The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East (Telhami, Shibley)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Telhami, Shibley. The World Through Arab Eyes: Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East. Basic Books, 2013.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction: Two Decades of Studying Arab Public Opinion
the key to understanding the region still lies in looking closely at the strongly held values and beliefs of people in the region and how they define themselves.
apprehensive about an impending era of American dominance, without the counterweight of the Soviet Union. To their minds, America now would be free to intensify its support for Israel, leaving Arabs still more vulnerable.
“Arabs are sick of their governments pathetically begging the U.S. to plead with Israel to please let them have peace.”
Reading what he felt was a highly anti-American Arab public sentiment, Arafat voiced his strong belief that pro-American Arab leaders would soon face a moment of reckoning. Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people were true Arab nationalists who genuinely cared about the Palestinian people, he said, and both were gaining widespread Arab public admiration.
resentment of American foreign policy over the Arab-Israeli issue was perhaps at the highest level since the late 1950s, following the Suez crisis.
not particularly surprising that the king of Saudi Arabia and the president of Egypt would see in Saddam Hussein’s ambitions a greater threat to them than the threat of an angry public—
In the absence of Arab public opinion polls, was I misreading the general public sentiments, based merely on meetings with a limited number of people and the media? And in what way is public opinion a factor in the decisions and behavior of rulers, if it is a factor at all?
how Arab rulers factored in public opinion
Arab governments’ near monopoly of the media
important differences existed among Arabs from region to region and, not surprisingly, country to country.
hypotheses about the circumstances under which public opinion produces measurable public action,
something else was already noticeable about public opinion in the region, especially elite opinion: a more uniform worldview.
These changes made me realize that this information revolution would affect not only Arab public opinion and the government’s ability to control it, but potentially how Arabs identified themselves as Arabs and Muslims (and Christians), as citizens of their countries, and citizens of the world. And identity is a key factor in forming opinion.
importance of the “issue public,” or that segment of the public that ranks a particular issue high in its priorities.
the intensity of an opinion matters more than raw numbers about opinions themselves.
Scholars and analysts inevitably relied on limited information when describing “Arab public opinion”
Zogby International.
leaders controlled politics and sometimes even aspects of society,
decade-long study of public-opinion in the Arab world.
two events gave added urgency to our work and lent immeasurable importance to our findings. The first, of course, was 9/ 11.
how little we in the West really knew about the opinions of Arabs,
assessing American public opinion toward Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Eastern issues broadly. Some of those polls were conducted before
tempting to conclude that the Arab uprisings have rendered the region a clean slate. But although the circumstances in the region have certainly changed drastically, not all opinions have migrated with them.
One of the assumptions about the Arab uprisings has been that they are driven principally by internal issues, not foreign policy issues. Economic deprivation does count, as does freedom from authoritarianism. But the Arab public notion of “dignity” cannot be separated from personal and collective aspirations, which in turn cannot be extricated from the way Arabs see the outside world and their place in it. In the end this drive to dignity is tied to broader national and international aspirations
“most admired world leader” there was the late Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein,
The answer lies not only in the relationship between citizen and ruler, but also in the relationship between Arabs and the outside world.
their aspirations remain connected to the aspirations of other Arabs and Muslims, and to a vision of their collective place in the world. Above all, they want to hold their heads high.
1. Arab Identities
The solidarity, the pride, the optimism were infectious.
Their chant then was as mesmerizing as it was memorable: “Raise your head high, you are an Egyptian.” Similar forceful expressions of restored dignity were to be heard all across the Arab world, in Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere.
much about the causes of the Arab uprisings and still more about how Arabs define themselves.
uprisings were in the first place about karamah, or dignity, and about ending a pervasive sense of humiliation. The dignity they hoped to restore was not simply in the relationship between rulers and ruled, but also in the relationship between their nations and the outside world. Those two relationships cannot be easily separated, because many Arabs saw their repressive rulers as subcontractors of Western masters.
citizens of their states, Arab and Muslim. But the degree to which they favor one identity over the other changes over time, and an understanding of these changes can provide clues to core Arab aspirations—
they also sought eish, or bread
not because of a historically new type of economic deprivation or new modes of repression unknown by Arabs in decades past. The most striking events of that decade were the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations
the violent consequences beginning in 2000, the confrontation between the United States and Muslim countries following the tragedy of 9/ 11, the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq, the bloody battles between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and, closer to home for Egyptians, the Israel-Gaza war in 2008–2009.
their government had taken positions at odds with public opinion and contrary to how Egyptians envisioned their role in the region.
crisis of identity—brought about, not by confusion about who they are, but by a role in the world undertaken by their rulers in their name that looked nothing like who they are.
