Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Daniel Pipes titles his piece on a recent opinion poll conducted in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Some Common Sense in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but he may be being a bit sanguine. Read it all to get his point, but I thought I'd extract this bit for comment:
...Israel: The Forum asked, "Islam defines the state of Egypt/Saudi Arabia; under the right circumstances, would you accept a Jewish State of Israel?" In this case, 26 percent of Egyptians and 9 percent of Saudi subjects answered in the affirmative.
We posed this question to quantify the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a conflict not about the size of Israel, its resources, armaments, sovereignty over holy sites, or the number of its citizens living on the West Bank. Rather, it concerns the fundamental goal of Zionism, the creation of a state defined by Jewish identity.
To provide context: About 20 percent of Palestinians since the 1920s have been willing to live with Israel in a state of harmony. The Egyptian response exceeds this slightly, the Saudi one comes in substantially below it. These results are in keeping with the more overtly religious nature of political life in Saudi Arabia than in Egypt. They confirm that the main source of anti-Zionism now is no longer nationalism but Islam...
So it's not really about borders, or settlements, or anything else. It's a Jewish state they can't tolerate. Worth remembering.
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