The Arab Street Speaks

Remember the Arab street. If you don’t you can tune in to some of the idiotic statements offered by one John Kerry and other serious foreign policy mavens, both left and right.

They told us that if ever we moved the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Arab street would rise up and smite us. They also told us that it would be impossible to have anything like a peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors unless we first solved the Palestianian problem.

Well, that one has also gone the way of all illusions.

Now, a new poll suggests that the people in most of Israel’s Arab neighbors are in favor of normalizing relations with Israel. They pay lip service to the Palestinian cause, but they understand full well that their interest lies with good relations with Israel-- and that does not merely mean military cooperation. It also means commercial and scientific exchanges. As the old saying goes: who would have thunk it?

Since this poll suggests that the Trump administration policy in the Middle East is succeeding, most American news media has scrupulously ignored the story. 

We find it in The Washington Examiner. 

In a surprise that experts didn’t see coming, most Arabs in countries that would be affected by President Trump’s Middle East peace plan endorse the pathway to normalized relations with Israel.

In the survey, a remarkable 7 in 10 people in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan said they also feel that normalization is coming despite what Palestinian leaders do to resist peace with the Jewish state.

Apparently, the Arab street is no longer quite so all-in with the Palestinian cause. Listening to our foreign policy establishment you would never have known it.

“Such findings would have seemed preposterous 5 or 10 years ago,” said a report on the findings in Middle East expert Joel Rosenberg’s All Arab News.

The poll, done by James Zogby, founder of Zogby Research Services and president of the Arab American Institute, raised the prospect that Saudi Arabia, the key player in the region and a top target of Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump adviser Jared Kushner in this year’s negotiations, is warming to a deal.

Yesterday, the Saudi foreign minister opened the door a bit wider to some kind of deal. In that he was in harmony with the kingdom’s subjects.

Rosenberg told Secrets that the survey “is the most dramatic public evidence we’ve seen not only that the Saudi public is steadily warming towards peace with Israel, but that the much-criticized strategy of President Trump to advance Arab-Israeli peace, and an Arab-Israeli strategic alliance against Iran, is actually working.”

As you know, Joe Biden has openly, if begrudgingly, supported the Trump administration efforts. And yet, Middle Eastern countries remember the nightmare that was the Obama administration support for Iran. They are not going to be inclined to trust Joe Biden, certainly not if he fulfills a promise to reinstate the Iran Nuclear Deal.

He also said that the issue and Trump's success in getting countries to sign on to normalization should be taken into account by voters next month.

“If Trump is reelected, the path is open towards a Saudi-Israeli peace treaty that would become the biggest breakthrough in history, in part because Riyadh trusts Trump. If Biden wins, the path becomes more complicated because Biden has been so hostile in his statements towards the Saudis and because he is so distrusted in Riyadh, having been one of the architects of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal,” he said.