WHAT DO PALESTINIANS WANT?
It’s time to
take a close look at an often ignored subject: what ordinary Palestinians think
about Israel, Jews, and terrorist attacks on civilians.
DANIEL POLISAR (November 2 2015)
The most recent wave of
Palestinian terror attacks, now entering its second month, has been mainly the
work of “lone wolf” operators running over Israeli civilians, soldiers, and
policemen with cars or stabbing them with knives. The perpetrators, many in or
just beyond their teenage years, are not, for the most part, activists in the
leading militant organizations. They have been setting forth to find targets
with the expectation, generally fulfilled, that after scoring a casualty or two
they will be killed or badly wounded. What drives these young Palestinians,
experts say, is a viral social-media campaign centered on claims that the Jews
are endangering the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and that Israel is executing
Palestinian children. Pundits and analysts in Israel and the West, struck by
the elements that make this round of violence different from its predecessors
over the past decade-and-a-half—which typically featured well-orchestrated
shootings, suicide bombings, or rocket fire—have focused on the motivations of
individual attackers, on how and why the Palestinian political and religious
leadership has been engaging in incitement, and on what Israeli officials or
American mediators might do to quell the violence.
Absent almost entirely from this discussion has
been any attempt to understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians. Yet it
is precisely the climate of public opinion that shapes and in turn is shaped by
the declarations of Palestinian leaders, and that creates the atmosphere in
which young people choose whether to wake up in the morning, pull a knife from
the family kitchen, and go out in search of martyrdom. Whether commentators are
ignoring the views of mainstream Palestinians out of a mistaken belief that
public opinion does not matter in dictatorships, or out of a dismissive sense
that they are powerless pawns whose fate is decided by their leaders, Israel,
or regional and world powers, the omission is both patronizing and likely to
lead to significant misunderstandings of what is happening. In this essay I aim
to fill the lacuna by addressing what Palestinians think both about violence
against Israelis and about the core issues that supply its context and
justification.
My interest in Arab public opinion in the West Bank
and Gaza is longstanding, dating back to the time regular surveying began there
shortly before the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO. In 1996, I
appeared on a panel with Khalil Shikaki, the pioneering director of the
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR); since then, I have
been increasingly impressed with his insights and his institute’s
professionalism. I therefore took particular notice of a PSR
survey that appeared after the August 2014 ceasefire
ending the latest war between Israel and Hamas. It reported, among other
findings, that fully 79 percent of Palestinians believed Hamas had won the war
and only 3 percent saw Israel as the victor. So convinced were respondents of
their side’s strength that nine in ten favored continued rocket fire at
Israel’s cities unless the blockade of Gaza were lifted, 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. In the ensuing months, I read
further polls from PSR and other research institutes to see whether support for
violence would drop appreciably once the emotions fired by war had cooled. Yet
despite a modest decline over time in most indicators, a majority continued to
support virtually every kind of attack against Israelis about which they were
asked—including rocket fire, suicide bombings, and stabbings. These and other
findings led me back to the polls conducted in earlier years, and eventually to
embarking on a comprehensive analysis of all reliable and publicly available
surveys in the West Bank and Gaza over the past two decades.
For this project, I 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: the PSR headed by Shikaki and its predecessor, CPRS; the Jerusalem Media and
Communications Center (JMCC); the Birzeit Center for
Development Studies (CDS), whose work was later continued under
the same director by the Arab
World for Research & Development(AWRAD); and
the Opinion Polls and Survey Research
Unit of An-Najah National University. Each of the
four has conducted between 50 and 120 polls and has made the results available
online in English (and generally in Arabic). Although commentators typically
describe the four as having differing perspectives, all are independent of any
government, party, or other institutional framework that might introduce
systematic bias into their work. All conduct face-to-face interviews;
customarily include more than 1,000 people in each survey; use variants of
“area-probability” sampling; and train fieldworkers extensively—which means
that the margin of error for their polls is typically 3 to 5 percent, with a
confidence level of 95 percent. Moreover, many of their questions are asked
repeatedly over time, making it possible to adjust for momentary swings of
opinion. And since the questions asked by the four institutes are themselves
often similar, it is possible to compare responses, thus testing the degree to
which the findings are or are not affected by the specific perspective or
methodology of a given institute. Tellingly, poll respondents in the West Bank
regularly voice strong criticism of President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian
Authority (PA) government that rules there, while those in Gaza often speak
negatively about the Hamas leadership, so it appears that Palestinians are not
cowed from giving their honest opinions. The consensus among informed scholars
is therefore that the surveys are reliable, valid, and genuinely reflective of
what Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza think.
