, of course, is what would Hiatt have Obama do? Does he seriously believe that the U.S., at this juncture in its history, has the resources to “nation-build” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria (presumably Mali now, too) all at the same time? And, given what the U.S. has accomplished with the hundreds of billions of dollars it has devoted to “nation-building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, does he really think that Washington — and especially the Pentagon, which has disbursed the great majority of those funds — even knows how to go about “building nations?” Has he read the reports of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), and his counterpart in Afghanistan? His assumption, of course, is that U.S. intervention — especially military intervention — must automatically make things better for the natives, even if the evidence consistently suggests that the natives may hold a different opinion.
Admittedly, Hiatt does insert a qualification:
During the Cold War, too, Americans fought bitterly over the size of the defense budget, the wisdom of interventions and the morality of supporting unsavory but friendly dictators. Over the decades the country made terrible mistakes overseas. But U.S. engagement and influence also helped to gradually open the world to more democracy and more prosperity.
Again, we see in this passage the assumption that big defense budgets, military or covert interventions, and U.S. support for friendly dictators — as controversial and even mistaken as those policies might have been — have all somehow contributed to a better world, that all’s well that ends well. But I think many Vietnamese, Cambodians, Iranians, Central Americans (especially Guatemalans), Brazilians, Chileans, Congolese, Iraqis, Indonesians, and citizens of other countries who have been on the receiving end of the U.S. defense budget, military or covert intervention, and those unsavory dictators may take exception to that conclusion. Certainly even a cursory reading of Shibley Telhami’s new book, The World Through Arab Eyes, which summarizes more than two decades of his work on public opinion in the Arab world, should disabuse him of how U.S. interventions in that part of the world has been perceived by the people there.
On this subject, Steve Walt’s latest on the “Top Ten Warning Signs of ‘liberal imperialism’”, which offers some sage observations, also notes that:
]]>[L]ike the neocons, liberal imperialists are eager proponents for using American hard power, even in situations where it might easily do more harm than good. The odd-bedfellow combination of their idealism with neocons’ ideology has given us a lot of bad foreign policy over the past decade, especially to intervene militarily in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today’s drumbeat to do the same in Syria.
The number of Israelis who oppose a military attack against Iran has risen modestly since last year, according to the Anwar Sadat Chair’s annual survey of Israeli public opinion released today at the Brookings Institution.
While 51-percent of Israeli respondents said they think it’s “very likely” that “Iran will eventually develop nuclear [...]]]>
The number of Israelis who oppose a military attack against Iran has risen modestly since last year, according to the Anwar Sadat Chair’s annual survey of Israeli public opinion released today at the Brookings Institution.
While 51-percent of Israeli respondents said they think it’s “very likely” that “Iran will eventually develop nuclear weapons” (54-percent of Israeli Jews think it’s “very likely”, down from 62-percent last year), an overall 50-percent of Israelis oppose an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program. The number of Israeli Jews who oppose unilateral Israeli action has also increased — 46-percent compared to 41-percent last year. A slightly greater number of Israelis say Israel should only strike Iran with US support — 43-percent compared to 42-percent who answered in February, and 46-percent of Israeli Jews compared to 43-percent in February. Only one in four Israelis meanwhile believe that a military attack would delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by more than five years. A substantial majority of Israelis favor a Middle East Nuclear Free Zone that would include Israel, though among Israeli Jews this is down from a year ago.
Israelis also appear divided about a UN deal with Iran that would allow it to enrich uranium at low levels under strict and intrusive monitoring. An overall 46-percent of Israelis said they would approve such a deal, while 47-percent said they would not, with 51-percent of Israeli Jews saying such a deal should not be allowed, compared to 44-percent who said it should be allowed.
While only one in four Israelis (24%) think the US “would join the war on Israel’s behalf” if Israel attacked Iran, Israelis appear to be warming to reelected President Barak Obama. An overall 60-percent of Israelis hold “positive” views of Obama, with a considerable increase shown among Israeli Jews (62-percent compared to 54-percent last year). Israelis also appear more optimistic about US-Israel relations, a major point of criticism leveled at the President by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during his campaign. Asked whether relations would “get warmer, stay about the same, or get cooler,” 26-percent thought relations would warm and only 14% thought they would cool; 55% thoughts there would be little change.
