WASHINGTON: Arabs believe the Obama administration has little commitment to a Palestinian state, should not intervene militarily in Syria and mostly failed to support Egypt’s interim leaders, a new poll released yesterday showed.
Five years after President Barack Obama’s landmark speech in Cairo aimed at re-setting ties with the Arab world, the poll revealed that while support for Obama, which had fallen in recent years, is on the rise again among most Arabs it still remains below an average of 50 percent.
Zogby Research Services polled about 7,000 people across six nations as well as the Palestinian territories in May for its annual survey, focusing on pressing issues facing the Arab world in 2014.
“In most Arab countries, attitudes toward the US are back to where they were in 2009, and are higher than the Bush-era lows,” the poll says, referring to the unpopularity of former president George W Bush.
The poll found most Arabs “believe that the United States is not even-handed in its approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making.”
And even though they cite continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as one of the biggest obstacles to peace and stability in the Arab world, most “have very little confidence that the United States is committed to an independent Palestinian state.”
In Jordan, some 95 percent of those polled said they were “not confident” the US wanted to see the creation of a Palestinian state.
Three years into the war in Syria, people in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and the Palestinian territories broadly support America’s bid for a negotiated end to the fighting.
The majority also believed that the US should “give greater attention to the humanitarian crisis of the Syrian refugees.”
There was a marked lack of support for US intervention to help the rebels battling to oust President Bashar Al Assad, including giving weapons to the opposition or air strikes against the Syrian military. In Morocco and Lebanon, 70 percent of those polled believed the US should “leave Syria alone, because it is none of the US business.”
On Egypt, many felt the US administration had shown greater support for ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak than for his elected successor Islamist Mohammed Mursi or for the interim military-led government.
AFP
