Can public opinion truly be ascertained in the Arab world, where more often than not dissent is stifled, news media are controlled by the state, elections are shams, women are silenced and custom discourages giving straight answers to outsiders? If anyone in the West can penetrate those barriers, it is Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland who has toiled for two decades in these infertile vineyards.

When he began his work few colleagues encouraged him because public opinion, the so-called “Arab street,” did not much matter. In a universe of authoritarian regimes and military rulers, individual citizens and their opinions were of little political importance. Telhami’s determination to forge ahead anyway was rewarded when the upheavals known as the Arab Spring erupted in late 2010 and “suddenly the attitudes of ordinary Arabs were inarguably the driving force across a large swath of the Middle East, not only shaping events as they happened but also laying the foundation for politics in the years ahead.”

The World Through Arab Eyes is Telhami’s useful and interesting attempt to explain how that shift came about and what it portends, “using the accumulated public opinion research of the past decade.” Most of his findings about what ordinary Arabs believe, developed through years of face-to-face, Arabic-language surveys, will not surprise specialists in the region, but they should be required reading for everyone in Washington’s national security and defense establishments. The findings do not bode well for U.S. interests: Arabs are widely and deeply antipathetic to the United States. If a new era of popular government really is coming to the Arab people, to judge from what Telhami reports, the new leaders will jettison strategic partnership with the United States and will probably abandon the quest for peace with Israel because they do not believe it is possible.

Whatever else happens, “the Palestinian-Israeli conflict issue remains the prism of pain through which most Arabs view the world,” Telhami found in his field sampling, and they hold the United States responsible. That view, combined with near-universal anger about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and a widespread belief that the United States pays only lip service to democracy and human rights, would make it difficult for any national leader claiming popular support to maintain cordial ties to Washington. When asked which world leader outside their own country they most admire, year after year his respondents cited one prominent figure or another perceived to have stood up to the United States — even Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. Similarly, they favor leaders who have stood up to Israel, including Hussein Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

It was always simplistic to ask, as Americans did after September 11, 2001, “Why do they hate us?” As was the case in James J. Zogby’s similar book Arab Voices — published in 2010 but little noticed because it appeared before the Arab Spring caught the world’s attention — Telhami’s evaluations of Arab attitudes about the United States are more nuanced, but he leaves the reader with one strong, inescapable conclusion: it is not about our “values,” it is about U.S. policies that have left them feeling powerless and ashamed. Those are difficult feelings to put aside.

This might have made dull reading, but Telhami enlivens the text with anecdotes accumulated when he was an adviser to diplomats and peace negotiators. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat personally deboned his fish at a luncheon. In the Wye River peace negotiations of the 1990s, as a member of the “anti-incitement committee,” Telhami discovered that Israeli and Palestinian leaders could not even agree on what constituted incitement, let alone how to prevent it.

Telhami also offers a lively account of the evolution of the Arab mass media, including Al Jazeera. Combined with the power of the Internet, he writes, these transnational satellite channels and newspapers have broken autocratic regimes’ stranglehold on information, and this empowering transformation cannot be reversed. Moreover, he finds that Arabs, like Americans, tend to rely on media that tell them what they want to hear or already believe, which is why Al Hurra, a satellite channel sponsored by the U.S. government, has had little impact. It is pointless for outsiders to criticize the tone of the coverage in these news media, he says, because it reflects the attitudes of their consumers, it does not shape them.

Telhami’s findings make clear that much Arab opinion is rooted in misinformation or downright ignorance. Most Arabs believe, for example, that a quest for “control” of Iraq’s oil motivated the U.S. decision to invade, even though much of the oil goes to Asia. They blame the United States for their catastrophic defeat by Israel in the 1967 war, even though in that era France was Israel’s principal arms supplier. And they believe Washington holds to a “double standard” in opposing Iran’s nuclear program while tolerating that of Israel, whereas the actual difference is that Iran is a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and bound by its provisions, while Israel is not.

Telhami reports these findings matter-of-factly, without criticizing them. Indeed, he can be faulted throughout the book for his reluctance to take the Arabs to task for some of their attitudes. If their world views are forged by events in the past, if they nurse grievances from decades or even centuries ago, he never tells them to get over it and look instead toward the future. He would no doubt argue that it was not his purpose to tell the Arabs what they should think, only to establish what they do think, but some readers may be put off by this posture of neutrality. Other than that, Telhami has given us a laudable guide to understanding the world views of a people about whom Americans in general know too little.

Thomas W. Lippman, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, is a former Middle East correspondent of the Washington Post. He is the author of six books about the region and Islam, most recently Saudi Arabia on the Edge, published in 2012. 

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