I also examined data from two international
institutes that have conducted parallel surveys among residents in the West
Bank/Gaza and in Arab and Muslim countries: the Pew Research Center, which
since 2002 has included countries in the Middle East in its annual global
surveys, and the Arab Barometer initiative, a consortium founded by Princeton
University and the University of Michigan that since 2006 has overseen three
waves of polling in the Middle East. To round out the picture, I incorporated a
handful of surveys carried out by Palestinian polling firms on behalf of
well-known international experts.
In what follows, I focus on three related
questions: What do Palestinians think of Israel and of Jews? How do they view
the Jewish claim to at least a part of the land of Israel, and especially
Jerusalem? And what do they believe about the legitimacy, efficacy, and desirability
of carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis? My hope is that, on the
basis of these findings, I can provide a better sense of what lies behind the
current wave of violence and perhaps stimulate discussion about how it might be
curbed.
I. What Palestinians Think of Israel
Since the establishment of the PA in 1994, the
Palestinians have been beset by problems. The government has increasingly been
viewed as corrupt, undemocratic, and unable to enforce law and order or to
reform itself. The economy has generally been weak, infrastructure sub-par, and
the PA unable at times to pay salaries. Since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, the
Palestinian state-in-the-making has been divided, with Fatah continuing to rule
the West Bank and all efforts at reconciliation a failure. The peace process
with Israel has been stalled much of the time, in part because of periodic
outbreaks of violence, and the handover of territory and authority to the PA
has been far slower than envisioned in the Oslo accords.
Who is responsible for the problems plaguing the
Palestinians? During the last two decades, the four institutes whose surveys I
examined have asked numerous questions on this subject, and on 53 occasions
have offered Israel as one of the possible answers. In all but one case, Israel
was the answer most widely chosen, usually by a statistically significant
margin—including when it came to problems that at least at first glance seemed
largely internal. Among these were clashes between PA police and Hamas that
left thirteen dead (1994), Palestinian economic problems (2000), the hindering
of political reform in the PA (2001), Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to resign as
prime minister (2003), lack of law and order in PA-held territories (2004), the
blocking of reform in the PA (2004), the Hamas coup that wrested control of
Gaza from Fatah (2007), a water crisis in the West Bank and Gaza (2010), a fuel
shortage in Gaza (2012), the inability of the PA to pay its employees (2013),
and the ongoing inability of Hamas and Fatah to reconcile (2015).
A large majority of Palestinians were convinced that Israel sought
deliberately to target civilians, and held Hamas blameless for positioning its
leadership, fighters, and weapons in populated areas.
In matters that necessarily involved both Israel
and the Palestinians, massive majorities blamed Israel and denied any
responsibility on their side. Cases in point include the suspension of
negotiations between Israel and the PLO (1997), the failure of talks at Camp
David (2000), the breakdown of a ceasefire during the second intifada (2003),
the collapse of the peace process (2004), the outbreak of the first Gaza war
(2008), the non-implementation of the Oslo accords (2012), the outbreak of the
second Gaza war (2012), and the breakdown of negotiations between the sides and
the third Gaza war (2014).
So convinced were Palestinians that Israel was
responsible for the Gaza wars, for example, that after each conflict, when
asked by JMCC pollsters whether they believed it was “possible for the Palestinian
side to avoid it, or was Israel planning to launch the war in all cases,”
overwhelming majorities averred that Israel was intending to go to war
regardless of Palestinian actions. Likewise, a large majority of Palestinians
were convinced that Israel sought deliberately to target civilians, and held
Hamas blameless for positioning its leadership, fighters, and weapons in
populated areas.
Over the years, there were also many questions
posed about problems for which Israel wasn’t listed as a possible culprit; on
these, respondents assigned blame to their government, to leading figures and
parties, or to society as a whole. But when Israel was offered as an
option, both where its culpability could plausibly be claimed and where doing
so was farfetched in the extreme, more Palestinians passed responsibility to
Israel than opted for any other answer. Whatever else this might say, it
indicates a tendency to ascribe to Israel greater power than it actually
wields—along with intentions so diabolical as to lead it to act in ways
detrimental to the Jewish state’s own interests, so long as this will cause
suffering to Palestinians.
The perception of Israel as implacably hostile and
even demonic affects responses to questions not only about the past and present
but also about what Israelis and their government are likely to do vis-à-vis
the Palestinians in the future. For instance: as anyone observing Israeli
politics over the last decade is aware, the most widely held position within
Israel favors the establishment of a Palestinian state in most or all of the
West Bank and Gaza; a minority prefer to increase Palestinian autonomy but with
Israel remaining in charge overall. Palestinian polls, however, tell a very
different story.
