Justice for Palestine

Efraim Karsh
Middle East Forum
The Karsh Chronicle
16 August '10

"To a man with a hammer," Mark Twain famously quipped, "everything looks like a nail." To a propagandist, everything looks like a poll.

No sooner had my latest New York Times op-ed piece, The Palestinians, Alone, been published than my mailbox was swamped with polls of all hues aimed at proving the depth of Arab compassion for the Palestinians.

One such poll claimed that 86% percent of Arabs were "prepared for peace" with Israel within the pre-June 1967 borders (these Arabs obviously forgot to consult the Palestinians, as only 21 percent of them named the "right of return" - a red line for all Palestinian factions without exception - as a most important concern). Another poll, held by the Brookings Institution in conjunction with Zogby International, reported a precipitous drop in Arab confidence in Barack Obama's Middle East policy (as if Obama had not distinguished himself, in his short term in office, as the most anti-Israeli U.S. president in living memory).

James Zogby himself, among others, felt compelled to attempt to rebut my article. "There are bad polls, and then there are bad interpretations of polls," he wrote in the Huffington Post. "Putting them together (i.e. a bad interpretation of a bad poll) can create a mess of misinformation."

The "bad poll" in question is a recent survey for the al-Arabiya television network, noted in my article, which found a staggering 71 percent of Arab respondents had no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. And the "bad interpretation" is my presumed failure to recognize that this was not a fully scientific poll but rather an "online vote," which didn't refer to the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks but rather to the "Middle East peace process."

It is arguable of course that an "online-vote" by 8844 respondents (more than twice the size of the Brookings/Zogby poll), answering one straightforward question, might be more accurate and less susceptible to manipulation than "scientifically" crafted surveys purposively choosing their target audiences; or that ordinary Arabs, living as they do in one of the least democratic parts of the world, will be more candid in the relative obscurity of the web than in the presence of a pollster knocking on their front door or contacting them by phone.

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