Pechter Polls

By Madeline McMahon
Staff Reporter
Monday, November 7, 2011

Adam Pechter ’93, who owns a political polling company, told students Sunday afternoon about the importance of garnering honest responses in measuring shifting public opinion in the Middle East.

Pechter spoke to about 15 students at a Master’s Tea in Silliman College Sunday afternoon about his company, Pechter Polls, which conducts polls in Middle Eastern countries by training local employees to collect data from their own communities. Pechter said he thinks this method avoids what he called the biases of Western pollsters and can help pinpoint the source of conflicts in the Middle East, such as those during the recent “Arab Spring.”

“It’s necessary to have the [most honest] response possible, where the responders feel the most comfortable,” he said. “We need valid feedback from these populations.”

Pechter Polls is most often employed by either the United States government or the governments of Middle Eastern countries to survey opinions on leadership, new initiatives and relations between countries, he said.

He added that his company, which he founded about two years ago, tries to design surveys to yield the most accurate results within the context of different cultures. He gave many examples of data collected in several Middle Eastern countries showing that similar questions often prompt different answers depending on the nationality of interviewers and the wording of questions.

“So much depends on the re-wording of questions, and knowing which questions to ask,” Pechter said.

Pechter also used data from East Jerusalem, an area that had never previously been polled, to show that many Palestinians would prefer to live in Israel if two separate states formed. He said these results often seem counterintuitive to Westerners, such as his clients who commission the polls, since they do not always understand the Middle Eastern perspective.

Though he believes that his methods are a way to better understand the source of conflicts in the Middle East, Pechter said that many members of the United States government do not always trust the inherently inexact nature of polls.

He concluded his talk by encouraging students to enter the polling industry themselves.

“This is a field of research where we need more talent,” he said. “You really need creative people working, probing and thinking about it.”

Two audience members interviewed both said they found the talk interesting, and Aaron Gertler ’15 said it even gave him an idea to start a project of his own, which he described as predicting when the tipping point for revolution occurs in tumultuous countries by examining popular sentiment. Gertler added that he thought Pechter’s methods helped to give voice to underrepresented peoples.

“I was impressed with his methods to work around oppression in these areas,” Gertler said. “This is something that we could make more use of in repressive countries.”

Silliman Master Judith Krauss attributed the company’s success to its unique polling style, adding that she does not think Middle Easterners are truly comfortable expressing themselves to American pollsters.

Pechter Polls was founded by Adam Pechter and Dr. David Pollock, and is based in Princeton, New Jersey.

PolicyWatch #1867

Poll Shows 40 Percent of Jerusalem Arabs Prefer Israel to a Palestinian State

By David Pollock
November 2, 2011

The nearly 300,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, regardless of diplomatic rhetoric, are almost evenly divided in choosing between Israeli and Palestinian citizenship.

In the wake of Washington’s decision to cut funding to UNESCO, a new phase of diplomatic debate approaches regarding the application for recognition of a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital.” Yet new research reveals that a surprisingly large number of the Palestinians who actually reside in the city reject that prospect. Forty-two percent say they would even try to move to Israel if their neighborhood became part of a new Palestinian state. And a statistically equivalent 39 percent say they would prefer Israeli to Palestinian citizenship.
These findings are from a survey sponsored by The Washington Institute and conducted September 4-10 by Palestinian pollster Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), in partnership with the Princeton-based Pechter Middle East Polls. The survey used a representative geographic probability sample of 500 respondents, yielding a margin of error of approximately 4 percent. Each one of east Jerusalem’s nineteen Palestinian neighborhoods was sampled in exact proportion to its share of the city’s total Palestinian population, and all interviews were conducted privately by local Palestinians in Arabic, and in respondents’ homes.

Percentage Choosing Israel Is Stable, But More Opting for Palestine

The latest poll numbers confirm findings from a similar survey conducted for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations by PCPO and Pechter in November 2010, the first-ever credible poll of its kind. In that survey, 40 percent of Jerusalem Palestinians said they would definitely or probably move in order to become citizens of Israel rather than of a new Palestinian state.

