Say what you will about the Arab world, it's hard to earn its gratitude. President Obama went to Egypt and not Israel. He demanded Israel cease adding new settlements in the West Bank. He treated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a chilling disdain. For all of that, though, Obama's approval rating in Arab countries has sunk.
The polls show some startling numbers. When last spring the Pew Global Attitudes Project asked residents of Islamic countries what they thought about Obama, he got some good marks when it came to such matters as climate change. But when the question was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the numbers not only declined in Indonesia and Turkey, they nearly went through the floor in the three Arab countries polled. In Jordan, 84% disapproved of the way Obama was handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Egypt, the figure was 88%, and in Lebanon, it was 90%.
For Obama, the figures must be disheartening. They strongly suggest that his attempt to woo the Arab world, to convince it that America can be an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, has dismally failed. In fact, the extent of this failure is most stark in Lebanon. There, 100% of Shiite respondents - in other words, Hezbollah and others - have no faith in Obama and his good intentions.
This may be a setback for Obama, but it is paradoxically a success for American values.
What the Arab world seems to appreciate is that America will never agree to what the Arab world wants - an Islamic state where a Jewish one now exists.
A fundamental document in this area - a once-secret CIA analysis from 1947 - was unearthed (to my knowledge) byThomas Lippman and reported in the winter 2007 issue of The Middle East Journal. The CIA strongly argued that creation of Israel was not in America's interests, and that, therefore, Washington ought to be opposed. This was no different from what later diplomats and military men (most recently, Gen. David Petraeus) have argued, and it is without a doubt correct. Supporting Israel hurts America in the Islamic - particularly the Arab - world and, given the crucial importance of Middle Eastern oil, makes no practical sense.
The CIA further argued that the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict would soon widen to become an Israeli-Islamic conflict - another bull's-eye for what was then an infant intelligence service. That process was already underway, which is why some non-Arabs (Bosnian Muslims, for instance) fought the creation of Israel, and has only intensified as radical Islam, laced with healthy doses of anti-Semitism, has gotten even stronger.
What neither the CIA nor, for that matter, the anti-Israel State Department recognized in the late 1940s is that America's interests are not always measurably pragmatic - metrics, in the jargon of our day. Sometimes, our interests reflect our national ethic, an affinity for other democracies, sympathy for the underdog. These, too, are in America's interests, and they may be modified, but not abandoned, for the sake of mere metrics.
This is why Obama's overture to the Arab world, clumsily executed, was never going to succeed. America can please some Arab governments - Egypt and Jordan, for instance - but not the Arab people. What they want, and what they have been told repeatedly they deserve, is a return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel and total control over all of Jerusalem. These are both out of the question as far as Israel is concerned.
This week, Palestinians and Israelis will once again talk peace in Washington. But until both sides, particularly the Arab peoples, give up on what they really want, the clock will remain where it has been. Those Pew polls show that's around 1947.
