Why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not end soon

Last updated on: November 3, 2015 at 8:11 am by Gerald McDermott

Why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not end soon 2015-11-03T08:11:40-04:00 Gerald McDermott

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It’s worse than we thought. By that I mean the thinking of average Palestinians.

Most of us have thought and hoped that average Palestinians just want to live in peace with their neighbors the Jews. That it is only their leaders who want continued war, and eventually to drive the Jews into the Sea.

Or that only a minority of Palestinians think killing innocent Jews is a good thing.

Think again.

Daniel Polisar, a political scientist in Israel, has been studying Palestinian public opinion for more than twenty years. He uses polling research conducted by both Jews and Arabs. He has examined over 330 surveys carried out by the four major Palestinian research institutes, each of which has been conducting regular polls for a decade or more. Here are some of his disturbing findings:

In 2014 “64 percent declared their support for ‘armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel’ (meaning, among other things, suicide bombings in Israeli population centers), and 54 percent applauded the event that in large measure had precipitated the 50-day war: the abduction and murder by Hamas operatives of three Israeli teenage boys hitchhiking home from school.”

“A large majority of Palestinians were convinced that Israel [in the 2014 Gaza war] sought deliberately to target civilians, and held Hamas blameless for positioning its leadership, fighters, and weapons in populated areas.”

“Three of every five Palestinians living next door to Israel believe its aspirations are to reconquer the Gaza Strip and the Arab-populated areas of the West Bank, annex them, and expel the more than four million Arab residents currently living there plus the 1.7 million Arab citizens of Israel. And this, despite the fact that in the past quarter-century, not a single Israeli Knesset member, respected public figure, or major media personality has advocated such a view in public or is reliably claimed to have expressed it in private.”

“The majority, 51 percent, assert that Israel will ‘destroy al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques and build a synagogue in their place.’ Again, a position with no basis in the policies of any of the parties in Israel’s governing coalition or opposition is assumed by an absolutely majority of Palestinians to reflect the true intentions of its government.”

“72 percent declared it morally right to deny that ‘Jews have a long history in Jerusalem going back thousands of years,’ while 90 percent declared “Denying that Palestinians have a long history in Jerusalem going back thousands of years” to be morally wrong.”

“Fieldworkers from the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion asked residents of the West Bank and Gaza: ‘Do you think that Jews have some rights to the land along with Palestinians?’ Only 12 percent agreed that ‘Both Jews and Palestinians have rights to the land,’ while more than 80 percent asserted that ‘This is Palestinian land and Jews have no rights to it.'”

“98 percent said the 1994 killing of 29 Palestinians in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein was terrorism, but only 15 percent were willing to label as terrorism a 2001 attack by Palestinian suicide bombers that killed 21 Israelis at the Dolphinarium night club in Tel Aviv. . . . When asked hypothetically if Israel’s use of chemical or biological weapons against Palestinians would constitute terror, 93 percent said yes, but when the identical question was posed regarding the use of such weapons of mass destruction by Palestinians against Israelis, only 25 percent responded affirmatively.”

“On six occasions in the last decade, Pew asked the following question in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Muslim and Arab countries: ‘Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?’ Though the level of support varied widely among countries and across time, one constant is that the Palestinians were always the leaders in seeing suicide bombings and similar attacks as justified. On average, 59 percent saw them as being justified often or sometimes; no other Arab or Muslim public came close.

“When pollsters specified a nationality for the attacks’ targets, the Palestinians were again ahead of any other people in the Arab world in seeing the attacks as legitimate. In surveys conducted by the Arab Barometer in 2006, 2010, and 2012, a higher percentage of Palestinians—on average, three in five—than of any other Arab public consistently agreed with the following statement: ‘U.S. involvement in the region justifies armed operations against the U.S. everywhere.’

“When Palestinians look back at sustained campaigns of violence, whether in the second intifada or in the three wars with Hamas, they see them as victories, and they tend to believe that armed campaigns are also likely to be effective in the future.”

“61 percent thought it morally ‘right’ to ‘nam[e] streets after Palestinian suicide bombers like Dalal al-Maghrabi who killed Israeli civilians within Israel.'”

“For most of the last decade-and-a-half, suicide bombings, which have generally been aimed at civilians and have been the most lethal in their impact, have enjoyed the support of solid Palestinian majorities. On 17 occasions between April 2001 and March 2013, JMCC asked, ‘How do you feel toward suicide-bombing operations against Israeli civilians?’ Supporters outnumbered opponents all but four times, and on average the level of support exceeded opposition by a full twenty points. Breaking down the data further, we see that strong supporters constitute the single largest group, followed by moderate supporters, then moderate opponents and, smallest of all, those strongly opposed.”

“When respondents were asked about ‘the bombing attack in the religious school in Jerusalem inside Israel . . . in which eight Israeli students were killed in addition to the Palestinian attacker.’ For that event, support swelled to 84 percent.”

“During the recent wave, moreover, Palestinian support for the favored modes of attack has in all likelihood been high as well. In a December 2014 poll, PSR posed the question: ‘Recently there has been an increase in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in attempts to stab or run over Israelis. Do you support or oppose these attempts?’ Seventy-eight percent were supportive, only 20 percent opposed.”

“Palestinian support for violence, and the attitudes underlying that support, have developed and become entrenched over a period of decades. Altering those attitudes can only begin once the attitudes are recognized for what they are, without blinking and without excuses.”

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