How They Do It– Netanyahu claims '30% of Iranians' want ties with Israel

Survey commissioned by Israel’s Foreign Ministry also says 48% of Iraqis and 30% of Saudis back relations — shows ‘gigantic change’

Times of Israel

The Arab world is increasingly ready to embrace Israel, according to a poll published Sunday by the Foreign Ministry which purports to show remarkably warm attitudes to Israel in several enemy Arab states. But the way the survey’s key questions were formulated, and the way in which the results were presented, are deeply flawed, pollsters said, with one of them dismissing the Foreign Ministry’s effort as “propaganda” meant to advance the government’s narrative of Israel’s rising popularity.

According to a press release issued by the Foreign Ministry about the poll, a staggering 48 percent of respondents in Iraq, 42% in the United Arab Emirates and 30% in Saudi Arabia and Iran are interested in their governments establishing some kind of “relations” with the Jewish state.

Israeli leaders and officials led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the numbers as testimony to Israel’s increasing global popularity and a harbinger of normalization with the Jewish state’s erstwhile enemies in the Arab world.

The omnibus poll, commissioned by the Foreign Ministry and carried out by the Canadian-owned company RIWI, was conducted in October. Random internet surfers from 54 countries were asked if they wanted to participate in an online poll, and the answers by about 1,000 people in each country served as the basis for an analysis presented at Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting. The respondents were unaware that the survey was commissioned by the Israeli government, officials said.

“The main finding is that in 47 out of 54 countries, a majority of the people there believe that their country would benefit from links with Israel. This is a gigantic change,” Netanyahu proclaimed at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, where senior Foreign Ministry officials presented the survey’s findings to the ministers.

“What is also interesting is that [among] half of the public in the countries in the Middle East that were reviewed, the assets and strength of Israel are appreciated and they believe that their country could benefit from links with Israel,” Netanyahu added.

Overall, according to the poll, some 47% of respondents from Arab countries and Iran said they believe their countries would benefit from some “kind of relations” with Israel.

Moreover, 51% of respondents from the Middle East consider Israel a “power” or an “asset.”

In Africa, that number is at 91%, and in North America 82%.

“When I say again and again that Israel is a rising global power, I know what I am talking about,” said Netanyahu, who is also foreign minister. “Israel is a sought-after, developed and strong country, and even the citizens of countries with which we do not have official relations understand the benefit of relations with Israel. We are going from strength to strength and developing even more links.”

Specifically, according to the poll, half of respondents from Sudan said they were interested in their country establishing either overt or covert ties with Jerusalem. In Iraq, the figure was 48%, in Morocco 43%, and in the United Arab Emirates 42%.

Thirty percent of respondents from Saudi Arabia and Iran were in favor of their respective regimes establishing some kind of relations with the Jewish state. Less than one-third of Lebanese respondents (32%) were interested in any sort of relations with Israel, a figure that stood at 20% in Algeria.

‘It’s propaganda’

According to the information sent to reporters Sunday evening, the survey was done with a representative sample and has a margin of error of 3.3%.

But relying on an online survey to learn about public opinion in the Arab world is problematic, as in many Arab countries, it is mostly young, urban people with higher-than-average education who make regular use of the internet, said Tamar Hermann, the academic director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttmann Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.

While omnibus online surveys may provide a sample representative enough to allow conclusions in the Western world, for the Middle East that is not the case, she asserted.

Even more problematic, however, is the fact that the Foreign Ministry asked the question about possible relations with Israel “in a biased manner,” Hermann added.

The question posed to respondents in the Arab world was: “What kind of relations would you like [your country] to have with Israel?”

The survey then asked respondents to choose between five possible answers: four that suggest some sort of relations, and only one that rejects the idea entirely.