Arabs despised their rulers for their authoritarianism but also for their subservience to Western powers
to conclude that this was only a national, not also a Pan-Arab, moment is dangerously mistaken.
identity in the Arab world and what Arabs mean when they identify themselves as “Arab,” or “Muslim,” or in terms of their country.
although most Arabs are active Muslims—people for whom religion plays a vital role in daily life—they do not always identify themselves by their religion. Besides, being a “Muslim” is not necessarily about being religious.
“What kind of atheist,” the reply comes, “a Christian atheist or a Muslim atheist?”
emphasis is contextual:
In some cases, “Arab” and “Muslim” are simply so intertwined that separating them is almost impossible. In Morocco, where “Christian” could mean “Western” and where, unlike in Egypt or the Levant, the concept of a “Christian Arab” appears foreign, the terms “Muslim” and “Arab” may be interchangeable.
shifted from embracing the secular nationalist movement to jumping on the bandwagon of Islamist groups.
Sometimes these are profound transformations of beliefs. Sometimes they are choices about the most effective instrument to attain individual and collective aims.
collective aspirations help determine the relative power of identities
Yet for the man who provoked the Suez crisis, it was hardly a disaster. In Arab eyes, Egyptian president Gamal Abd al-Nasser stood up to France, Britain, and Israel and managed to survive and get away with nationalizing the Suez Canal.
Nasser was the preferred leader, followed by two non-Arab leaders known for their anticolonialism, Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi of India. Jump ahead another eight years, to 2011, and the most admired world leader for Saudis (not including Saudi leaders themselves) was the secular Arab nationalist (and dead) Saddam Hussein of Iraq, probably because he was seen to have stood up to the United States and Iran,
neither of the top-ranked leaders was specifically Islamist.
when the candidate of the ultra-religious Salafi Islamist party was disqualified, many of the party’s stronghold districts voted not for other Islamist candidates but for the Nasserist secular Arab nationalist candidate, Abdin Sabahi.
some Egyptians an assertion of an Islamic identity is about faith, but for many others it is merely asserting the right to be Muslim, the right to accept Sharia law, plus a measure of defiance in the face of perceived Western assault. Muslims simply do not want to have to apologize for who they are, for their faith and for all that it entails.
Whenever identification with the state is superseded by a combination of Arab/ Muslim identities, this creates what I call “legitimacy interdependence.”
information revolution has been the degree to which it can effect identity change.
blurred the difference between country and rulers. The term Addawlah, or al-Dawlah, “the state” in Arabic, is sometimes used by Arabs simply to refer to those in power. Tellingly, it equally can be used to refer to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and corruption.
rally public support against a perceived common exterior threat.
will rally behind any of these identities when it is assaulted. But they will rally even more behind the particular identity that shows the most promise of delivering what they aspire to.
the decade following the Iraq war, identification with country was superseded by transnational identity (a combination of Arab/ Muslim) in every year and almost every country; the exception was Lebanon.
not only has identification with country declined, but it also is lower than each of the other two dominant identities, Muslim and Arab.
consequential for people’s expectations about their own governments,
half or more said they expected their governments to do what is good for either Muslims or Arabs—which obviously places foreign policy on center stage.
rise of a transnational Arab media.
those watching transnational media outlets like Al Jazeera have tended to shift away from a country identity toward an Arab identity, while Muslim identity has mostly remained about the same.
started with an American tragedy that increased the tension between the West and Muslim-majority countries, and moved from one destructive war to another. All the while, unelected Arab rulers at best seemed inept and helpless, and at worst were seen as collaborators with the public’s enemies.
