Adminstartion uses faulty polls to pressure Israel

Here is an excerpt of the Q and A between Charlie Rose and George Mitchell:

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Charlie Rose: Why is President Obama's popularity so low in Israel? It's four percent.

George Mitchell: No, that's completely false...Several polls that I've seen in the past month show that he is—I'll give you the numbers, 49 favorable, 45 unfavorable, 43 favorable, 37 unfavorable; it's a reasonable. A plurality support him in Israel and a small plurality oppose him.

http://www.meforum.org/blog/obama-mideast-monitor/2010/01/interesting-george-mitchell-interview

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The poll Mitchell relies upon seems to be from the New America Foundation. As far as I have been able to determine, this has been the only one poll regarding the views of Israelis towards the administration that comes anywhere near matching Mitchell’s statements. Previous polls done by Israelis themselves have shown far more problematic views http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371037911&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull , including one that show only 6% of Israelis who see the administration as pro-Israel http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1245184872947&pagename=JPArticle/ShowFull and one that shows only 4% of Israelis Jews consider Obama pro-Israel. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251145138121&pagename=JPArticle/ShowFull



The New American Foundation is a left wing group, with a connection to Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=New_America_Foundation . Steve Rattner is involved; Bernard Schwartz, Lew Cullman also involved-very generous donors to not just the Democratic Party but also strong supporters of Barack Obama. James Fallows is the Chairman-certainly leans to the left.



Ben Smith, of Politico, wrote this about the poll’s authors:



The surveys authors, who support robust Israeli and American engagement in the peace process, said in an analysis accompanying the poll’s findings that the numbers are encouraging, and that the responses leave Netanyahu room to maneuver toward peace, and Obama sufficient support to demand it.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30442.html#ixzz0cUoBhtkh





This poll was basically done by Jim Gerstein (founding VP of J Street-a group that its founder admitted served to have Barack Obama’s back on matters relating to Israel; that has connections to George Soros- a foe of Israel’s; that has been linked to Hamas supporters; has Arab donors; had a line-up of anti-Israel speakers scheduled for its first Washington conference, etc).



Below is one Commentary magazine writer’s view of the New America Foundation poll. Noah Pollak is the expert on J Street and he has critiqued J Street’s polling methods before http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/75641.



The moral of the story?



George Mitchell seems to be using a poll that should be viewed skeptically in order to give him leeway to influence Israel to comply with American plans. Domestically, will the administration rely on this quite useful poll to justify its actions to American Jews? That strategy may have been presaged by Mitchell’s views expressed during the Charlie Rose interview.



Is Mitchell relying on a poll concocted by political allies to rationalize predetermined policies regarding Israel?


Agenda Polling

Noah Pollak - 12.10.2009 - 12:25 PM

So J Street’s pollster, Jim Gerstein (who was also a founding VP of J Street), has done a poll of Israelis for the New America Foundation. It is being billed as a repudiation of the famous Jerusalem Post poll conducted in June that found that only 6 percent of Israelis consider the Obama administration to be pro-Israel. The new Gerstein poll is advertised by NAF as proving that “Israelis actually demonstrate a much more supportive and nuanced view of President Obama” than was the case in the previous poll.

I was always skeptical of the original poll. The numbers just seemed too low to be credible, and the poll was conducted right after Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan speech, when passions were high. But the way to credibly disprove those numbers is to sample a similar group and ask the same questions. Unsurprisingly, that’s not what Gerstein did.

The JPost poll was conducted among Jewish Israelis. Gerstein, however, polled everyone, including Arabs, who comprised 16 percent of his sample (an under-sampling, actually — almost 20 percent of Israelis are Arab). More important, he did not ask the same, or even a similar, question. He asked a question that was sure to make Obama look better than the previous poll: not whether the respondent thought that the Obama administration was pro-Israel, but whether the respondent had warm feelings toward Barack Obama personally.

This is where the poll found a 41 percent “favorable rating” for Obama. But having warm feelings toward a politician is not the same thing as approving of his performance in office. The exact same phenomenon has been documented in numerous polls of Americans, who consistently give Barack Obama higher approval marks than his policies.

It looks to me like the poll itself was conducted responsibly, and it has many interesting findings, including that more than twice the number of Israelis identify with the Right than with the Left. But the PR effort being waged on its behalf, however, is not being conducted all that honestly. There was no effort in the Gerstein poll to replicate, even vaguely, the question that the Jerusalem Post poll asked: Do you believe that the Obama administration is pro-Israel? Instead, Gerstein asked an Oprah Winfrey–style question about whether Barack Obama gives you warm fuzzies, and included the Israeli Arab population in his sample, which the JPost poll did not.

I have little doubt that another poll replicating the JPost’s questions and sample demographic would find that far more than 6 percent of Israeli Jews believe that the Obama administration is pro-Israel. It’s too bad that the New America Foundation didn’t take the opportunity to find out. The full poll can be read here.