William Saletan looks over the evidence on what Americans, and Republicans, think about them. He looks especially closely at a poll that asks respondents what concerns them about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and gives them six options. It asks, that is, if they’re most concerned about Israeli interests, American interests, Palestinian interests, human rights, or international law, or not concerned about the conflict at all. He notes that the Republicans most intensely concerned about the conflict list Israeli interests as what concerns them most — and by a wide margin.

I think Saletan, though, is overlooking two things. The first is that Republicans in general are slightly more likely than the general public to be most concerned about U.S. national interests. The second is that the people who pick the Israeli-interests option are not necessarily saying that Israeli interests should ever trump American ones where they come into conflict, let alone that they should generally trump. They may care about America more than they care about Israel, but think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict matters a great deal for Israel and does not matter much for the U.S. (and, to the extent it matters for us, matters because of its effect on our ally Israel). And so when they think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they don’t primarily think of U.S. interests. That’s one theory, anyway, colored by the fact that it’s roughly the way I think about these questions: If I thought Israeli and U.S. interests conflicted in a serious way, I would certainly want U.S. policy to reflect the latter, but at the same time my main concern about this conflict has to do with Israel.

I’m not knocking the poll, by the way. Judging from the polls Saletan reviews, what he is trying to get at may just be hard to poll.