2. The Information Revolution and Public Opinion
widening gap between governments and publics in the region,
absence of opportunities for legitimate political expression could lead some to violence.
translating public anger into mass political mobilization requires effective political parties or social institutions, or at least charismatic leaders. Tunisia and Egypt had none of these at the outset.
“During the week before Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, the total rate of tweets from Egypt—and around the world—about political change in that country ballooned from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day.
quarter of all Internet users said they had acquired access only in the previous year.
Cybermedia, in short, were not the cause of the revolts but the tools that enabled them.
decade and a half ago, most Arabs received their news from government-controlled media within their own borders. By 2010, Arabs in every country I polled got their information from sources that originated outside their borders.
consistently identified Al Jazeera TV as their first choice for news.
availability of multiple sources of information from outside state boundaries.
people watch international news on the TV channel that best reflects their views and
their initial trust is established, viewers are likely to also trust the station’s coverage of issues that the viewer has no independent way to confirm.
the short term, identity influences media selection; in the long term, media also influences identity.
3. The Network Americans Love to Hate: Al Jazeera
Arabic unified a media market of some 350 million people in twenty-two countries and beyond.
Sawt al-Arab Radio (“ Voice of the Arabs”), sponsored by Egypt to spread Nasser’s Pan-Arabist message in the 1950s and 1960s.
Saudi royal family took the lead by purchasing popular Arabic newspapers and distributing them across the region, and
hoped to take away viewership from stations critical of him and of Qatar.
alternative American TV station, called Al Hurra,
popular Arabic outlets succeeded because they reflected the hearts and minds of the region on core issues, not because they shaped them.
Like Nasser’s Sawt al-Arab, Al Jazeera first and foremost catered to Arab hearts, but unlike Sawt al-Arab it provided more timely information and far more diversity of views.
has been bold in ensuring presentation of multiple views, including presenting Israeli views dating back to the 1990s, when few other Arab stations dared do so, as well as airing Bin Laden tapes, Iranian views, and hosting or covering speeches and news conferences of American officials—including then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.
ideological position of the emir. Al Thani once described himself to me as a “Nasserist,”
Arabs were overwhelmingly sympathetic with the Syrian people against the Assad regime, they were heavily divided on the wisdom of external intervention, which Al Jazeera seemed to favor, increasingly reflecting the foreign policy position of the Qatari government on this issue.
the majority of Arabs who use the Internet go principally to Arabic-language websites.
4. Incitement, Empathy, and Opinion
AFTER 9/ 11, AMERICANS DISCOVERED pervasive anger with the United States among Arabs and Muslims globally, even among those who had no sympathy for those attacking American soil.
speeches by Osama bin Laden, including those that specifically called for violence against the United States; graphic pictures of Arab and Muslim victims of the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Palestinian victims of Israeli offensives in the West Bank and Gaza; provocative images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison; and stories of American soldiers flushing Qurans down the toilet.
to argue that incitement is a primary cause of conflict, or that it could be significantly reduced through diplomatic or educational efforts while conflict rages, is to confuse symptoms and causes.
inability of American Al Hurra TV to air speeches by Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah during the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006—congressional funds would have dried up if it had—meant that few Arabs were watching Al Hurra.
Negative coverage reinforces, but does not cause, preexisting perceptions.
A commission mandated by Congress and appointed by the Bush administration to explore effective American public diplomacy noted that perceptions of America in the Muslim world are principally a function of substantive American foreign policies, not of public relations, even if the latter can help at the margin.
highlights the suffering of the other side actually provokes more resentment than empathy in conflict.
in conflict, empathy is superseded by fear of giving advantages to the enemy—
less likely to be resentful tended to be women and the less educated—
Reading English-language Internet sites had no meaningful effect on empathy or resentment.
Only 10 percent of Jewish respondents expressed empathy with the suffering of the refugees,
Palestinian attitudes toward Israelis improved, not from hearing the Israeli narrative but from having the Israelis merely hear the Palestinian story. There was no measurable impact on Israelis. And a month after the experiment, its effect on the participants disappeared altogether, as participants reverted to old attitudes. The scholars’ conclusion was that the asymmetry of power, perceived and real, is a factor in the way each side reacts.