On over two dozen occasions since 2009, PSR
fieldworkers asked West Bank and Gaza residents, “What do you think are the
aspirations of Israel for the long run?” With clock-like consistency, the
options espoused by most of the parties represented in the Israeli Knesset and
by consistent majorities of Israelis—namely, that Israel is seeking “withdrawal
from all [or part] of the territories it occupied in 1967”—are chosen least often.
More popular is the belief, held by one-fifth of Palestinians, that Israel’s
goal is “Annexation of the West Bank while denying political rights of
Palestinian citizens.” But the view commanding an absolute majority in all 25
polls, at an average of 59 percent, is that Israel’s aspirations are “Extending
the borders of the state of Israel to cover all the area between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean Sea and expelling its Arab citizens.”
Assuming one takes respondents at their word, 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.
A majority of Palestinians, 51 percent, assert that Israel will “destroy
al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques and build a synagogue in their place.”
It is in this context that one must consider
Palestinian public opinion about the area of Jerusalem known by Jews as the
Temple Mount and by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). Here
stood the ancient Israelites’ First and Second Temples until the latter was
destroyed by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago, and here for thirteen centuries
have been situated the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The area,
captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967, has been
administered by Jordanian (and, to a lesser extent, Palestinian) religious
officials representing the Islamic Waqf. The status quo, unchanged for a
half-century except at the margins, is that Muslims can visit the Temple Mount
at all hours and pray at its mosques, while Jews are restricted in their
visiting hours, have no structure for worship, and are forbidden from praying
even as individuals. In 2014, a few right-wing Israeli politicians did propose
modifications that would augment the hours for Jewish visits and enable Jews to
pray; since then, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior
officials have reiterated dozens of times that the status quo will not be
changed.
Against that background, on four occasions in the
last year PSR asked residents of the West Bank and Gaza for their views on
Israel’s plans for the Mount. On average, only 11 percent believe Israel will
maintain the status quo; 16 percent hold that it will allow Jews to visit any
time or to pray there; one-fifth claim that it will “divide the al-Haram area
between Muslims and Jews, allowing Jews to establish a synagogue next to
al-Aqsa mosque”; while 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.
II. What Palestinians Think of Israelis and Jews
The specific findings noted above fit with a more
broadly negative view of Israelis and Jews that Palestinians espouse on the
rare occasions when pollsters have given them the opportunity to generalize. In
February 1999, JMCC offered survey participants “a list of characteristics that
could be used to describe the Israelis” and asked for a score on a scale of 1
to 5. Regarding the first characteristic, “violent,” 76 percent gave Israelis
the highest rankings, a 4 or 5. On the second trait, “honest,” 67 percent
scored Israel a 1 or 2. The third trait was “intelligent,” and here
Palestinians gave Israelis credit, with 61 percent rating them a 4 or 5.
Two years later, with the second intifada well
under way, JMCC did a similar poll showing even more pronounced results. The
proportion of Palestinians scoring Israelis at 5 for violence went up to 88
percent, with another 7 percent giving them a 4. More than four-fifths saw
Israelis as dishonest. In place of “intelligent,” JMCC pollsters asked to what
extent Israelis were “strong,” and here 58 percent of Palestinians gave them
high marks.
What emerges, then, is a picture of Israelis as
violent and untrustworthy, but clever and strong—which matches up with
Palestinian assessments of Israel’s outsized power and diabolical nature in its
past behavior and future intentions.
In 2009, the Pew Research Center asked publics in
two dozen countries how they viewed Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Regarding
Jews, 94 percent of Palestinians reported a “very unfavorable” opinion. (Only
23 percent reported a very unfavorable opinion of Christians.) In this respect,
Palestinian views are par for the course in the Arab world: between 92 and 95
percent of Lebanese, Egyptians, and Jordanians also expressed very unfavorable
opinions of Jews. Two years later, Pew repeated the questions and achieved
comparable results. In the
latter survey, Pew also asked whether some religions were more
prone than others to violence. More than half of Palestinians averred that this
is the case, and of these, 88 percent fingered Judaism as the most violent.
(The other choices were Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism.)
On the rare occasions when they have been given the opportunity to
generalize, Palestinians characterize Israelis as belligerent and untrustworthy
but clever and strong, and finger Judaism as the most violent of all religions.
Palestinians also see Jews as lacking a historical
tie to the land of Israel or to Jerusalem. In 2011, the American political
consultant Stanley Greenberg commissioned a
survey of Palestinians on behalf of The
Israel Project. When presented with several statements describing actions that
could be viewed as morally right or wrong, 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.