As in the 2010 poll, last month’s respondents offered a variety of mostly practical motives for preferring Israeli citizenship: higher income, better jobs, and a more reliable social safety net, specifically including healthcare, pensions, and disability benefits. Freedom of movement under Israeli rule also ranked very high; contrary to the common misconception of an “isolated” community, around two-thirds of these Palestinians reported that they visit not just west Jerusalem, but also other parts of Israel and the West Bank at least once a week. By contrast, when asked about the prospect of living in a Palestinian state, over half said they would be concerned about less freedom of expression and more corruption.

Nevertheless, half (53 percent) said they would prefer Palestinian citizenship, compared to just 30 percent in November 2010. Yet fewer than half (44 percent) said they would probably move, if necessary, in order to obtain it. This change suggests that, as discussion of Palestinian statehood and the future of Jerusalem has become more explicit, views have shifted toward this option among the one-third who previously voiced uncertainty or refused to answer these questions.

Only a Third See Practical Gain from UN Bid

Although the situation and attitudes of east Jerusalem Palestinians differ in many ways from those of West Bank and Gaza residents, their views converge in at least one surprising respect. Just one-third (34 percent) of the September respondents said that the UN vote on Palestinian membership would have any positive practical effect on their own lives.

The results from a separate poll of all West Bank/Gaza Palestinians (including a proportional 9 percent subsample in east Jerusalem) were strikingly similar. This poll was conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian pollster Dr. Nader Said of the Arab World for Research and Development on October 2-4, shortly after President Mahmoud Abbas’s widely reported UN General Assembly speech. Nevertheless, only a minority (37 percent) of respondents expected the UN deliberations to yield any “concrete advance” for the Palestinian cause.

Israeli Citizenship Issues

From an official Israeli perspective, the desire of so many Jerusalem Palestinians to remain under Israel’s jurisdiction may be a mixed blessing. On one hand, it seemingly strengthens Israel’s case to retain the relevant neighborhoods based on self-determination. On the other hand, it could raise the issue of granting Israeli citizenship to a few hundred thousand additional Palestinians.

In theory, Palestinian legal residents of Jerusalem have had the right to request Israeli citizenship since 1967. But only a small minority have chosen to exercise that right, probably due to complex reasons: social stigma; fear of losing their Jordanian passports; reluctance to engage in a potentially costly, time-consuming, and uncertain bureaucratic process; and the lack of any compelling incentives to change their status. As a result, only about 15,000 east Jerusalem Palestinians are Israeli citizens today, and fewer than 10 percent of the September respondents reported holding an Israeli passport.

Nevertheless, the latest poll suggests that this reticence could change as the possibility of having to choose between Israeli or Palestinian citizenship becomes somewhat more realistic. For example, a majority (62 percent) said that “the ability to vote in Israeli national elections” would be at least moderately important to them if their neighborhood were recognized as part of Israel. And the same percentage said that “social equality as full citizens of Israel” would also be important.

Palestinian Population Growth Outstrips Israeli Growth

Demographic research related to the above surveys produces another clear and counterintuitive conclusion: despite libelous rhetoric about the “Judaization” of Jerusalem, Palestinian population growth in the city has outpaced that of Israelis by far. Since 1967, the city’s Israeli population — including in the new neighborhoods beyond the 1949-1967 armistice lines — has indeed grown substantially, roughly doubling from under 250,000 to around half a million today. But over the same period, the Palestinian population has more than quadrupled, from around 70,000 in 1967 to 288,000 at last official count in 2010.

The latter increase reflects a combination of factors. Natural growth, migration, and expansion of the municipal boundaries in 1967 to encompass some surrounding Palestinian settlements have all contributed, probably in roughly equal measure. As a result, the Palestinian percentage of the city’s total population has increased from under 25 percent in 1967 to 37 percent today.

Building Permits, Evictions, and Discrimination

Only a relatively small minority (24 percent) of east Jerusalem Palestinians now say they are dissatisfied with “the ease or difficulty of obtaining building permits” in the city — a surprising finding given the preoccupation with this problem among some media outlets and NGOs. This marks a sharp decline from November 2010, when two-thirds (66 percent) reported dissatisfaction on this issue. And while 70 percent of the September respondents said that discrimination in municipal services is at least a “moderate” problem, a mere 7 percent named building permits, evictions, or demolitions as examples of such discrimination in response to an open-ended question.

