Taking Sides in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflicts: Most Say Don't Do It

A fascinating new poll by the University of Maryland's WorldPublicOpinion.org. The question asked of 18,792 respondents in 18 countries, the United States included, was this: In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do you think your country should take Israel's side, the Palestinians' side, or side with neither?

In 14 countries, the response was on the whole overwhelmingly for staying neutral. In the United States, for example, 71% of respondents favor staying neutral, as opposed to 21% favoring taking Israel's side and just 3% favoring taking the Palestinians' side. Curiously, the United States did not produce the largest proportion of those calling for siding with Israel. India did. There, 24% would side with Israel, but 23% would side with the Palestinians, and just 22% would stay neutral. IOndia's case is the only one among the 18 countries where the breakdown is so even across all three categories.

In every western or non-Middle Eastern country, the overwhelming majority of respondents favor staying neutral: 79% in Great Britain and France, 82% in South Korea, 74% in China. The stereotypical notion that Europeans are automatically more pro-Palestinian is upended by the results. Just 6% of French, 8% of Britons and 12% of Spaniards would have their government side with the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, public opinion in countries of the Middle East reverses the tale. In Turkey, Iran and Egypt, neutrality is in the minority while taking the Palestinians' side has much support: 42% in Turkey, 63% in Iran, 86% in Egypt.

The world average? 58% want neutrality, 20% would take the Palestinians' side, 7% would take Israel's side.

Here are the results, rendered in a WorldPublicOpinion.org graph:

Why is this relevant? In the United States, it's quite relevant for two reasons: American engagement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not been very successful, but it's been almost constant since the 1970s. And it's been American policy to take Israel's side since the days of Henry Kissinger. That may be why American involvement hasn't been as successful as it might, or should have been, considering the investment. Palestinians have known all along what Aaron David Miller, the ex-State Department analyst, Middle East specialist and adviser to six secretaries of state over two decades, revealed in The Much Too Promised Land, his recent account of his experiences: In the 1990s, he writes,

We had made a decision to lay out American ideas on the extent of Israel’s further redeployment from the West Bank as well as on security performance for Palestinians, and as usual we felt obliged to run our ideas by Israel first. This ‘no surprise’ understanding actually went back to Kissinger, and even [James] Baker had abided by it.

It didn't stop there. “Dennis, like myself,” Miller adds of Dennis Ross, the head of policy planning in the State Department during the first Bush administration and the Clinton administrations, “had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather than from that of the Palestinians.” Speaking of actual negotiating sessions he was familiar with, Miller notes: “In truth, not a single senior-level official involved with the negotiations was willing or able to present, let alone fight for, the Arab or Palestinian perspective.”

Arabs and Palestinians are immensely to blame for many failures in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process--Arabs for their hypocrisy and their abject treatment of Palestinian refugees or workers in Arab lands, the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat and his Fatah organization for their corruption and lack of imagination, and now the Palestinian pseudo-leadership of Hamas and its brutal, Islamist agenda that buys Palestinians' allegiance with a mixture of demagoguery, fearmongering and social services.

But the blame is nowhere near one-sided. Israel's policy of building more settlements in Occupied Territories, its disproportionate use of force against Palestinians, most of whose victims are civilian, its stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank, and its generally dehumanizing treatment of Palestinians all creates its own dynamic of mutual hatreds.

The American role could have broken the deadlock. Instead, by outwardly and sometimes blatantly siding with Israel, American diplomacy arrived at the table with trust already lost as far as Palestinians are concerned. That hasn't changed. What's revealing about the World Public Opinion poll is that it suggests a rather significant disconnect between official American policy and American public opinion. The American public wants more neutrality. It realizes what the rest of the world generally does as well: neutrality for a mediator is the only way to win trust from both sides, especially in the Middle East. The battle isn't lost. But if the United States aims to remain a player in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, there's no victory in sight--unless the United States abandons its bias for Israel in favor of the only bias that can broker breakthroughs in that region: a bias for neutrality.

Read my analysis on the matter: "America's Pro-Israel Bias: Why the United States Takes Israel's Side."

See Also: The Wilson Quarterly has just posted an essay by Miller, The Long Dance:Searching for Arab-Israeli Peace, which summarizes his main themes.