A majority of Palestinians appear to have
translated this historical understanding into political conclusions. On fifteen
occasions between 2003 and 2014, pollsters from PSR asked whether it would be
acceptable, in the framework of a comprehensive agreement for a two-state
solution, to divide Jerusalem so the Palestinians would have their capital in eastern
Jerusalem and exercise sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods and the Old
City, including Haram al-Sharif, while Israel would be sovereign over Jewish
neighborhoods, the Jewish quarter of the Old City, and the Western Wall. On
every occasion, respondents soundly rejected the proposal, with opposition
almost always exceeding three-fifths. These findings match those of a poll by
Bir Zeit’s CDS. No reliable survey to date has shown that a majority of
Palestinians are willing to accept such a division of the city.
Given such a negative view of Israelis and of Jews,
and of the Jewish link to the land, it is hardly surprising that most ordinary
Palestinians do not believe Jews have a right to a state there. In 1995, when
JMCC asked whether Israel had a right to exist, 65 percent responded
negatively. Similarly, in a 2015
pollcommissioned for the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy by David Pollock, who has conducted surveys of the Arab world for
more than two decades, 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.”
This denial of Jewish roots and rights might help
explain why Palestinians are skeptical that Israel, not yet three-quarters of a
century old, will continue to exist as a Jewish state, or perhaps at all, in
another generation. In 2011, the Greenberg poll asked Palestinians to choose which
statement is more accurate: “I am certain Israel will exist 25 years from now
as a Jewish state with a Jewish majority” or “I am not so certain . . . .” Over
60 percent doubted Israel would continue to exist as a Jewish state. In the
2015 Washington Institute poll, a similar question was asked, with different
wording and a lengthened time horizon. In response, only a quarter of
Palestinians believed Israel would continue to exist as a Jewish state “in
another 30 or 40 years.” A comparable number thought it would exist as a
bi-national state of Jews and Palestinians, while close to half said Israel
would no longer exist either “because Arab or Muslim resistance will destroy
it” or “because it will collapse from internal contradictions.”
In sum, when the Palestinians look at Israel, they
see a country of enormous power and influence that has done great harm to them,
that seeks to displace them entirely from historical Palestine, and whose
people are deficient as individuals and also lacking any collective rights to
the land in general or to Jerusalem in particular.
III. How Palestinians See Violence against Israelis
Palestinian views of Israel hardly provide the
fertile ground of trust, respect, or shared assumptions that would facilitate
reaching a long-term accommodation or bringing about co-existence. But must
they lead to support for violence against Israelis? To back
such violence, after all, Palestinians must hold a set of views that prejudice
them in favor of carrying out actual attacks. To those views we now turn.
On the surface, the decision of ordinary
Palestinians to support or not to support the initiative of young people who
take knives and go out to attack Jews in Jerusalem’s Old City, or run over
Israelis on the roads of the West Bank, seems straightforward enough. Yet views
on the use of violence in these and other cases are based on a host of
assumptions and attitudes, most of which are probably not considered
consciously. In light of the salience of Palestinian violence, and in an effort
to understand its contours and origins, pollsters have asked a large variety of
questions and compiled a rich body of data. Before examining levels of support
for specific kinds of actions, it is valuable to consider the attitudinal
evidence, grouped here under three headings.
1. Is Violence against Israelis and Westerners
Legitimate?
To what extent do Palestinians see it as morally
right and appropriate to use violence against Israelis, or against Westerners
more generally? A good place to begin this inquiry is a
PSR poll in December 2001, one of whose questions
was: “In your opinion, are there any circumstances under which you would
justify the use of terrorism to achieve political goals?” Fifty-four percent
responded that there were no such circumstances; 37 percent said there were. At
first glance, this would indicate the majority’s rejection of
terrorism on moral grounds, a particularly significant finding since the poll
was conducted at the height of the second intifada.
To understand what this finding means in practice,
however, we must take into account how Palestinians interpret the word
“terrorism.” In that same poll, 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. Likewise,
93 percent described as terrorism Israel’s August 2001 assassination of the
head of the PFLP, a PLO wing that repudiated the Oslo accords and carried out
numerous attacks against Israelis, but only 10 percent countenanced the term to
describe the PFLP’s assassination of the right-wing Israeli government minister
Rehavam Ze’evi two months later. 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.
98 percent of Palestinians said the killing of 29 Palestinians in Hebron
by Baruch Goldstein was terrorism, but only 15 percent were willing to say the
same for an attack by suicide bombers that killed 21 Israelis in Tel Aviv.
