Truemors
-1.jpg){kind=small}
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Poll: Israeli Jews See Obama as Pro-Palestinian
Share:
by stevesmys | June 19, 2009 at 09:48 am
101 views | 2 Recommendations | 3 comments
A new poll suggests that Israelis view President Barrack Obama as pro-Palestine.
A push for Israel to halt settlement growth in the West Bank and to relaunch peace talks may have cause this major shift in Jewish-Israeli sentiment.
Fifty per cent of Israelis thought Obama was pro-Palestinian, while just six per cent thought he was pro-Israel, acording to the poll for the Jerusalem Post newspaper released on Friday.
Videos
The results are in stark contrast to a poll taken during the Bush administration, which found that 88 per cent of Jewish Israelis thought was "pro-Israel."
The poll suggests that support for Obama's stance on the Middle East had fallen significantly following his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington, and following a major speech addressing the Arab World in Cairo, Egypt.
In Cairo, Obama called for a "new beginning" between the U.S. and Muslim nations.
During both events, Obama pushed for Israel to halt expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem. About 500,000 Jewish settlers live in more than 200 settlements in the occupied areas.
The night before Obama's Cairo speech, filmmaker Max Blumenthal took his his camera out to the streets of Jersulem to ask what Israeli and American Jews thought of Obama. They weren't too kind.
The Jerusalem Post poll indicated that 69 per cent of Israelis were against the settlement freeze, while 27 per cent were in favor.
A previous poll taken merely one month ago, found only 14 percent saw the Obama administration as pro-Palestinian while 31 percent viewed it pro-Israeli. The large shift in perspective points to a strong reaction from the Israeli public after the American president's speech to the Muslim world.
This has raised concerns among Israelis that the U.S. president may distance himself from the Jewish state to improve relations with the Muslim world.
The poll by the Jerusalem Post and Smith Research surveyed 500 Israeli Jews and said it had a margin of error of 4.5 per cent.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (3)
at 11:01 on June 23rd, 2009
May I suggest that the tepid response among Israelis toward Obama is because of his moral equivalency between the Holocaust and the Palestinian situation. This is the Palestinian narrative created in order to disprove any long term connection to the land by Jews.
His mis-informed blurb did not sit well with the truth from this perspective.
at 11:04 on June 23rd, 2009
BTW, Jeff Halper is a long time activist that likes to imagine the truth rather then the facts. He is loose and fancy free with the truth to suit his ideology.
at 07:15 on June 24th, 2009
500 is not many though is it ! What do the orthodox think ? Can a person that barely follows the rules of a religion really be considered a member of it ?