Over 92% of people in the Arab countries consider Palestine an Arab cause and expressed their solidarity and support to Palestine, according to a recent survey. It was published by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies based in Doha, Qatar on Wednesday, January 10.
The survey was conducted across 16 Arab countries, including in Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank, Palestine (including Jerusalem), with a total of 8,000 respondents during December and the first week of January. The survey was conducted a the three month mark of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, in which Israel has killed over 23,000 Palestinians and wounded around 60,000. Around 80% of 2.3 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced by the war and various UN agencies have reported that massive humanitarian crises are unfolding in the temporary camps housing the displaced people.
The scale of Israeli killing of innocent Palestinian civilians including nearly 10,000 children has caused widespread grief in the Arab region with nearly 97% of the respondents expressing some kind of distress and over 84% claiming it to be “great psychological stress.”
Israel’s brutal massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has caused a massive jump in solidarity towards Palestine among the Arab people. The survey reported that 92% of people now identify Palestine as an Arab cause in comparison to 76% in 2022. This is the highest percentage recorded by the center’s annual survey since its beginning in 2011.
In countries which have signed normalization deals with Israel in recent years or were on the verge of doing so, the percentage of people believing Palestine to be an Arab cause has risen sharply in comparison to 2022.
For example, in Saudi Arabia, which was conducting talks for the normalization with Israel just before the war began in Gaza the percentage rose from 69% to over 95%. The rise in related figures in Morocco (from 50% to 95%), Egypt (from 75% to 94%) and Sudan (from 68% to 91%) is similar.
Egypt was the first Arab country to recognize Israel in 1979. Morocco and Sudan normalized their relations with Israel under the “Abraham Accords” under US pressure in 2021.
Reacting to the growing tendency of their governments to recognize Israel, 84% of respondents rejected any such policy. Significantly, in Saudi Arabia the percentage of people opposed to recognizing Israel as a state rose from 38% in 2022 to 68% now.
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood a legitimate act of resistance, say respondents
According to the findings of the survey, over 89% of all respondents believe that the attacks carried out by the Palestinian resistance forces including Hamas inside Israel on October 7 was a legitimate act against the decades of crimes of the Israeli occupation.
Out of these around 35% of the respondents identified “continued Israeli occupation” of Palestinian lands as the reason behind the attacks in which nearly 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 250 others were taken hostage.
Another 24% held that the main reason behind the attack on Israel was to defend the sanctity of the Al-Aqsa mosque, which has been repeatedly stormed by both illegal settlers, Israeli state officials, and Israeli army in recent years.
Around 8% of the respondents believed that the real reason behind the Al-Aqsa Flood was the long-standing Israeli blockade and siege of Gaza.
Israel has imposed a punishing blockade on Gaza since 2006 restricting the movement of people and essential goods in the small enclave converting it, as per the UN, into the world’s largest open air prison. The UN has found that the Israeli blockade caused massive deterioration of Gaza’s economy and people’s living standards.
Rejecting Israel’s claims of victimhood, 69% of all the respondents believe that Palestinian cause is just with or without Hamas’ armed resistance with just 23% saying that Palestinian cause needs to be peaceful.
The overwhelming majority of the respondents rejected Israeli and western media’s attempts to compare Hamas with terrorist groups such as ISIS. Over 82% of respondents believe that reporting of the Israeli war in Gaza by the US media has been biased towards Israel.
The US and Israel are dangerous for regional peace and security
More than 75% of the respondents had critical views about the role western countries such as the US, France, the UK, and Germany have played in the region since the Israeli war in Gaza began.
More than 94% of all respondents believed that the US had played a negative role in the war with 84% believing that its role was very bad.
The US has not only supported the indiscriminate bombardments and ground offensive in Gaza since October 7, calling it Israel’s right to “self-defense”, but it has also provided millions of dollars of ammunition to aid the Israeli war efforts. The US has also prevented international institutions from acting against Israeli genocide by repeatedly using its veto in the UN Security Council.
The report on the survey notes that, “respondents demonstrated a near consensus (81%) in their belief that the US government is not serious about working to establish a Palestinian state” in the territories occupied in 1967 namely, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza as has been its stated objective.
77% of all the respondents believe that the US and Israel are the biggest source of threat to security in the Arab region.