Also in the same survey, Palestinians were asked
whether “The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City by people suspected
to be members of Bin Laden’s organization” was terrorism. Only 41 percent were
willing to say yes; 53 percent rejected the term. The same pattern crops up in
surveys conducted between 2006 and 2009 by the Arab Barometer project, in which
Palestinians consistently distinguished themselves from other Arabs in
rejecting the term terrorism for such jihadist operations as the “Madrid train
explosions” (March 2004, 191 killed) and the “London underground explosions”
(July 2005, 52 dead). In both cases, a majority of Palestinians averred these
were not acts of terror, whereas comparable figures in the other Arab publics
ranged from 17 percent down to 2 percent.
This highly differentiated usage of “terrorism”
affects the wording of all surveys conducted among Palestinians. In describing
attacks by Arabs on Westerners or Israelis, pollsters therefore resort to more
acceptable formulations like “resistance operations,” “military operations,”
“armed attacks against Israeli civilians in Israel,” and the like.
Palestinian attitudes toward the legitimacy of
violence can be further understood from a second set of international polls by
Pew. 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.”
Though I am unaware of any polls asking
Palestinians whether it is legitimate to attack Israelis with the aim of
securing political or other gains, it is hard to imagine that such attacks
would command less support than the three-fifths justifying such actions to
defend Islam in general, or to strike at American targets in particular.
2. Does Violence Work?
For a majority of Palestinians, the use of violence
against Westerners is seen as a legitimate means of defending Islam or securing
political or other gains; but, with respect to Israel, is it also an effective means
of achieving their goals? On this subject, numerous questions have been asked
over the last two decades, both retrospectively about past events and
prospectively about the future.
Regarding the past, the picture is fairly clear.
In December 2000, a few months into the second
intifada, 69 percent told JMCC that the violence had rendered Israelis more
willing to make concessions. A couple of years later, with the conflict having
become more violent, similarly high proportions said the intifada had helped
Israelis “understand the Palestinians’ demands in order to reach a peace
agreement.” These findings were replicated and extended by PSR in 21 polls
between December 2001 and September 2006, in which majorities of two to one
consistently backed the view that “armed confrontations so far have helped achieve
Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not.”
Similarly, Israeli decisions to pull out of
previously held territory have been seen by Palestinians as a consequence of
their “armed resistance” and not as a function of Israeli strategic interests,
international pressure, or other factors. This was pointedly true regarding the
decision by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to leave the Gaza
Strip. When asked by PSR in September 2005, a month after the pullout, what was
“the single most important factor” in the Israeli decision, 57 percent chose
“attacks by Palestinian resistance.” Time and again in polls before and after
the pullout, three-quarters on average would tell PSR they saw “Sharon’s plan
to evacuate the Israeli settlements from Gaza as a victory for the Palestinian
armed resistance against Israel.”
The same pattern is discernible in opinions about
the three Gaza wars. In December 2012, after the second war, 84 percent
responded affirmatively to AWRAD pollsters asking whether “the results of the
Gaza conflict will lead to tangible progress toward Palestinian independence,”
and despite a slight decline the figure remained robust for months afterward.
Following the 2014 war, as I noted earlier, PSR reported that 79 percent saw
Hamas as the winner. In fact, after each of the three wars, overwhelming
majorities asserted to pollsters from each of the Palestinian institutes that
their side was the victor.
The same view, moreover, informs the response to
questions regarding the future. When asked a few months before the
outbreak of the second intifada whether “a return to armed confrontations will
achieve Palestinian rights in a way that the negotiations cannot,” those
banking on violence outnumbered those betting against by nearly 20 percentage
points. After the intifada broke out, the gap between the two rose to nearly 50
points. This point was made more explicit in
a 2002 survey carried out by JMCC on behalf of the polling
expert Steven Kull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the
University of Maryland. West Bank and Gaza residents were asked: “Do you think
that when Palestinians use violence that injures and kills Israeli civilians
this makes the Israelis more willing or less willing to make compromises?”
Sixty-four percent opted for “more willing,”and only 17 percent for “less
willing.”
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.
To be sure, there have been occasions when the
majority of Palestinians have looked back at particular attacks and concluded
they did more harm than good. In 2010, for example, members of Hamas’s military
wing shot and killed four Israelis near Hebron, including a pregnant woman and
the father and mother of a family of six children. The attack, which came a
couple of days before Israeli and Palestinian officials were slated to launch a
new round of negotiations in Washington, shattered a period of relative calm.
When asked about it shortly afterward, twice as many respondents predicted it
would hurt rather than advance Palestinian interests. Likewise, in polls on a
number of occasions between September 2010 and December 2011, a small majority
expressed the view that, should armed clashes erupt, they would not have a
better chance to bring about gains than would negotiations.