This counterintuitive finding derives from a combination of important but widely misunderstood underlying factors. First, the two neighborhoods most affected by these problems, Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, represent but a tiny fraction (5.6 percent) of Jerusalem’s overall Palestinian population. Second, the number of demolitions, while individually unfortunate, is reported to be low, averaging under fifty per year since 1967. Third, the movement of new Israeli residents into Palestinian neighborhoods has been remarkably minimal over the past twenty years, rising from 1,400 in 1991 to 2,200 today, according to a new estimate by independent Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann of the NGO Ir Amim. In other words, almost all of the Israeli growth beyond the city’s pre-1967 area is in previously empty land around the city’s outskirts — areas likely to remain in Israel in exchange for other territory in any future border agreement with a Palestinian state. Fourth, and perhaps most important lately, the Jerusalem municipality has sharply increased the planned number of building approvals for Palestinians over the past year, including the city’s first entirely new substantial Palestinian neighborhood since 1967.

Policy Implications

The attitudes revealed by this survey point to the desirability of more creative approaches to reconciling the conflicting claims and aspirations of the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, and the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. The United States should consider putting greater emphasis on the needs and wants of those residents, whether Palestinians or Israelis, in formulating policies on the city’s future. This understanding adds one more compelling reason to reject a unilateral demand for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital” — a demand that ignores not only the need to negotiate these issues, but also the legitimate desires of the city’s Palestinian population.

David Pollock is the Kaufman fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on the political dynamics of Middle Eastern countries. In addition, he is the principal advisor to Pechter Middle East Polls.

By David Pollock
Policy Alert, September 22, 2011

The PA’s demand for a UN declaration that names east Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state actually goes against the wishes of much of the city’s Palestinian population.
A new and credible poll of east Jerusalem Palestinians shows that nearly half would prefer to become citizens of Israel rather than of a new Palestinian state — casting fresh doubts on the official Palestinian claim to the city. Only one-quarter (23 percent) of the city’s nearly 300,000 Palestinian residents said they would “definitely” prefer Palestinian citizenship, despite the recent surge in nationalist activity leading up to this week’s UN debate. Even more remarkably, 42 percent said they would actually move to a different neighborhood if necessary in order to remain under Israeli rather than Palestinian authority, confirming results from a similar survey administered by a Palestinian pollster in November 2010 and cosponsored by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.

The new survey — conducted September 4-10 by leading Palestinian pollster Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, in partnership with Princeton-based Pechter Middle East Polls — included a representative geographic probability sample of 500 respondents, yielding a margin of error of approximately 4 percent. Every one of east Jerusalem’s nineteen Palestinian neighborhoods was sampled in exact proportion to its share of the total population, and the face-to-face interviews were conducted privately by local Palestinians in respondents’ homes.

Participants offered several practical reasons for preferring Israeli citizenship: greater freedom of movement under Israel’s jurisdiction, higher income, more employment opportunities, and a better social safety net, including health insurance, pensions, and disability benefits. Indeed, two-thirds reported that they travel not just to west Jerusalem, but also to other parts of Israel every week. At the same time, more than half of the respondents said they are concerned about increased corruption and decreased freedom of expression under Palestinian rule.

In another very timely finding, a solid majority — 59 percent — said that a UN declaration of a Palestinian state without Israel’s agreement would actually have a negative effect on their lives. This figure is up substantially from the November 2010 Pechter poll, as the implications of such a unilateral declaration have become ever more apparent.

East Jerusalem Palestinians remain generally dissatisfied with the amount of income and property taxes they pay, and with the delays in travel caused by checkpoints or by Israel’s West Bank security barrier. Yet a comparison of results from last November shows a significant improvement in perceptions of other issues.

For example, a majority (57 percent) are now satisfied with their standard of living, up from 44 percent in November. And just 43 percent now say they are dissatisfied on the issue of obtaining building permits — down greatly from around 70 percent in the previous survey. Similarly, only 16 percent now report dissatisfaction with Jerusalem municipal officials, a significant improvement compared to 35 percent in November.