The poll also surveyed Israeli opinions about a number of other regional issues including the war in Syria and Israeli-Egyptian relations. Interestingly, less than half of Israelis believe that Israel made strategic gains or prevailed in the Gaza conflict.
]]>Weiss mainly focuses on Israel-Palestine and human [...]]]>
Weiss mainly focuses on Israel-Palestine and human rights in the Middle East. He also headed “Just Journalism”, a media monitoring organization focused on “how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the UK” prior to its September 2011 closure (lack of funding was cited). His own work has been widely published and last month Foreign Affairs printed his “What it Will Take to Intervene in Syria“, where he argued that intervention “at this moment would be premature” and then proceeded to describe how it could be executed anyway. Less than a month later the crux of Weiss’s position is that Bashar al-Assad is no longer a legitimate leader and Iran and Russia are already “intervening” in Syria, so the West should too:
…Russia, Iran and Hezbollah have all been “intervening” in Syria’s internal affairs for ten months now. Meanwhile, the Arab League, the United States and the European Union have all determined that any claim to sovereignty Assad might have had in 2011 is null and void in 2012. What is needed, therefore, is not condemnations, demarches and shuttered embassies but a Western equivalent of intervention in Syria, namely in the form of:
- • Humanitarian “safe areas” to provide food, aid and medical supplies to the civilian population and give the various opposition groups a headquarters inside their own country
• Advanced weapons and communication devices for the Syrian rebels
• A no-fly zone to stop the regime from using its aircraft to conduct reconnaissance, offload security personnel and – yes – strafe rebel strongholds from the sky.
Weiss also strongly criticizes the US, UK and France for not working to push the Assad government out more forcibly:
Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alain Juppe can grumble all they like about travesties at Turtle Bay and the inevitability of Assad’s fall. Even if they got their toothless Security Council resolution calling for Assad’s departure, then what? Would he pack up and go quietly? If so, where to? How’s the tabouleh in the Black Sea?
Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who supported intervention in Libya in the very early stages of the uprising, wrote in CNN today that Russia and China’s vetoing of last week’s United Nations draft Security Council resolution on Syria has made the reality on the ground more dangerous for Syrians. He accordingly urges more consideration of the “various military options available” (while conceding that taking such action is currently premature) and makes the case that Western powers have in fact been reluctant to intervene despite growing necessity:
The “anti-imperialists” will, as they often do, cry foul. This time, though, they will find themselves on the wrong side. None of the Western powers has come out in even tepid support of military intervention. Consumed by their own internal problems, this is not at all something they want. But it may be something the Syrian people need.
Yesterday US intelligence veteran and foreign policy analyst Paul Pillar wrote that one reason why Russia and China vetoed the UN draft resolution was because of their experience with Libya:
The Russians in particular made it clear they were determined not to fall again for what they regarded as a bait and switch on Libya, in which a NATO military intervention that received multilateral support on humanitarian grounds quickly morphed into support for toppling the Libyan regime.
Pillar appears to be adamantly on the anti-intervention side. He argues that foreign intervention in Libya has given Iran and North Korea “the worst possible message” with respect to their own security interests and alleged nuclear ambitions and that “Sectarian divisions in Syria would make the aftermath of even a low-cost regime-toppling intervention messier than Libya.”
The American Security Projects’ Joshua Foust also weighed in on the Libya/Syria comparison in the context of the intervention debate in the Atlantic today:
In a vacuum, intervening to prevent mass killings in Libya made sense. Libya, however, did not (and does not) exist in a vacuum. It has both internal and regional politics. So does Syria. The failure to gain international buy-in to do something — not necessarily militarily but some response — to the atrocities there is a direct consequence of interventionists ignoring politics in their rush to do good. Unfortunately, the people of Syria are now paying the price, and will continue to do so.
As reported by Josh Rogin in Foreign Policy, this weekend several members of congress touched on the Syria intervention debate at the 2012 Munich Security Conference as well. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry echoed Pillar and Foust’s argument that “Syria is not Libya” but added that:
…nobody should interpret that statement to suggest that it means that Syrian leaders can rely on the notion that they can act with impunity and not expect the international community to assist the Syrian people in some way.
