25 March 2010

Utica, N.Y. - More than four-in-five Americans (81%) agree the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a negative impact on U.S. interests, including a majority of both Democrats (88%) and Republicans (77%), a new Zogby Interactive survey finds.

While Americans agree the conflict has a negative impact, they are split about how to deal with the situation. Fifty percent of Americans agree the Obama Administration should steer a middle course in pursing peace in the Middle East. There is a strong divide on this question with 73% of Democrats agreeing that the President should steer a middle course while only 24% of Republicans hold the same opinion. These numbers are largely unchanged from a similar survey conducted in April of 2009.

"Americans have made clear that ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict is important and negatively impacts U.S. interests, but the growing partisan divide over policy is worrisome" said Arab American Institute President James Zogby.

Fifty-one percent of Americans also believe that the inability to stop Israeli settlements makes the U.S. less respected in the world. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats (62%), more than half of political Independents (53%) and a third of Republicans (34%) agree.

The full poll results will be released at the New America Foundation on Thursday March 25th at 1:30pm. For more details: Full Poll Release Information

Zogby International was commissioned by the Arab American institute to conduct an interactive survey of 2,471 American adults between March 17th and March 19th. A sampling of Zogby International's online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the US, was invited to participate. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, gender, education to more accurately reflect the population. The margin of error is +/- 2.0 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups.