A Useful Way to Track Israeli Opinion Polling During This Election

Israeli elections, with their proliferation of parties and shifting alliances,  further complicated by the fact that there are multiple polling agencies getting differing results, can be confounding. A hat tip to Avner Cohen for drawing attention to a rather useful Wikipedia entry: "Opinion Polling for the Israeli Legislative Election, 2015." 

It has useful comparative tables party by party, and appears to be updated almost daily.

New America Foundation Poll Suggests Israeli Attitudes Not as Hardline as Portrayed

Before taking leave for the weekend, an interesting survey: the idea that President Obama is deeply unpopular in Israel and that Prime Minister Netanyahu has little room for maneuver due to domestic attitudes is challenged by a new survey published by The New America Foundation and Gerstein/Agne Strategic Communications. Their summary is here, and I quote:

The results of New America Foundation’s national survey of 1,000 Israelis reveal a very different picture from the narrative that has taken hold regarding Israeli attitudes toward President Obama and American efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Despite repeated media reports touting a “4 percent Obama approval rating” and arguments that the United States has lost the Israeli public’s support for renewed peace efforts, Israelis actually demonstrate a much more supportive and nuanced view of President Obama, and there is solid backing for an American-sponsored final status agreement along the lines of where the parties left off nine years ago at Taba and in the recent Olmert-Abbas negotiations. The survey also shows that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a great deal of political space to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians, including within his own Likud party.

You can find the full survey here (PDF) and their analysis of the results here (PDF). It certainly offers a much more positive take on Israeli attitudes than many media reports and subjective impressions.

Weekend Reading

If the new readers are still around, perhaps I should explain that since I don't blog on weekends, I've taken to putting together a sort of catchall "weekend reading" list of reports, studies, or postings of interest in the field. It's pretty much whatever I'm aware of and isn't meant to be comprehensive.

And, a I noted in the previous post, according to my counter this will be the 400th post since starting in January. A full hundred of those appeared in June, thanks to the Lebanese and Iranian electons, the Obama speech in Cairo and the Iranian uprising.

• The Carnegie Endowment's Arab Reform Bulletin has a special issue on the world economic crisis and its impact, offering a somewhat different emphasis than its usual concentration on democratization issues.

• David Pollock at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has sometimes criticized methods of polling in the Arab world, but today he's noting some new polls that show the US doing better in the "Arab street." [Oops. For several hours I had it spelled "Pollack." Sorry, Dave. Must have been thinking of Ken. Fixed now.]
  

• Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based, Egyptian-born television preacher often criticized in the West but much watched in the Middle East, has a new book out; Marc Lynch considers it quite important; Arabic Media Shack is more cautious; Al-Masry al-Youm serialized parts of it for those who read Arabic.

• The latest podcast is up at MEI: A View of the Current Situation in the Swat Valley and Waziristan by Pakistani Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Babar Awan. (Podcast plays when you click the link, so use earphones if you're in a busy office.) Original details of the July 6 event are here.
  

Egyptian Government Poll on the Obama Visit

Thanks to The Arabist for a link to an Egyptian Government poll on Egyptian reactions to the Obama visit. I'm sure I don't have to emphasize that if it's the government taking the poll — it's the Cabinet Information Decision and Support Center behind it &mdash and the people being polled are aware of it, it may affect their responses.

Mousavi Ahead in a Poll? Ahmadinejad in Trouble?

A post on the Newsweek website (scroll down for the story) claims a secret poll shows more voters planning to vote for Mir-Hossein Mousavi than for Ahmed Ahmadinejad. And Gary Sick at his new blog rounds up several other stories out of Iran in recent days that seem to suggest the same thing.

Of course, there are four candidates in the race, and it's likely Ahmadinejad would run second and make the runoff. But Gary also cites a piece by Trita Parsi that suggests that some US Congressmen and other neocons are actually helping win votes for Ahmadinejad by demonizing him.

The election is Friday. I have said all along there might be a surprise, and now it looks like one just might be emerging. Let's wait and see.

Probably Not Much Over the Weekend

I'll be away over the three-day President's Day weekend, and while I'll have a laptop if anything major breaks, I probably won't be posting much, if at all.

Oh, and an update on the language question. While there are only 10 votes in, all but one favored foreign language links, so I'll keep doing it, but still leave the poll open till March 31 since my readership is still tiny.

A Poll on Languages for Links

A poll: I'd like to know if the readers of this blog want links to sites in other languages (mostly French and Arabic, since my Hebrew and Farsi are rudimentary and my Turkish nonexistent; maybe the rare other European language). I've put a polling box there on the right sidebar, right under the picture of the Journal, with an end date of March 31. I'd appreciate it if you'd vote there rather than in the comments box. I'm no HTML expert so this is pretty much the Google gadget unrefined: our IT folks at MEI are very busy getting a new and much-improved website ready, so I'm winging the tech side of this blog, and I'm a bit of a greybeard for this sort of thing.

And since we're on languages, let me note that in my early postings I referred to Avigdor Lieberman's party as "Yisrael Beitenu," since that seemed to this non-fluent-Hebrew-speaker the best transliteration of ישראל ביתנו, but given the fact that the party itself spells it "Yisrael Beiteinu" (despite the fact there is no second yod in the written form) I'll be adopting that. I'm not certain if Arabic/Hebrew characters will show up on your screen if you don't have the proper settings on your browser