Majority of Arabs oppose normalisation with Israel, pan-Arab survey finds
More than a quarter of all Arabs believe Israel poses the greatest threat to their region, followed by the US and Iran, a pan-Arab poll conducted by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed on Tuesday.
Across 15 countries surveyed, 28 percent of Arabs said they consider Israel the foremost threat to their own nations.
The areas with the highest threat assessment for Israel were the Mashreq, otherwise known as the Levant (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria), at 58 percent, and the Nile Valley (Egypt, Sudan) at 38 percent.
The Maghreb (Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia) and the Gulf (Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) had the lowest threat assessments for Israel at nine percent in each region, but also had the highest number of respondents who said they do not know, or do not wish to answer the question, at 47 percent and 42 percent, respectively.
In the Mashreq, the US and Iran polled equally at 16 percent as the second biggest threat to that region, while in the Gulf, Iran is considered the biggest security threat by 14 percent of respondents.
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Across the Maghreb, the Nile Valley, and the Gulf, fewer than eight percent of respondents saw the US as a major security threat.
Meanwhile, one-third of respondents in the Nile Valley said the second biggest threat after Israel is the Arab Gulf states.
The 2025 Arab Opinion Index (AOI) was conducted between November 2024 and August 2025 in 15 Arab countries: Algeria; Egypt; Iraq; Jordan; Kuwait; Lebanon; Libya; Mauritania; Morocco; Palestine; Qatar; Saudi Arabia; Sudan; Syria; and Tunisia.
The survey consisted of face-to-face interviews with a sample of 40,130 respondents.
The AOI is the largest public opinion survey in the Arab world, Laila Omar, a researcher with Arab Center DC and an anthropology professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told the audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, where the findings were unveiled.
In some cases, the team of 1,000 researchers had to resort to phone interviews due to safety considerations on all sides - namely in Saudi Arabia and in Tunisia for this latest set of findings, Omar noted.
Syria
A key element in the 35-page report stemming from the AOI is that it includes unprecedented independent insight into how Syrians perceive political life following the fall of the repressive government of Bashar al-Assad.
On Israel, 70 percent of Syrian respondents said they oppose a Syria-Israel agreement that does not include the return of the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed in 1967.
In 2018, the first Trump administration recognised it as no longer occupied, but a part of Israel proper.
Nearly three-quarters of Syrian respondents said Israel "is working to support certain groups in Syrian society in order to fuel separatist conflicts and threaten the unity of Syrian territory".
A whopping 88 percent said they believe Israel "is working to threaten security and stability in Syria".
The survey also examined how Syrians assess their domestic challenges.
Some 60 percent of all Syrian respondents expressed feelings of "hope", "joy/happiness", "security", and "relief" at the fall of the Assad dynasty, while 22 percent or less expressed feelings like "anxiety" or "uncertainty" when prompted.
When asked what type of state they want to see, 42 percent of Syrian respondents said they support building a civil state, compared to 28 percent who said they want a religious state.
An overwhelming majority, 70 percent, reported that “sectarian discourse” is widespread or somewhat prevalent in the country, and 41 percent blamed that on foreign interference, while 36 percent said it stems from the absence of citizenship and tolerance.
Palestine
Eighty percent of the Arab public, when asked, said they believe that the Palestinian cause is a collective Arab cause, the AOI showed.
Only 12 percent believe it is solely a Palestinian cause.
In Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Kuwait, 90 percent or more of respondents said it is a collective Arab cause.
Saudi Arabia polled the lowest in this category, with 62 percent of respondents there saying the Palestinian struggle is a collective Arab cause. But the caveat is that in this particular case, 30 percent of respondents said they did not know what to say, or declined to answer.
When it comes to normalisation with Israel, despite the 2020 Abraham Accords involving the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, the percentage of Arabs who support recognition of Israel dropped by two percentage points in the 2024-25 AOI compared to 2022-23, the report said.
An overwhelming majority of 87 percent of all respondents oppose recognition of Israel, while only six percent said they would accept it.
The top reasons cited were that Israel "is a settler-colonial state occupying Palestine", and that it "is an expansionist state seeking to dominate or occupy countries in the Arab world and control their resources".
Of those who support their countries recognising Israel, half made such a move conditional on the formation of an independent Palestinian state, otherwise known as the two-state solution.
Saudi Arabia again came in with the lowest opposition to the recognition of Israel at 61 percent - compared to 74 percent and above in all other polled countries - with the caveat that 30 percent of respondents to this question said they did not know what to say, or declined to answer.
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