Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of Arab citizens from over a dozen nations responded that they would oppose the recognition of Israel.
AFTER SIGNING the Abraham Accords, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of Bahrain (left) and UAE display their copies as then-US president Donald Trump looks on, at the White House, September 15, 2020.(photo credit: TOM BRENNER/REUTERS)
An average of 84% of Arabs opposes diplomatic recognition of Israel by their countries, according to results from the soon-to-be-released 2022 Arab Opinion Index (AOI). The AOI is an annual series of opinion surveys conducted by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS).
The Arab Center Washington DC (ACW) is an affiliate of the ACRPS. They released some early results of the AOI.
The AOI surveyed Arabs in over a dozen Arab countries, asking participants various questions in face-to-face interviews. The survey included people from Algeria, Mauritania, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Qatar, Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.
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Would Arabs support or oppose diplomatic recognition of Israel by your country?
Survey participants were asked the question, “would you support or oppose diplomatic recognition of Israel by your country?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority responded that they would oppose it. In total, 84% responded in opposition, 8% responded that they would support it, and 8% were unsure or declined to answer.
The most Israel-friendly country included in the survey is Morocco, of whose participants 67% answered in opposition, 20% answered in support, and 13% didn’t know or declined to answer.
Conversely, none of the survey participants from Algeria supported diplomatic recognition of Israel while 99% were against it. This is even more extreme than the Palestinian response, 3% of whom supported diplomatic recognition of Israel.
FLAGS OF Arab states are seen along the Nile River ahead of a meeting of foreign ministers in Cairo (credit: REUTERS)
The AOI has been asking the same question to survey participants since 2011 when the survey was first conducted.
Again, the overwhelming majority, 76% of the aggregate, responded by saying that the Palestinian cause concerned all Arabs.
Attitudes on US policy concerning Palestinians
People across all the Arab countries surveyed also had a negative view of US policy concerning the Palestinians. In aggregate, 53% had a “very negative” view, 24% had a “negative” view, 8% had a “positive” view, and only 3% had a “very positive” view.
Over the decade since the AOI survey has been conducted, apparently little has changed in Arab attitudes, overall, regarding Israel. However, some have apparently changed. For instance, while 20% of Moroccans surveyed this past year favored diplomatic recognition of Israel, according to the AOI survey of 2019-2020, that percentage was as low as 4% just a couple of years ago.
Morocco is one of the countries party to the Abraham Accords, the historic treaty that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries. It joined the accords in December 2020. Survey participants from Sudan, a country that signed onto the Accords in 2021, were the most open to diplomatic recognition of Israel after Morocco with 18% supporting recognition. That is up from the 13% recorded in the 2019-2020 survey. The other Arab signatories to the Abraham Accords, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, were notably absent from the survey.
Additionally, the percentage of Arabs who view the “Palestinian cause” as concerning all Arabs and not just the Palestinians is 3% lower in 2022 than it was in the 2019-2020 survey. Also noteworthy is that, according to the 2019-2020 AOI survey, Palestinians, along with Saudis rated themselves as the least free to criticize their own governments. For Palestinians, this may have referred to either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, depending on where the survey participant was living.
While overall, the Arab world still does not view Israel positively. However, while the Abraham Accords demonstrate an avenue for Israel to find acceptance from Arab governments, it’s possible that the AOI survey could also be understood as a tepid admission that slowly, there is an avenue for Israel to be accepted by the Arab public.
As Netanyahu’s newly formed government is just settling into power, it remains to be seen if it will help or hinder that possibility.
@Ted
This is a good point, but as MBS recently did in Saudi Arabia, reforms should expected to be pursued in these nations which, while not eliminating Islamist teaching, might focus upon teaching them with far less exclusivity. This won’t bleed the Islamic nature from their DNA, but it might lead to making it far less prominent in their every day life and far more tolerant of the Jews as a result. In addition to this, the issue of antisemitism could be tackled more directly as is being done in Bahrain with the MOU. I do think it would be wise to temper expectations with the reality of the situation, but I would suggest that these type of agendas should be make part of the recipe, if you will, for the AA to have any chance at a long term success.
Perhaps Israel should insist to all AA member states and any other Arab state that wants to join, that they should commit to re-educating the people.
Unfortunately this antisemitism comes from two places. 1. the Koran and Hadiths and 2. misinformation about the conflict today. The latter will be easier to correct but the former will never be corrected. It is in their Islamic dna.
@dreuveni
Intriguing point. Well argued. Personally, I think there may be some resistance to accepting the new state-borne opinion, but you make a good point that they are not used to thinking for themselves and will therefore comply with the top down indoctrination.
These polled people answer (if truthfully) according to the information available to them. If their government provide new data, their opinions will change. In comparison, just consider the opinions of US or EU citizens with regard to Covid-19. Even Israel is rowing back on this subject.
This raises a very important point which seems to always be overlooked. These Muslim nations are not ruled by popular consent, making such public input relatively unimportant to the nation’s potential for pursuing peace with Israel, for the most part. Indeed, the concept of governance by consent of the governed is so foreign to these people that they reject it even if they were to be conquered by the west and had such ideas forced upon them – much as we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. Furthermore, the regimes which do rule these nations have for decades pumped vile antisemitic rhetoric upon their public, maintaining public narratives which could only result in such polling results as discussed above. Of course, it is useful for these poorly run regimes to focus their respective public’s enmity upon the hated Jews who are illegitimate colonists, subhuman, evil and abominations needing to be slaughtered. Such national narratives help manage and distract these publics from focusing their attentions upon their own substandard living conditions and lack of a substantive future which in turn serves to help maintain the despotic-totalitarian regimes in power.
Regrettably, even within the Abraham Accords, there is no caveat requiring Israel’s partners to address the dichotomy of national narratives which separate the traditional anti-Israeli teachings and the truth – notably Bahrain I believe has a Memorandum of Understanding addressing the antisemitism in their nation and even accepts the IHRA definition of antisemitism. I recall a rather poignant lecture by Geoffrey Clarfield, who also spoke at the Jordan Option Symposiums (both of them as I recall), where he made a profoundly important point that this dichotomy of narratives between Israel and her allies remains as the greatest challenge to the success of the Abraham Accords. He noted that for the Accords to have any chance at a long term success, their would need to be an agreement between Israel and her allied partners to not only come to an acceptable understanding of what the true history is, but to present it and teach it to their respective publics to remedy the very alarming findings which are present in the above polls, which I personally do not find to be very surprising to be honest.
It should be noted that Mudar intends to address the dichotomy of narratives and to replace the propagandized antisemitic narrative which is, and has been, taught to his people going back thru the last century. Doing so is the only method by which the deep divisions between the Israeli’s and their neighbors might be bridged, and, IMO, this is the most pivotal step which must be successfully taken to even hope to achieve a meaningful and lasting peace. The rash abuse by UAE to literally create an internal incident over the relatively unnoteworthy visit by an Israeli minister to the Temple Mount demonstrates the regrettable potential consequences of maintaining such dichotomous narratives as exists between such allied nations as Israel and the UAE, and this incident was the result of the effects of these warring narratives only at the highest level of govt, ie there was no popular demand leading to the tabling of the UN resolution.
I’m shocked.
What would Ted and others say of
taqiyya”