Priorities of the Arab street

aI've just been watching this incredibly interesting al Jazeera program, "Voice of the People," which has been discussing the results of an online poll about Arab priorities.  It was hosted by Jumana Nimour and Mohammed Krishan, with four unusually impressive guests in the studio (Mustafa Hamarneh, Fahmi Huwaydi, Ahmed Abdullah, and some guy whose name I didn't catch) and groups of a dozen audience members in Beirut, Rabat, Doha and Cairo (and maybe more - those were the ones that I actually saw).

 

Here's a screen capture of the results of the poll:

Here's what it says, under the label "Priorities of the Arab Street":

Palestine             27%
Reform                26%
Human Rights      11%
Poverty and         10%
  Unemployment
Normalization       8%
  (w/Israel)
Freedom of Iraq    7%
Arab market         6%
    (two others which I couldn't make out on my crappy computer screen placed under 5%)

If you add those up, it looks like 35% take Israel/Palestine as the top priority and 37% take some aspect of demoracy, human rights, and reform as their top priority.  Iraq places surprisingly low, as do economic issues.  Terrorism and Islamic extremism do not appear at all, although this may well be a function of the al Jazeera questionnaire rather than Arab priorities.

I'll have more to say about this program when I can get hold of a transcript, along with the details of the survey, as opposed to just what I happened to hear while working on other stuff simultaneously.   But it has just been so interesting that I wanted to put something about it right away.  Plus, Jumana was on it, which is always a treat!

UPDATE:  here's the al Jazeera write up (in Arabic) of the survey.  I only want to add two things right now. 

First, asking respondents to choose one highest priority probably isn't the best way to measure Arab public opinion;  far better to let everyone say "Palestine" as their first choice, and then scrutinize their second choices as a way of seeing what they are really concerned about at a more practical level.

Second, the 37%-35% net in favor of reform and democracy over Palestine/Israel as the highest priority issue should actually be the headline finding here.  In past surveys of this kind, you were far more likely to find 60-70% choosing Palestine first, which crowded out all other issues.  That Palestine is not now crowding out reform is encouraging and interesting.

Comments

[Stacey]

So, I know others have pointed this out before, but I'll do it again. Whenever I have attended a protest related to the I/P issue, whether in Cairo, Sana'a, or elsewhere (notice I don't say Beirut, where I actually saw people applauding the coverage of Arafat's funeral melee), it's amazing how quicky what starts out on as a rage against Israel turns to a discussion of the price of bread or sugar.

Protesting the treatment of the Palestinians is a kind of Bordieuian "authorized speech." It is a vocabulary of resistence that is used to simultaneously signify more and less than what it claims to be about. It would be my guess that many of the votes in the I/P category more properly belong in the democracy/human rights or economics categories. This is something we'll never know for sure, but my own participation in protests in Egypt and Yemen, at the very least, would strongly suggest it.

[Abbas]

The last issue was health care..
As for what Stacy wrote, Palestine issue will always be the first and foremost issue.
The west and particulary the US just don't get it.
Stop trying to parrot the Bush Admin. claim that with "democracy/human rights or economics categories" everything will be fine!!!!

[the aardvark]

Abbas,
I (and I suspect Stacy) couldn't care less about the Bush administration's claims... But I do care about the many, many Arabs who have been demanding reform for many, many years, with little success. Reform and democracy and human rights are not alternatives to caring about Palestine. Posing them as such has been standard practice for Arab rulers for many years, and it's been all too effective as an excuse for refusing change. My sense of this is not that pushing for domestic reform comes at the expense of caring about the Palestinians, but that the two issues go together for a lot of Arabs today. Certainly that's the way it's been framed on al Jazeera for years now...

[Abbas]

Abu Aardvark, first let say that I'm a big fan of your blog. I should've elaborated more on the issue of Palestine vs. reforms in the M.E.:
Fixing the former takes away all the excuses and exposes all the Arab sock puppets and corrupt kings & emirs. Like it or not, the bush admin. and it's parrots DO matter in today's world in general and in the M.E. in particular.

[Mike Doran]

AA, slow down! If you keep writing sentences like this, "That Palestine is not now crowding out reform is encouraging and interesting," it's a very slipperly slope that will quickly bounce you over to my side of the tracks. Quick, put on the brakes!

Mike Doran
Princeton
Shameless plug: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050316faupdate84276/michael-scott-doran/is-palestine-the-pivot.html

[the aardvark]

Hey Mike, no worries there! I've always argued that al Jazeera and co have put reform and critique of the Arab status quo on an equal par with Palestine and Iraq. It doesn't make Arabs any less critical of American foreign policy, though, nor does it make them less mobilized around the Palestinian issue. I would put it more like this: you can't ignore the Palestinian issue, but you also can't use the Palestinian issue to ignore reform. That's the big change I see.

[praktike]

There's a famous David Ben Gurion quote about the White Paper that, ironically, fits here.

[Jay C]

Just for the uninitiated visitor to the blog (me),can you clarify a point: On a TV poll by Al-Jazeera on the attitudes of the "Arab Street":
When the highest-ranking "priority" issue is given as "Palestine", what meaning will the audience take this to respresent? Peace with Israel? Destroying Israel? Internal Palestinian reforms? Something else? Obviously, context counts in trying to interpret opinion polls such as this: but then, it IS a TV talk-show poll in the classic style (i.e., with a likelihood that is may be meaningless, too).

[the aardvark]

Jay - the survey's question said "support the Palestinian people" - no elaboration. It's entirely possible that different respondents meant different things by that response, even if they agreed on the overall importance of the Palestinian issue. For more context, I'd need to get hold of the transcript (rather than rely on my already fading memory), and I haven't seen one posted yet.

As to the reliability of an on-line tv talk show survey, I'm with you... never know what to make of them. When you get a landslide in an unexpected direction (like with the question on Syria/Lebanon a few weeks ago), that can be interesting... but I pity the fool who tries to do sophisticated statistical analysis of these surveys. In some ways, how they talk about the survey is more interesting than the survey itself.