5. The Arab Prism of Pain
THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT ISSUE remains the prism of pain through which most Arabs view the world.
The conflict represents not only the painful experience of Arabs losing Palestine in 1948 and facing another devastating defeat in the 1967 war; it is also a reminder of a contemporary Arab history full of dashed aspirations and deeply humiliating experiences, usually tied to the West.
If the Arab awakening is in the first place about restoring dignity, about raising Arab heads high in the world, then the Palestinian-Israeli conflict represents dignity’s antithesis.
2001 the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah Bin Abd al-Aziz (who later became king), turned down President George W. Bush’s invitation to visit the White House and made it clear that the cause was his anger with American policy on the Palestine issue.
was rare that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was raised. Now it is the first, second, or third item on nearly every agenda of every country I visit.
prism of pain through which they see the world.
2006 Chirac polled second, behind Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Those who expressed sympathy for the Hezbollah-led opposition outnumbered those who expressed sympathy with the majority government led by Sunni prime minister Fouad Siniora by a ratio of 3 to 1
this divide is generally trumped by the Arab-Israeli conflict,
Though Erdogan was briefly surpassed in 2010 by Venezuela’s late president, Hugo Chavez
Arabs see Israeli power as largely deriving from American power. Indeed, it’s hard to find criticism of Israel in the past decade that didn’t also include criticism of the United States.
Israel is an instrument of American “imperialism.”
Although Arabs have continued to say that the Palestinian issue is central to them, their level of mobilization behind it is much higher in times of war and crisis, and much more muted in times of peacemaking.
Arab people ranked Palestine higher in their priorities than their governments did.
conflict is itself an embodiment of the sense of humiliation and dependence.
6. How Arabs View Their Uprisings
By a solid but not overwhelming majority, most Arabs see the uprisings as the outcome of the plight of ordinary people, while 16 percent believed they are driven by opposition groups, and 19 percent see the hands of foreign powers at work
Regarding the Syrian revolt, 86 percent of those polled in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates said they sympathized with the rebels, while only 9 percent sympathized with the government. In Yemen, 89 percent supported the revolt and only 5 percent expressed support for the government.
Mistrust of the aims of Western powers runs deep, and even as many Arabs were desperate to get help to stop the killing of innocents, their views of foreign intervention were ambivalent. There was one early exception to this ambivalence: Libya.
The unprecedented Arab League action of calling on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya was in part out of deference to pervasive Arab public opinion on this issue.
Arab commentaries, including headlines on Al Jazeera, were beginning to criticize the West for walking away from their “responsibilities.” In some ways, one can say that the U.S. attempt to make the Arab revolutions not about Washington early on helped reduce the suspicion that Washington and the West were intervening for the wrong reasons.
pervasive sense in the Arab world that Arab and Muslim countries were incapable of intervening effectively, especially in times of revolution, because most lacked effective military power, and the one country that did, Egypt, was in the middle of its own revolution.
So even the clearest case of Arabs desperately seeking to remove a dictator—Libya and Qaddafi—never translated into overwhelming Arab public support for Western intervention.
“Arab states are still condemning verbally and not doing anything. The result? The West has intervened. So don’t blame the West”;
Arab attitudes toward these powers and the extent of trust in their intentions went beyond the Arab uprisings.
given the overwhelmingly negative views of the United States in the Arab world, the Arab verdict on the American handling of the uprisings is relatively positive.
They want change, freedom, and dignity, and are prepared to pay a high price for them. The United States would do well to stay on the right side of this historical tide.
7. Trends in Arab Attitudes Toward the United States
During George W. Bush’s presidency, there was considerable focus, at home and abroad, on the degree to which Bush’s Christian faith and that of influential evangelicals influenced U.S. foreign policy, imbuing it with a crusading spirit. This played squarely into the hands of the minority of Muslims who prefer to frame foreign policy issues as a struggle between Islam and the “crusaders.”
memorable and historic speech in Cairo in June 2009.
policies his beliefs might translate into—the template through which all U.S. presidents are judged.
basic Arab public evaluation of the United States didn’t dramatically change in 2009 from the previous year, with 77 percent expressing unfavorable views.
