My pal Noah Pollak has an interesting deconstruction of a recent poll of Israeli public opinion over at Contentions. The poll, commissioned by the New America Foundation and conducted by JStreet co-founder Jim Gerstein, found that president Obama’s approval ratings in Israel are higher than previously thought. Since the previous numbers were based on a Jerusalem Post poll that gave Obama a 6 percent approval rating, one would think that some sort of improvement wouldn’t be difficult to find. After all, Obama had nowhere to go with Israelis but up. Apparently, however, the task was proved daunting enough that the NAF has had to be more than a bit disingenuous in their spin doctoring. As Pollak puts it,

[Gerstein] did not ask the same, or even a similar, question. He asked a question that was sure to make Obama look better than the previous poll: not whether the respondent thought that the Obama administration was pro-Israel, but whether the respondent had warm feelings toward Barack Obama personally.

There was no effort in the Gerstein poll to replicate, even vaguely, the question that the Jerusalem Post poll asked: Do you believe that the Obama administration is pro-Israel? Instead, Gerstein asked an Oprah Winfrey–style question about whether Barack Obama gives you warm fuzzies, and included the Israeli Arab population in his sample, which the JPost poll did not.

Personally, I think it was silly not to include Israeli Arabs in the first poll – they are citizens, they vote, and they will be a factor in future negotiations – nonetheless, there’s no doubt that Gerstein and the NAF appear to be more than a bit desperate to salvage Obama’s faltering reputation as an object of universal global admiration.