Looking ahead, 21 percent say a new intifada in Jerusalem is very likely if peace negotiations with Israel collapse entirely; an additional 36 percent say this is somewhat likely. Surprisingly, these figures are actually down slightly from November 2010. More ominously, however, two-thirds predict that some groups would continue the “armed struggle” against Israel even if the two sides reached a peace agreement.

Views of leading political figures are decidedly mixed. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas scores relatively high with a 49 percent approval rating. But Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Arab Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Raed Salah are not far behind, with 40 percent and 33 percent each. Remarkably, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, is in the same league with 34 percent. By comparison, President Obama’s popularity is considerably lower, at just 20 percent.

Overall, the political implications of this new poll are clear: official PA demands, including a UN declaration that east Jerusalem must be the capital of a new Palestinian state, actually go against the wishes of much of the city’s Palestinian population. As a result, the United States and other governments are on very firm ground in opposing these demands, even from a democratic Palestinian standpoint.

David Pollock is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on the political dynamics of Middle Eastern countries.

The Real Issue Is Political Leadership

By David Pollock
BitterLemons-API.org, June 1, 2011

Around half of Israelis, Palestinians, and some other key Arab publics, according to various opinion polls taken in the past decade, support something like the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, whose basic concept is peace and Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for Israel’s full withdrawal from the territories it captured in the 1967 war. Similarly, around half of each one of these publics would also support other analogous proposals focused more narrowly on “land for peace” in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, such as the unofficial Palestinian-Israeli Geneva initiative of 2003 or the Clinton parameters of December 2000.
Given such statistics, is this glass half empty or half full? These results suggest that political leadership could move these societies toward peace based on mutual compromises. But whether such political leadership can be found, whether the devilish details of a peace agreement can be successfully negotiated, and whether any such agreement could withstand the shifting winds of public opinion — all these are different questions entirely.

For now, more specifically and potentially significantly, at least a narrow majority of West Bank/Gaza Palestinians supports such compromise proposals — even when the questions are worded to include some territorial swaps beyond the 1967 lines and to exclude an unlimited “right of return” for Palestinian refugees. And Israelis tend to support such proposals even when worded to provide for sharing Jerusalem and to omit any mention of recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state.”

At the same time, Palestinians are somewhat more likely, and Israelis somewhat less likely, to support the Arab Peace Initiative as compared to the other proposals mentioned above — almost certainly because of the former’s inclusion of an ambiguous reference to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 on the “right of return.” For a significant number of Israelis, this issue seems to outweigh even the prospect of recognition by the entire league of Arab states. And for a significant number of Palestinians, this issue seems to expand their willingness to accept peace with Israel — although, as just noted, a majority has usually been prepared to accept that even without provision for refugee movement into that country’s pre-1967 territory.

The most recent polls from Egypt and Jordan, however, show that the publics in those two countries — the only Arab ones officially at peace with Israel, after Israel ceded them all the land they claimed — are actually, and unfortunately, turning against those very peace treaties. A reliable Pechter Middle East Polls survey in Jordan in April/May 2011 shows something over half of that public opposed to peace with Israel. The latest Pechter Poll of Egypt, conducted during the revolution there in early February, showed this public roughly evenly divided on this matter, but with around a third responding “don’t know” or refusing to answer the question. But since then, two other polls suggest that Egyptians are moving into the opposing column. The Pew Poll, taken in April, records 54 percent saying their country should cancel its peace treaty with Israel.

Of course, a great deal depends upon the precise timing, wording, and sample selection of each one of these (or any other) surveys. That is all the more reason why polls asking not about the Arab Peace Initiative specifically, but about other loosely similar proposals, can only be a rough guide to public opinion on these issues. And even polls that ask explicitly about the API must be taken with the proverbial grain (or more) of salt, depending upon their individual context, technical specifications, and overall credibility of the pollster. Nevertheless, the very brief additional selection of relevant results presented below may be useful.