Bottom line: For Arabs, it is always about the issues.
Arabs care about many things, but they view Washington in terms of a limited set of issues—and no single policy is more important than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
United States is an anchor of a political order they do not like,
Less than two weeks after the 9/ 11 tragedy, President Bush used a joint session of Congress to explain the attitudes of militants who launched the attacks—a description seen by many in the Arab world (and by some in the United States) as implicating Arab and Muslim people more generally: “They hate our freedoms.”
second Iraq war was more damaging to America’s image in the Arab world than any single American policy since the end of the cold war.
highlights the two issues that have defined Arab attitudes toward America more than any other—
American presence in the Gulf region
the 2003 invasion of a sovereign Arab country
despite overwhelming and passionate Arab public opposition to the war, the United States used incentives and threats to win the cooperation of Arab governments in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Seen from this perspective, the war represented utter collective Arab humiliation.
Between the beginning of the war in 2003 and the start of the Arab uprisings in 2010, Arab views of the United States were distinctively and consistently negative, averaging over 80 percent unfavorable.
much of the improvement in attitudes toward the United States and the Obama administration happened in the middle—among those who shifted from “somewhat unfavorable” views to those who said they had “somewhat favorable” views.
Was Never About Values Arab attitudes toward the United States were never at their core about values as such.
It isn’t that Arabs say, “We don’t like American values; therefore we reject American policies.” It is the opposite: They reject American policies and therefore question American values and whether America stands for what it professes.
overwhelming majority of Arab respondents specified U.S. policies, not U.S. values. On average, roughly 75 percent chose “policy” while only 10 percent opted for values
concern about protecting Arab and Muslim culture and religion, even identity, is completely predictable.
radical Muslim elements, that eschew all Western influence and seek a totalitarian, Taliban-like Islamic rule, but they are still a minority.
no evidence that such groups have a large number of adherents in the Arab world, and there is bountiful evidence to the contrary.
“confronts America” and that it “stands up for Muslim causes such as the Palestinian cause.” Those who embraced Al Qaeda because of its aims to establish a Taliban-like Islamic state or because they liked the group’s methods of operation were a small minority.
variations are also present, up to a point, in the Arab attitudes toward the United States and its policies.
In a 2008 poll, only 9 to 16 percent of respondents in Egypt and Saudi Arabia expressed favorable views of the United States,
while 73 percent in both countries said their attitude was “very unfavorable.” In comparison, attitudes in Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates tended to be more favorable, even though only between 22 percent and 26 percent expressed favorable views.
although fewer than 5 percent of Arabs are Christian, a majority of Arabs in America are Christian.
Every year since 2003, Arabs ranked controlling oil and protecting Israel highest as driving forces of American foreign policy, followed by weakening the Muslim world and regional dominance.
liked its people but didn’t like its government or its foreign policy. We did not measure this over time, but this certainly holds together anecdotally,
But in the past decade there has been a change.
When Americans reelected Bush in 2004,
What I found is that attitudes toward the American people were indeed differentiated from attitudes toward “the United States,” but on the whole they were more divided and, in 2010, more negative than conventional wisdom supposed:
“What two steps by the United States would improve your views of America most?” The top four answers all pertained to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the presence of American forces in the Gulf region
Sobhi as the new chief of staff of the Egyptian army in the summer of 2012, it came to light that when Sobhi was a student at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania, he “argued in a paper that the American military presence in the Middle East and its ‘one sided’ support of Israel were fueling hatred toward the United States and miring it in an unwinnable global war with Islamist militants.” Sobhi’s views are widely shared across the Arab world and certainly in Egypt.
Israelis had grown comfortable and secure in Bush’s world, which emphasized unilateralism, seemingly linked Islam and terrorism in the discourse, and, in practice, deemphasized the Arab-Israeli issue for much of the time.
