By Matthew Duss

Matthew Duss is a Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, and Director of Middle East Progress. Matthew received a master’s degree in Middle East studies from the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies, where his graduate work focused on Shi’ite political activism in Iraq, and a BA in political science from the University of Washington. Matthew’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Forward and The Guardian. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs.

Testifying before the US Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2010, then-CENTCOM chief General David Petraeus made headlines by recognising the continued significance of the Palestinian issue in Middle East affairs. “Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace,” Petraeus noted in his written statement,¹ is one of the “cross-cutting issues that serve as major drivers of instability, inter-state tensions, and conflict” that “can serve as root causes of instability or as obstacles to security.”

Petraeus’ analysis of the conflict’s significance, which was shortly affirmed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates,² was quickly criticised by a number of pro-Israel conservatives, who insisted that the general had inappropriately over-emphasised the importance of the conflict, and its impact on US interests. In a typical response, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman insisted that Gen. Petraeus had “simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the US and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.”³ While Petraeus’ presentation was clearly informed by his recent experiences in the Middle East, his analysis of the issue’s salience was seen by some as simply politically unacceptable.

As the Middle East has been roiled by uprisings across the region over the last number of months, a number of critics were quick to suggest that the ‘Arab Spring,’ as it has come to be optimistically called, would finally relegate the Palestinian issue to the political periphery.

Writing in the Washington Times in February, Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon declared, “Recent events in our region have dealt … the mortal blow” to the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was one of central importance.⁴ Far from being a driver of resentment in the region, Ayalon claimed, the Palestinian issue was “nothing more than a footnote to all the general grievances” of Muslim extremists.

In an April Wall Street Journal piece entitled “The Arab Spring and the Palestine Distraction,” Josef Joffe of the Hoover Institution wrote that events in Tunisia and Egypt showed that efforts to ameliorate unrest through a peace process got cause and effect backward. “It is not the [Palestinian] conflict that feeds the despotism; it is the despots who fan the conflict,” Joffe wrote. “Their peoples are the victims of this power ploy, not its drivers. This is what the demonstrators of Tahrir Square and the rebels of Benghazi have told us with their silence on the Palestine issue.”⁵

According to Ayalon and Joffe, the fact that the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings were inwardly focused, and not about Palestine or Israel, shows that the Palestinian issue was, all along, simply a tool cynically deployed by authoritarian leaders to distract their publics from their own incompetence and corruption. With the passing of these regimes, they claim, the Palestinian issue will decline in significance.

This, unfortunately, is worse than wishful thinking. It is bad analysis.

While it is quite true that the key concerns of Arab demonstrators have been internal corruption, lack of government accountability, and an absence of economic opportunity, this does NOT mean that the question of Palestine has been eclipsed. In Egypt, the corrupt and oppressive regime of Hosni Mubarak was clearly the overwhelming focus of the demonstrations that ended his rule in early February, but it is not true that demonstrators were “silent” on the issue. Reports from the scene noted anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans,⁶ and numerous photographs and news stories⁷ recorded Palestinian flags on display in Tahrir.

“I was in Tunis the night news of Mubarak’s ousting was received,” wrote Larbi Sadiki, a lecturer at the University of Exeter in England. “Thousands danced and chanted for Palestine, pan-Arabism, and Arab revolution.”⁸

As journalist Mona Eltahaway recounted in a panel discussion earlier this year, young protesters in Tahrir Square told her that, “The hatred for Israel … will not end until you lift the siege on Gaza and treat Palestinians with freedom and dignity.”⁹ The same young people who powered the uprisings against Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Eltahaway explained, are now saying, “It’s time to march for the freedom and dignity of our Palestinian sisters and brothers.”

This shouldn’t be surprising, as public opinion data have communicated these views for years.¹⁰ In poll¹¹ after poll¹² Arab publics have consistently placed Palestine high on their list of concerns, and US support for the Israeli occupation high on their list of grievances. The most recent poll of Arab public opinion by Zogby International showed that this has not changed, with respondents in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan listing “continuing occupation of Palestinian lands” as “the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”¹³

For an example of how these opinions impact the political processes in the region, we can look to a recent story from Tunisia, where a coalition made up of “Islamist parties, along with Arab nationalists and extreme leftist factions, are pushing to implement a constitutional provision that would ban normalisation of relations with Israel.”¹⁴ While it seems unlikely that such a provision would ultimately pass – Al-Nahda, Tunisia’s major Islamist party, enjoys roughly 20 per cent support among Tunisians, according to recent polls – the fact that it is being deployed goes to the continuing salience of the issue among Tunisian voters.

None of this, of course, represents a normative argument that pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiments are defensible or correct. Simply that they are a political reality. While there is no question that leaders like Mubarak both allowed and encouraged hostility to Israel over its treatment of Palestinians as a means to divert from their own governing failures (a dangerous game, of course, as the Israeli occupation was a demonstration of Arab leaders’ impotence), the fact is that it was there to be manipulated because it was genuine and deeply felt concern among the population.

This is similar in some ways to the way the issue plays in US politics, though, of course, in reverse. As polls repeatedly show, the US population is deeply sympathetic to Israel,¹⁵ for both cultural reasons – a perception of shared “Judeo-Christian” heritage – and political reasons, support for a fellow democracy under terrorist threat. The US political discourse tends to reward those who loudly take up Israel’s cause and punish those who don’t, a status quo enforced by a substantial network of pro-Israel lobbying organisations which have endeavoured to make support for Israel a threshold issue.

As countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, and hopefully others, move haltingly down the path, if not to democracy (as one hopes), then to somewhat greater government accountability and responsiveness to popular will, it is only reasonable to expect such sentiments to continue to be a driving factor in politics in these countries. Just as many American politicians are expected to pay at least lip service to Israel to demonstrate their national security bona fides, so we should expect politicians in the Arab world to continue to declare support for the Palestinian cause in order to demonstrate theirs.

This is simply a political reality in the region, one that will continue to impact US relationships and goals. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of a number of regional challenges, it is one in which the US is uniquely implicated, by virtue of the ‘special relationship’ with Israel, and the billions of dollars in military aid the US sends there every year.¹⁶ In a recent conversation, former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer recently put it this way: “It’s not the biggest problem in the region,” he said, “but it is the issue on which perception of US power is largely formed.” This is precisely what Gen. Petraeus was getting at in his statement to Congress. And it is something that analysts and policymakers will, like it or not, have to confront as they deal with a changing Middle East.

1. “Statement of David H. Petraeus, U.S. Army, Commander, U.S. Central Command, before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the Posture of U.S. Central Command,” March 16, 2010, http://armed-services.senate.gov/statemnt/2010/03%20March/Petraeus%2003-16-10.pdf