The Geneva initiative, when taken as a whole document, has recently garnered narrow majority or at least plurality Israeli and Palestinian support. In March 2010, the International Peace Institute reported that 56 percent of Israelis support the Geneva initiative, with about half of the Palestinian population supporting it. The group’s poll from December 2008 had shown similar results, with a 51 percent support rating among Israelis, but about 41 percent among Palestinians. Palestinian support, measured in November 2010, increased to 67.6 percent when respondents were asked specifically about the clause concerning Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, with no more than three percent land swaps.

The Brookings Institution has reported on opinions about the concept of land-for-peace in six Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. In 2010, 56 percent of those polled said that they would be prepared for comprehensive peace with Israel if it pulled out of the 1967 territories, but that they do not believe Israel would do so. This number was the highest of the past three years.

According to the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research, as of March 2011 Palestinians still displayed a relatively high level of support for the API: 54 percent supported it, but this was down from 64 percent in August of 2009. Other Palestinian polls generally show comparable levels of support for the notions of “land for peace” and a “two-state solution,” though usually without specific reference to the API.

Israeli opinions on the API, measured in late 2010 by the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, were reported to be at a support level of 52 percent, a number significantly higher than previous years. Yet a Brookings survey taken at almost exactly the same time strongly suggests that such a yes/no finding is actually simplistic: while just 40 percent of Israeli respondents that they would be ready for a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians based on the 1967 borders with slight modifications, as against 30 percent clearly opposed, fully 30 percent responded that they had a view different from either of those two alternatives.

What then is the political, rather than the purely statistical, significance, of all these numbers? As noted above, political leadership is at least as important as public opinion. For the time being, both Palestinian and Israeli political leaders are adding conditions to peace, above and beyond the bare minimum that their own publics require. And elsewhere in the region, where public opinion now matters as never before, political leaders are struggling just to maintain some semblance of stability in the face of unprecedented uncertainty. As a result, even if public opinion may permit peace, it is certainly not pushing governments in that direction today.

David Pollock is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on the political dynamics of Middle Eastern countries.

At the height of this month’s protests in Egypt, pollsters phoned hundreds of Egyptians on their cellphones and landlines to ask them, among other things, who should be the next president of the country. Just 16% named Hosni Mubarak, who hadn’t yet stepped down.

As much as the results, the poll itself was a reflection of the growing efforts by governments, companies and others to gauge public opinion in the Middle East. Until the last decade, few major international polling organizations surveyed in the region. Today, many do, including Gallup and Pew Research Center, producing data on what Arabs and Muslims think about the U.S., religion and al Qaeda. But pollsters work under severe restrictions. Some comply with regimes that review questions and delete touchy ones. Others avoid polling during the month of Ramadan. And most conduct the interviews in person, which tends to yield better results, pollsters say, but is far more costly and time-consuming.

The challenges in the region leave many gaps in the data. Gallup polls daily in the U.S., with results available the next day. By comparison, a national, face-to-face survey in Egypt could take a month. And without a critical mass of polls, it is difficult to gauge the reliability of the numbers.

The poll in Egypt, conducted by Princeton, N.J.-based Pechter Middle East Polls among 343 Egyptians between Feb. 5 and Feb. 8, was carried out by phone using interviewers based in the United Arab Emirates, a strategy designed in part to avoid political interference. Pollsters also reasoned that Egyptians would be reluctant to open their homes to strangers during the political turmoil. It also was restricted to Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt’s two biggest cities.

Adam Pechter, who founded the polling house two years ago, says these factors might have diminished the poll’s accuracy. Still, he says, it helped shed light on what Egyptians thought during a tumultuous time.

Two other polls of Egypt conducted in 2010 underscore how geographic focus might skew results. In a survey limited to urban areas, Egyptians’ support for the U.S. appeared to be rising. But in a poll that attempted to canvass most of the country, support for the U.S. was declining.

Experienced pollsters learn to account for special factors in the region. For instance, survey researchers avoid asking questions during Ramadan, a period, several pollsters say, when it can be more difficult to persuade people to participate in surveys.

When they poll at other times of year, researchers generally find very high rates of cooperation in the Mideast: Sometimes more than 90% of people they contact participate in the survey. Participation has been particularly high in Iraq, an effect pollsters attribute to high-stakes issues and the relative infrequency of polling compared with the U.S., where most people decline to participate.