The emergent interpretation adopted by the Bush administration—“ They hate us for our values”—
8. Attitudes Toward Iran
Without any prompting, the vast majority of Arabs, year after year, consistently identified Israel first and the United States second. Iran has ranked a distant third
Shiite-Sunni overtones of the war could not be ignored, with Iraq fearing that Iran would assist and help empower Iraq’s Shiite majority against a secular government dominated by Sunni elites
But the emphasis was principally on the Arab-Persian divide, not Sunni-Shiite,
Clinton administration in what was termed “dual containment”
The 2003 Iraq war definitively changed this shifting strategic environment. The second U.S.-led invasion of the country completely eliminated Iraq from the region’s military equation.
Khomeini’s success in overthrowing a despised regime and standing up to Washington inspired Sunni Islamists across the Arab world.
any sense that Iran threatens Arabs has been dwarfed almost to extinction by the extent to which Israel and the United States
Israel and the United States supersede Iran as a threat even among the people of Gulf Arab
Shiite-Sunni issue has risen in the priorities of Egyptians since the Arab uprisings came in
9. Attitudes Toward Democracy, Women, and Religion
most were seeking dignity, freedom, and democracy.
like most people, they also want other things beyond democracy.
America’s democracy promotion efforts were a fig leaf for wars designed to control oil and help Israel.
Nor was any Arab or even Islamic state among the top five countries identified by Arabs as most democratic. Not only were all the countries on the list Western states, but the United States was always included—even in 2004, when talk of a civilizational clash
believe that Western countries offer more democracy and freedom for their people than any Arab or Muslim states,
Arab public never believed that the Bush administration’s efforts to spread democracy in the region were sincere.
war was more about oil, Israel, and weakening Muslims than democracy;
is hard to know exactly how many Iraqis died in the war, but estimates range from 100,000 to several hundred thousand. Hundreds of thousands more were wounded. Over 4 million Iraqis were displaced, or more than 13 percent of the Iraqi population—half of them outside Iraq. This is aside from the deprivation, absence of personal security, and economic devastation. To most Arabs, telling them that the invasion was good for Iraq is an insult of major proportions, even if many disliked Saddam Hussein and his regime. If this was democracy, Arabs wanted nothing of it.
decline of an important Arab state, thus a weakened Arab world, and evaluated the state of affairs for Iraqi citizens largely through the prism of Sunni Iraqis.
In fact, to the extent that the Iraq war helped rouse the Arab public into action, it was more in observing their utter helplessness during a decade that mattered most for the future of the people in the region. Their voices were never heard, and for that they blamed America as much as they blamed their own governments for being subservient to Washington. And to add insult to injury, they were being told that it was all for their own good, that democracy was on the way. Democracy was on the way, but for different reasons altogether.
On the one hand, Arabs greatly admire Turkey for its democratic government and leaders. On the other hand, Turkey was listed by almost none of our respondents as one of the top democratic countries in the world. My interpretation of this is that Arabs want democracy and freedom for sure, but they also hope to balance it with other things they want.
Arabs broadly view Western democracy and freedom favorably, do they not necessarily choose any of these Western countries as a model?
Egyptians and other Arabs are looking for a democratic model that incorporates aspects relevant for their identity, particularly the Islamic character
to understand how literally Arabs want to see Sharia applied in practice.
83 percent said they prefer applying the spirit of Sharia but with adaptation to modern times.
extent to which the Arab public wants to see clergy play a role in politics. And the results show that Arabs are widely divided over the issue,
there is overwhelming support in every country for more gender equality.
work of Michael Ross, a professor at UCLA, who has suggested that women’s political rights in the Middle East are connected more to the political economies of the Middle East than to religion or culture. Ross argues that women in the Middle East lag behind women in other regions in making political and economic gains principally because “oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence.
10. Global Perspectives
ONE MANIFEST ARAB PUBLIC ASPIRATION since the end of the cold war has been to counter American power, which is seen to have empowered Israel and limited the prospects of Arab influence in the Gulf and elsewhere.
But there is a second, related, political desire through which Arabs view the larger world: a craving for Arab advancement and empowerment.
for most Arabs, independence did not equate with true freedom.
has since been hard for Arabs to separate Israel’s humiliating victory from Western domination.
popular conspiracy theorists nonetheless suggested that the West and Israel had somehow “lured” Iraq into attacking Iran to weaken two promising Muslim states;
roots in a century of very real conspiracies and unilateral action against Arab interests.
