Poll: 31 percent of Israelis call Obama pro-Israel

On the day Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to meet with
President Obama, a new poll showed that just 31 percent of Israelis
consider the Obama administration to be pro-Israel.

This contrasts sharply with the 88 percent of respondents who called former President George W. Bush pro-Israel.

{mosads}The Smith Research poll of 500 Israelis, reported Monday by the Jerusalem Post, followed a statistical model of the population and was conducted last week. Forty percent said Obama was neutral between Israel and the Palestinians, and 14 percent considered the president pro-Palestinian.

Two percent called Bush pro-Palestinian and 7 percent labeled him neutral.

The only European leader who was considered more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Israeli uncertainty over where the Obama administration stands was also reflected in a poll released earlier this month that was conducted for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which found that 60 percent of Israeli Jews had a favorable opinion of Obama but that nearly half of the respondents had not yet formed an opinion on his policy toward Israel.

Thirty-eight percent of the 610 respondents in the BESA Center/ADL poll said Obama’s attitude toward Israel was friendly and 33 percent pegged it as neutral. Nearly two-thirds, 63 percent, feared that Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world to improve U.S. standing would come at Israel’s expense.

Obama will head to Egypt for an address to the Muslim world on June 4, a trip that has already raised eyebrows in some corners.

“The trip will be useless unless it is preceded by real change in the policies of the U.S. administration toward the Arab and Islamic world,” said Mohammed Habib, deputy leader of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, after the trip was announced.

“The U.S. administration is attempting to recruit all the Arab states … to implement its permanent agenda that favors the Zionist entity,” he added.