Under certain circumstances, then, a majority of
Palestinians conclude that the timing for an outbreak of violence is wrong. But
these are exceptions: when Palestinians look back at sustainedcampaigns
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.
3. Is Violence Praiseworthy?
If violence against Israelis is seen as both
legitimate and effective, it stands to reason that those responsible for it
will be celebrated and admired—and so they are. A case in point comes from the
2011 Greenberg poll, in which respondents were asked to characterize a series
of actions as “right” or “wrong.” One such action was the 1978 hijacking of two
Israeli buses and a taxi; in the ensuing firefight, the PLO hijackers, among
them a young woman named Dalal al-Maghrabi, were killed along with 38 Israeli
civilian victims. In the poll, a substantial majority, 61 percent, thought it
morally “right” to “nam[e] streets after Palestinian suicide bombers like Dalal
al-Maghrabi who killed Israeli civilians within Israel.”
61 percent thought it morally “right” to “name streets after Palestinian
suicide bombers like Dalal al-Maghrabi who killed Israeli civilians within
Israel.”
Similar questions have been asked about leading
figures known for threatening or using violence against Israel or the West. In
Pew studies conducted in dozens of countries and in the Palestinian
territories, Palestinians have been the most fervent admirers of, for instance,
Hassan Nasrallah, who led the Hizballah terrorist organization against Israel
in the 2006 Lebanon war and since then has repeatedly threatened to attack the
Jewish state and its citizens. Though absolute levels of support for Nasrallah
have varied over the years, the Palestinians outstripped every other people in
expressing their confidence in him on the three occasions the question came up.
Although the Palestinian population is
overwhelmingly Sunni, Palestinians consistently led others in their admiration
not just for Nasrallah but for Shiite Hizballah itself. Within the Middle East,
they expressed the highest levels of confidence in Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, another prominent Shiite Muslim known for his repeated threats to
annihilate Israel. Moreover, they led the world over the course of a decade in
believing that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and a
vociferous foe of Israel, could be counted on to “do the right thing in world
affairs.” In 2011, the last time Pew asked about bin Laden before his death at
the hands of American commandos, the Palestinians once again outdid all others
in their admiration, just as they did on various occasions in their favorable
assessments of al-Qaeda—and (the one time they were asked in a Pew survey) of
the Taliban.
IV. Palestinian Support for Armed Attacks
So much for Palestinian views on the foundational
issues of the legitimacy, effectiveness, and praiseworthiness of violence. When
it comes to the actual question of whether to support particular types of
violence in advance, or to express backing for concrete attacks after they
happen, what views do ordinary Palestinians hold?
Broadly speaking, from the Oslo accords in
September 1993 until spring 2000, a plurality of Palestinians were against most
kinds of armed attacks. According to a question posed by CPRS sixteen times
during this period, 49 percent opposed “armed attacks against Israelis” and 42
percent favored them. A handful of JMCC polls confirmed this reading of public
sentiment.
But a caution is in order. When large numbers are
supportive of armed attacks—and 42 percent is a large number—it does not much
matter if they are slightly outnumbered by those opposed to such actions.
Anyone contemplating an attack can still expect to benefit from a substantial
network of backers, and if successful to bring great honor upon himself and his
family. Needless to say, though, actual majority support will provide all the
more fertile ground for attacks—and since the eve of the second intifada in
September 2000 until today, there has been, during most periods, majority
support among Palestinians for violence of almost every kind against Israelis.
Anyone contemplating an armed attack can expect to benefit from a
substantial network of backers, and if successful to bring great honor upon
himself and his family.
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.
Although PSR, for its part, did not ask
specifically about suicide bombings, on 48 occasions between 2000 and 2015 it
did inquire about views on “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside
Israel”; in most cases, supporters outnumbered opponents, with those expressing
strong support almost always outpacing, often by as much as six to one, those
voicing strong opposition. On the half-dozen occasions this question was asked
in the last twelve months, supporters outnumbered opponents every time.
Even higher levels of support have been registered
after attacks that succeed in killing Israelis. Whereas an
October 2003 poll by PSR reported
54-percent support for attacks on Israeli civilians in general, when asked
about “the bombing operation in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, which led to the
death of 20 Israelis,” the proportion of support reached 74 percent. Parallel
leaps from in-principle backing for future actions to after-the-fact support
for concrete attacks are reported in polls from September 2004 (after a bomber
in Tel Aviv killed 11 Israelis), June 2006 (lethal attack on a shopping center
in Dimona), and March 2008—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.