1967 France shifted its policy almost entirely. That shift began with a decision to stop supplying Israel with weapons, after which the United States moved to become Israel’s key supplier.
In the end, Arab preference for a Turkish superpower is less about the nation’s democracy and more about its embrace of Arab and Muslim aspirations and its projected ability to go its own way, to stand up to Israel on Gaza and to the United States on Iraq, and, as a Muslim country, to persist in the face of its rejected membership in the European Union, despite its role in NATO.
Arabs are generally passing judgment about the world through two separate prisms, one of which seeks a balance to those threatening them while the other searches for a model to admire and emulate if they want to acquire their own independent power.
Above all, Arabs hunger for Arab power, Arab progress, Arab democracy, and an Arab state that would help take Arabs to what they perceive to be their rightful place among nations.
the one place that captured the public’s imagination more than any other was Tahrir Square.
11. From 9/11 to Tahrir Square: The Arabs Through American Eyes
ordinary Arabs risking their lives for freedom
The 1990s saw unprecedented American power and influence. Over ten years, the United States basked in the glow of having won the cold war, successfully confronted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by building an extraordinary and unprecedented international coalition, and then enjoyed an enormous economic expansion. It is hard to find a decade when America reigned more supreme. But 9/ 11, as we all recall, shattered the country’s confidence and imbued the American public with an instant sense of vulnerability and helplessness. Within days of that event, a congressional leader said to me during urgent consultations what many others quietly feared: “This can defeat us.”
Most respondents in my 2011 poll viewed the conflict between Islam and the West as driven more by political than cultural factors,
those who did attach great weight to the issue were more likely to act on it through voting or campaign contributions and tended to favor supporting Israel over the Palestinians, by ratios ranging from 2 to 1 to 6 to 1 over the years
passionate support for Israel in recent years has not been in the Democratic Party, which is the home of the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans, but in the Republican Party, the home of an evangelical Christian
12. Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East
Iran’s hand was present but also exaggerated in the Bahraini uprisings
Despite Heikal’s long-standing support for Arab self-determination, in August 2011 he argued that the Arab revolutions were “not an Arab Spring but a new Sykes-Picot deal to divide the Arab world and share its resources.”
Eight conclusions about how Arab public opinion will help reshape the unfolding political course in the Arab world.
· First, the processes unleashed by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are not episodic and are likely to endure.
· Second, the uprisings and their consequences will play themselves out differently in each country, and the key factors in most instances will be the relative ethnic and religious homogeneity of the populace, relative wealth of the state, and the government’s flexibility in providing credible steps for reform.
· Third, no government in the Arab world is fully immune to revolt, including the oil-rich countries.
· Fourth, while the importance of public opinion is increasing, public sentiment is never the only factor in determining political outcomes or directions of policy.
· Fifth, the short-to medium-term course of the uprisings is bound to lead to some reevaluation of the initial assumptions about their nature and their causes. The Arab public immediately recognized the power of peaceful demonstrations, as demonstrators in Yemen, Egypt, and Syria deliberately chanted in the face of government forces, “silmiyya, silmiyya” (peaceful, peaceful)
· Sixth, the outcome of the uprisings is at least in part a function of regional forces,
· Seventh, more than any other factor, what happens in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the next decade will affect not only Arab aspirations and the pursuit of democracy in the region but also the shape of regional alliances and the relations between Arabs and the rest of the world.
· Eighth, Arab identity and sense of threat will continue to be defined in relation to Israel and the United States. The most consequential measures of this sense of threat remain the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the presence of American forces in the region.
But what those who take the lead count on is the deep sense of mistrust of American intentions pervasive among Arabs.
Every good U.S. act, even when well intentioned, will be attributed to sinister aims.
zero-sum game so long as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains unresolved
But with all the unpredictability of the Arab uprisings, one can be confident about the forces at play, particularly about the rising Arab public empowerment and its importance as a factor in local, regional, and international politics. Even as many Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians, and other Arabs strive for a better life and more freedom for themselves at home, their aspirations remain connected to the aspirations of other Arabs and Muslims, and to a vision of their collective place in the world. Above all, they want to hold their heads high.