WHAT’S GOING ON? Poll Shows Arabs Support Israel Over Iran

Now this is an altogether amazing development: on February 10, Faisal al-Kasim, a British-Syrian television personality based in Qatar who has five million followers on Twitter, asked them which side they would support if war broke out between Israel on one side and Iran and its militias in Syria on the other.

Here are the astonishing results:

Al-Kasim reportedly said in 2001 that he is Druze; his show, “The Opposite Direction,” which airs on Al-Jazeera, is considered highly controversial, as it has featured guests who are violently opposed to each other’s positions.

The seeming shift in the Arab World toward Israel owes less to any love for Israel than the fear of Iran and its surrogates; as Evelyn Gordon wrote in Commentary, “As one Syrian wrote, ‘no Syrian in his right mind’ would support Israel in most situations, ‘but you will find millions of Syrians queuing up with the blue devils’ — his charming term for Israel — ‘against the fascist sectarian regime that has surpassed all the monsters on earth in killing Syrians.’”

Gordon added, “Today, the Arab world still has the numbers and the oil, but it’s siding with Israel against Iran. So for any realist who holds that America should align itself with Arab concerns because numbers and oil are crucial considerations, the top priority now shouldn’t be another fruitless Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but reining in Iran’s malignant behavior. To its credit, that is something the Trump Administration is trying to do. …”