One may speculate about the reasons behind
heightened support for specifically named attacks. It may be a consequence of
the society-wide adulation of shahids (those who die carrying
out attacks) during the weeks after they attain bloody martyrdom, of the higher
regard for suicide bombings than for other kinds of actions, and/or of
enthusiasm for striking Israelis in places of special significance—like Tel
Aviv, the symbol of Jewish economic power, or Jerusalem, the focal point of religious
contention, or Dimona, the epicenter of Israel’s military might. Whatever the
reason, individuals considering such an attack can expect the prospect of even
greater honor and celebration than might otherwise be anticipated—for
themselves, their families, and any militant organization with which they are
connected.
An even larger consensus has favored violence
against Israeli settlers, reaching 87 percent on average in polls by CPRS and
PSR during the decade ending in 2004. Indeed, since that year, PSR ceased
asking about attacks on settlers, perhaps because the answers were already so
consistent. But the phenomenon bears relevance to the current round of
violence, a substantial part of which has been aimed at Israelis living or
traveling in the West Bank. Moreover, in the eyes of the Palestinian
mainstream, Jews living in Jerusalem’s Old City or in the neighborhoods that
Israel captured in 1967, such as Pisgat Ze’ev and Armon Hanetziv, are also
considered settlers. Palestinian news reports about the latter, for example,
routinely refer to “the Israeli settlement of Armon Hanetziv built on the lands
of Jabal al-Muqaber.” These areas have been targeted in part because of the
relative ease with which the perpetrators (most of whom have hailed from eastern
Jerusalem or Hebron) can reach them, but an additional factor may have been the
higher level of support for attacking Israelis in such places.
Even more formidable is the societal consensus
behind attacks on Israeli soldiers. In a dozen polls between 2001 and 2004, PSR
found such support averaging 90 percent, with strong backers
outnumbering strong opponents by a lopsided fifty to one. This particular
feature of Palestinian opinion, about which pollsters stopped asking questions
a decade ago, could help explain why so many recent attacks have been aimed at
soldiers and policemen.
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. Though the question has not
been repeated since then, there is no reason to believe the response today
would be substantially different.
V. What Is to Be Done
To sum up: these findings show the degree to which
the recent Palestinian perpetrators of violence reflect and are acting on the
basis of views widely held in their society. Though they may be lone wolves in
the technical sense of not belonging to an organizational command structure,
they are anything but alone within their communities. To the contrary, they are
surrounded by people who share many of their core beliefs, who justify the
attacks they are carrying out, who see their actions as potentially valuable in
furthering Palestinian goals, and who can be counted on to venerate them and
their families.
These popularly held attitudes also make it
difficult for Palestinian officials to limit their own incitement of violence
or to deploy security forces vigorously to curb the attacks. So long as
Palestinian popular opinion remains where it is, eruptions of violence will
always be possible, and once begun can easily and quickly escalate.
Could anything change this state of affairs? It
seems highly improbable that the Palestinian masses, whose views have been
relatively stable for so long, will spontaneously shift gears in the
foreseeable future. Nor are there any signs that Palestinian media or religious
leaders are rethinking their own, often incendiary role in shaping public opinion.
Moreover, the populations of the neighboring Arab states and the media that
cater to them—a main reference point for Palestinians—are hardly poised to help
bring about positive change. Not only is public opinion in these countries
unrelentingly hostile to Jews and Israel, but the Arab world as a whole is
suffering a wave of internecine violence, which hardly makes it a model to be
emulated.
It’s unlikely that a change in Israeli actions will help dampen the
situation. A half-century of Israeli restraint at the Temple Mount, for
example, hasn’t convinced Palestinians that there is no plan to replace the
mosques with a Third Temple.
Similarly farfetched, but for other reasons, is the
idea that Israeli leaders, by modifying their rhetoric or restraining the
reactions of the security forces, can appreciably dampen Palestinian support
for violence. Doves might argue that Israel could transform Palestinian opinion
in the long term with an offer of a two-state solution more generous than those
advanced by former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert (and rejected by
the Palestinian leadership). Hawks might contend that change can be brought
about by exacting a price for violence and ensuring that it never serves to
advance Palestinian interests. But in the short and medium term, neither of
these approaches is likely to be effective.
Palestinians view Israeli words and deeds through a
powerfully distorting lens. A half-century of Israeli restraint at the Temple
Mount has failed to convince most Palestinians that there is no plan to replace
the mosques on Haram al-Sharif with a Jewish house of worship. A
decade-and-a-half marked by prolonged and intense bouts of violence has
persuaded Palestinians that the use of force generally helps them, and many
have formed these views based on earlier rounds of attacks against Israelis and
Westerners dating back a number of decades. Additionally, a series of
confrontations between the West and the Arab/Islamic world has ingrained in
most Palestinians a belief that attacking Western or Israeli targets, far from
constituting terrorism, is legitimate resistance. Hence, Israel is an unlikely
candidate to mitigate Palestinian support for violence.