Also, pollsters who want to carry out in-person surveys can find ways to work around barriers erected by restrictive regimes. Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, says indirect questions are less likely to be censored by governments. He points to questions on a 2008 survey managed by the center asking people in 19 countries and territories, including five in the Middle East, to rate two things on a scale from one to 10: How much their country is governed according to the will of the people, and how much it should be. In every country, including the U.S., the results indicated that people wanted a government that reflects the will of the people more than the current government does. Egypt had the second-largest gap between the two sets of responses of any country, which Dr. Kull points to as evidence of popular support for the recent uprising.

Sometimes, seemingly innocuous questions are included in polls to draw attention away from political topics. Mr. Pechter says his company also has hired local market-research firms to slip political questions into mainly nonpolitical surveys, which generally aren’t screened.

Still, pollsters generally are reluctant to disclose their methodologies for Middle East polls, citing the risks of working there. That makes it difficult to evaluate their results. And some pollsters including Gallup and the University of Maryland research center, allow governments to screen polls. So, in Gallup’s latest round of polls last year there are no approval ratings in Egypt or Libya for those countries’ leaders, a question asked in many other countries around the world.

Some pollsters are hopeful that the political upheavals in the Middle East will bring more freedom to their field. “I believe this is changing right before our eyes, as people break away from the police-state mentality,” says David Pollock, a former State Department adviser and cofounder of Pechter. “You can almost see a surge of media freedom.”

Write to Carl Bialik at numbersguy@wsj.com

Case Closed

Lebanon’s Christian community has lost faith in the court established to prosecute the killers of the country’s former premier. That’s good news for Hezbollah, and bad news for the United States and its allies.

BY DAVID POLLOCK | JANUARY 20, 2011 | FOREIGN POLICY

The seemingly never-ending story of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was established by the U.N. Security Council to prosecute the killers of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, reached a landmark this week when the court’s prosecutor submitted his indictment to pretrial judge Daniel Fransen. Diplomats from Washington to Tehran expect the indictment, which will remain sealed for a few more months, to implicate members of the radical Shiite militia Hezbollah in the crime. Hezbollah has denounced the tribunal as an American-Zionist plot, collapsed the Lebanese unity government, and even, in recent days, staged mock “coup drills” in the streets of Beirut.

Behind Hezbollah’s power play against the tribunal lies something more than brute force: Lebanon’s Christians and Sunnis, once largely united in support of the tribunal, have parted ways. This split began a few years ago at the elite level with the defection of Gen. Michel Aoun, the leader of the largest Christian party, to the pro-Syrian camp. But, as recent polling data in Lebanon makes clear, the divisions have now reached the popular level.

At this point, a majority of Lebanon’s Christian community has actually turned against the tribunal. As a result, there is little prospect today of the sort of mass popular demonstrations that kicked Syrian forces out of Lebanon in 2005 following the assassination of Hariri, a Sunni — or that booted president-for-life Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali out of Tunisia just a few days ago.

This is the most surprising and politically significant finding of a public opinion poll conducted in Lebanon during November and December 2010 by Pechter Middle East Polls, a firm advised by the author. The findings, made possible with the help of a reliable local commercial market research firm, are based on face-to-face interviews with a representative national sample of 1,000 respondents, yielding a statistical margin of error of approximately plus or minus 3 percent. Pechter previously conducted a survey of political attitudes in Lebanon in April 2010, which shows the shifts in Lebanon’s complicated and often highly polarized sectarian society.

As of last month, 79 percent of Lebanon’s Sunnis called the tribunal “free and fair,” including a solid majority (60 percent) who felt “strongly” that way. But only about half as many (42 percent) of the Christians agreed even “somewhat” with that position. Instead, a majority (55 percent) of Christians said the tribunal was not free and fair.