Interestingly, while senate hawks John McCain and Joe Lieberman had harsher words for Russia and China, they, like Kerry, avoided advocating intervention directly. According to Lieberman:
What’s happening in Syria today is exactly what we got involve in Libya to stop from happening…. I understand Syria is more complicated, but one choice we don’t have is just to stand back and let the government kill people who are fighting for their own freedom.
Pro-interventionists like Weiss aside, many of whom have been arguing for the West to go into Syria for months (consider the output of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Foreign Policy Initiative on the issue), the trend in Washington seems to be that more could and should be done about Syria, but other considerations are getting in the way. Meanwhile, according to a poll conducted by Shibley Telhami in October, an overwhelming majority from the Arab countries he surveyed support the Syrian rebels over the government, but are divided about foreign intervention. During the question-answer period of the poll’s launch event at the Brookings Institution, Telhami added that Syrians themselves are also “divided” on the issue: “My suspicion is many Syrians want international intervention, many don’t.”
It will be interesting to see how ongoing brutality by Assad’s forces will affect this debate not only among the most important actors, the Syrian people, but foreign governments too.
]]>When the Bush administration used the Iraq War as a vehicle to spread democratic change in the Middle East, anger with the United States on foreign policy issues — particularly Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict [...]]]>
]]>When the Bush administration used the Iraq War as a vehicle to spread democratic change in the Middle East, anger with the United States on foreign policy issues — particularly Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict — and deep suspicion of U.S. intentions put the genuine democracy advocates in the region on the defensive. The outcome has been that, every year since the Iraq War began, polls of Arabs revealed their sense that the Middle East is even less democratic than before.
As we witness the remarkable and inspiring events in both Tunisia and Egypt, one has to wonder whether these events could have taken place even earlier had there not been the diversion of the Iraq War — and whether these upheavals might have swept away Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship without shots being fired from the outside.
Even in Iran, where there is obvious public opposition to the clerical regime, as indicated by the contestation over the 2009 presidential election, one wonders whether the Iranian people might succeed if the regime were robbed of its ability to point fingers at the West.
The media coverage of hostile remarks about Iran from some Gulf Arab leaders, among others, largely glazed over the autocratic [...]]]>
The media coverage of hostile remarks about Iran from some Gulf Arab leaders, among others, largely glazed over the autocratic character of the figures making the comments. But the gaps in attitudes between the dictatorial leadership of many of these Arab countries and their populations — citizens or subjects, however you want to call them — is vast and well-known.
Telhami and Zobgy’s Arab Public Opinion survey is a highly regarded poll, known for reflecting the views of the people in these countries who go unmentioned in diplomatic cables such as those released by WikiLeaks.
As of last August, here’s how those surveyed felt about Iranian nuclear weapons (hint: it’s nothing like their leaders):
Gulf Between Arab Leaders and Public
The U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks about Arab regimes’ hostility toward Iran — and the innumerable commentators on the subject – all overlook the gulf between autocratic Arab leaders and their citizens or subjects, who tend to have a different view of Iran and its nuclear programme.
However, a Brookings Institution and Zogby International 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll, released in August, found that more than three- quarters of respondents in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Lebanon and Egypt thought Iran had the right to pursue its nuclear programme despite most feeling that it is aimed at developing weapons.
While a majority of respondents (55 percent) said they believe Tehran’s nuclear programme is aimed at developing weapons – a charge denied by Iran – nearly four out of five respondents (77 percent) said the country has the right to pursue the programme – a whopping increase of 24 percent since last year.
Support for the programme was strongest by far in Egypt and Morocco and weakest in the UAE, where a strong majority said Iran should be pressured to halt it.
Conversely, only 20 percent of respondents said they favoured applying international pressure on Iran to curb its nuclear programme. That was down from the 40 percent who took that position one year ago.
“Overall, there is very little support here for the notion that Arabs are secretly yearning for the U.S. to attack Iran,” wrote Marc Lynch, a Mideast expert at George Washington University, whose blog on foreignpolicy.com has a wide readership among elite sectors here. “Really little.”
Moreover, a solid majority (57 percent) of respondents agreed that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would lead to a “more positive” outcome in the Middle East region. That was nearly twice the percentage of one year ago (29 percent). By contrast, only 21 percent said that it would lead to a “more negative outcome”, compared to a plurality of 46 percent who took that position in 2009.
(Much of this sidebar is drawn from Lobe’s August article on the poll. The link for Marc Lynch’s FP piece was added to this post.)
]]>It began yesterday when David Pollock wrote a post which challenged the findings of a Zogby International poll and posits the results ”must be considered an unreliable outlier unless some compelling new supporting evidence emerges.” Other analysts have been citing the results as confirmation that Obama’s perceived accommodations to Israel have driven Arab populations to increasingly support Iran’s nuclear program. (See last month’s on LobeLog.)
Pollock charges that the Zogby poll’s findings—which he summarizes as “an astonishing 50-point net shift” from 2009 to 2010 towards the opinion that “Iranian nuclear weapons would have a positive or negative effect on the Middle East”—don’t fit with the results of a number of other opinion polls which asked Arab populations about Iran. He argues there is no causal relationship between Arab perception that Obama has been too soft on Israel and the Zogby Poll’s evidence of increasing support for Iran’s nuclear program among Arab populations.
But since last autumn, when Obama reached a public compromise with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the hot-button issue of Israeli settlements, a number of different polls have measured Arab attitudes toward Iran. In every case but one, these surveys have consistently demonstrated heavily negative views of Iran, its nuclear program, and of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The mistake of Telhami, and other analysts, is to rely on a single 2010 Zogby poll to make their judgement, rather than considering the full range of polling on the issue.
And concludes:
So the overall scorecard reads as follows: Since November 2009, four independent, credible polls have shown heavily negative Arab views of Iran, Ahmadinejad, and Iran’s nuclear program. Only one poll reported relatively positive views. Arabs may be disillusioned with Obama, but if they object to the United States taking a harder line toward the Islamic Republic, they sure aren’t telling the pollsters.
Telhami, who directed the 2010 Arab Public Opinion Poll, shot back today, writing that Pollock fundamentally misunderstood the poll’s results. He noted the huge divergence in polling results, particularly in Egypt, might have much to do with when the different polls were conducted. The Pew poll was conducted from April 12 through May 3; the Zogby poll from June 29 to July 20.
What happened in between? The Gaza Flotilla incident, which significantly affected public attitudes on a number of related issues. And it is not a surprise that anything related to Gaza would have more impact in Egypt than elsewhere in the Arab world given its proximity and the fact that Egypt controlled it from 1948-1967. In addition, there was also increased talk about a proposal for a nuclear free zone in Middle East which highlighted Israel’s nuclear program, through a campaign led by Egypt and the Arab League, which is headquartered in Cairo. On May 28, there was a seeming breakthrough when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference called for taking up the issue of creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East in 2012, in a move supported by the Arabs states, the U.S. — and Iran. Israel, which is not a signatory to the treaty, was concerned, and there were subsequent reports that the U.S. was having second thoughts about favoring the move. A good part of the Arab public’s attitudes towards Iran’s program is a function of the constant “double standard” argument one hears in the Arab world. My own sense is that if I were to give respondents the option of choosing elimination of all nuclear weapons, including Israel’s, and preventing any state from acquiring them in the future, there is a good chance that a majority of Arabs polled would support that. So the events between May and July 2010 likely had a substantial impact on public attitudes on this issue. In fact, it would be surprising if they had not.
And concludes:
]]>The central thrust of the findings on Iran is that Arab public attitudes toward Iran’s nuclear program are in good part a function of their views toward Israel and the U.S. Certainly these attitudes vary from country to country based on proximity to Iran and the Sunni-Shiite divide and old Arab-Persian divide. But when Arabs in the six countries studied are asked to identify in an open question the two counties that pose the biggest threat to them, the vast majority of those polled identify Israel first, the United States second, and Iran third-by far. That’s the dynamic from which Iran benefits. The surest way to isolate Iran among the Arab public is to successfully mediate lasting Arab-Israeli peace.