In this respect, Lebanon’s Christian community is closer to the country’s Shiite population, from which Hezbollah draws its support. Fully 85 percent of Shiites surveyed believed strongly that the tribunal — which, let’s remember, has yet to release any of its findings — was neither free nor fair. Similarly, asked an open-ended question about the country’s highest national priority today, 18 percent of both Christians and Shiites cited “the false witnesses file” of the tribunal, a complaint raised by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah meant to cast doubt on the tribunal’s credibility. This answer was not far behind the plurality first choice in all three major communities of “protecting civil peace.” By contrast, not even 1 percent of Sunnis named the issue of false witnesses as a Lebanese national priority.

The fall of Lebanon’s unity government means that the country’s small Druze minority may hold the swing vote in parliament on the identity of the new prime minister and the composition of a new government. Because the Druze comprise only about 5 percent of the Lebanese population, they accounted for just 50 respondents out of 1,000 in this survey. This subsample is too small to be statistically significant — but it is still suggestive. Druze respondents split almost evenly on whether the tribunal is free and fair (23 percent support the tribunal versus 26 percent who do not). Druze leader Walid Jumblatt has exploited this ambivalence by shifting at will from strong support to strong opposition to the tribunal, depending on regional political trends. His current pro-Hezbollah and pro-Syrian position is another clear indication of which way Lebanon’s political winds are blowing.

The tribunal is not the only issue on which Lebanese Christian and Shiite views have converged. Regarding Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, around 60 percent of Shiites and 40 percent of Christians now voice at least somewhat favorable views. Among Sunnis, by contrast, that percentage plummets to just 17 percent. By comparison, Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri, Rafik’s son, garners favorable ratings from nearly all Lebanese Sunnis (94 percent) and around two-thirds of the country’s Christians; a mere 11 percent of Lebanon’s Shiites concur with that assessment. Nevertheless, when asked in an open-ended way to name the national leader they most admire, 51 percent of Sunnis cite Hariri, but only 3 percent of Christians do.

Moreover, the data suggest that Lebanon’s Christians no longer expect much help from the United States. Barack Obama’s approval rating among Christians has now tipped in a negative direction (45 percent vs. 55 percent). Lebanon’s Shiites remain overwhelmingly negative (12 percent vs. 88 percent) toward Obama — no surprise, given their strong support for Hezbollah. Only Sunnis retain a largely positive view, giving the U.S. president a 65 percent vs. 35 percent approval rating.

Iran is one issue on which Lebanon’s Sunnis and Christians still generally agree, and differ sharply from their Shiite countrymen. Two-thirds of both Christians and Sunnis have unfavorable views of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; among Lebanese Shiites, that figure is an astonishingly low 2 percent.

For all these stark differences, the latest survey also shows that it is simplistic to analyze Lebanese public opinion purely by sect because there is significant diversity of views on some important questions within each community. For example, while 51 percent of Sunnis name Saad Hariri as their most admired national leader, second place is held by “no one” — with 21 percent. Two Sunnis often mentioned these days as possible replacement candidates for prime minister score miserably inside their own community: Former Prime Minister Najib Miqati received the support of only 4 percent, while Omar Karameh, another former premier, was named by only 2 percent of Sunnis.

Surprisingly, the Shiites are likewise far from monolithic: Nasrallah gets 64 percent of their votes as “most admired national leader,” but Nabih Berri, the parliamentary speaker and leader of the Shiite-dominated Amal movement, scores second with a respectable 23 percent. And Lebanese Christians support a potpourri of leaders: Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, Michel Aoun, and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman are virtually tied at 13 to 15 percent; they are followed by Suleiman Franjieh and Hassan Nasrallah, with 9 percent apiece. First place among the Christians goes to “no one” with 21 percent.

Such intriguing nuances notwithstanding, the central finding from this survey remains: Lebanon’s Sunnis are currently the only group who continue to support the tribunal entrusted with bringing Hariri’s assassins to justice. They are more isolated than ever before, as the Shiite opposition to the court has remained strong and the Christian community has clearly moved toward an anti-tribunal and even pro-Syrian position.

As a result, Hezbollah’s firm opposition to the tribunal, to the Hariri government, and to what remains of U.S. policy in Lebanon will probably carry the day — not only among the shifting Lebanese elites, but also on Lebanon’s volatile streets.

RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images

David Pollock is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “Actions, Not Just Attitudes: A New Paradigm for U.S.-Arab Relations.”