The onus is therefore on the Palestinian leadership
to recognize the dangers posed to its own self-interest by the current volatile
circumstances and to take a firm and consistent stance against violence. Of
course, there is no expecting Hamas to adopt such a position, which would
contravene its organizational ethos and traditions ingrained over
two-and-a-half decades. But is it utterly inconceivable that a successor to the
eighty-year-old Abbas might do so? Whatever his weaknesses may be—and they have
been abundantly on display in recent weeks—Abbas has preached for a decade that
violence is not beneficial to the Palestinian cause and has consistently
ordered his security forces to cooperate with Israel in quelling armed attacks.
This is at least a precedent on which a stronger and more courageous leader
might build.
In any such effort, the Arab countries with the
greatest stake in preserving stability and preventing the further ascendancy of
radical Islamic forces in their neighborhood might have a refreshingly
constructive role to play (especially Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia). So might
the United States and Europe, which have both an interest in cooling fevers and
various diplomatic, political, and financial levers at their disposal. Though
Palestinians possess a remarkable capacity to form their own, independent
perception of the world around them, they are not immune to the consequences of
their actions or to the changing incentives they face. If the U.S. and other
Western powers were to begin vociferously condemning violence initiated by
Palestinians, to penalize the PA and Hamas until attacks stop, and to ensure
that under no circumstances will gains, diplomatic or otherwise, accrue from
them, this, too, might exercise a meliorating effect over time.
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. Toward that
end, I hope this essay, along with the broader research project of which it is
a part, can serve as a catalyst.
About the author
Daniel Polisar, a political scientist, is the provost and executive
vice-president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. His research has focused on
democratization, Israel’s constitutional development, and the challenges of
liberalization in the Palestinian Authority.
RESPONSE:
HOW PALESTINIANS' VISION OF ISRAEL SERVES PALESTINIAN NEEDS
Daniel
Polisar’s findings suggest it is not only Westerners who reduce Palestinians to
passive figurines, but Palestinians themselves.
HAVIV RETTIG
GUR (November 12 2015)
Possibly the most surprising
thing about Daniel Polisar’s essay, “What Do Palestinians Want?,” is that the
simple question it poses is so rarely asked. In his examination of 330 local
surveys of Palestinian opinion on Israel, together with a few more carried out
by foreign institutions, Polisar’s purpose is straightforward: to see how the
Palestinian Arabs, key actors in a century-old conflict, understand events and
how their behaviors flow from that understanding. Simple, yes—but a real
innovation in discussions of the conflict.
At the outset of his essay, Polisar briefly wonders at the rarity of
similar efforts, suggesting that the apparent lack of interest in a systematic
appreciation of Palestinian opinion about Israel may flow from “a mistaken
belief that public opinion does not matter in dictatorships,” or from “a
dismissive sense that [Palestinians] are powerless pawns whose fate is decided
by their leaders, Israel, or regional and world powers.” Out of kindness, perhaps,
he omits a more basic explanation: that observers tend to believe they already
know precisely what Palestinians think because those purported thoughts are
conveyed to them daily by activists and supporters who have taken up the
Palestinians’ cause.
Whatever the explanation, Polisar’s own effort to convey Palestinian
public opinion on the conflict with Israel reveals the scope and depth of what
has been missing. His implicit argument that “what is happening” on the ground
is at least in part happening within the bounds of the Palestinian psyche and
discourse rather dramatically shifts the common assumptions of diplomats,
journalists, and would-be peacemakers.
The Israel that emerges from Polisar’s examination of Palestinian
attitudes cannot be said to constitute, in any meaningful sense, a critical or
diagnostic depiction of the reality of Israeli society. It is, rather, a vision
of Israel that serves distinctly Palestinian needs. To be sure, one can say
something similar about the astonishing role played by Israel, for good and
(increasingly) for ill, in the consciousness of the West, where the
many-layered life of a nation is so often reduced to a caricature through which
the moral passions or identity narratives of foreigners can find expression. For
Palestinians and Israelis, of course, the consequences that flow from their
visions of each other are stupendously high—and so Polisar’s painstaking study
is arguably a more fundamental and valuable contribution to understanding the
conflict than any straight-line history would have been.
In part, this is because of the depth and nuance of
his study, which dives deeper than the fairly well-understood facts about
Palestinian rejection of Jewish legitimacy in the land and support for violence
against civilians. Thus, Polisar shows that majorities of Palestinians believe
that Israel actively sought the successive wars it has fought in Gaza, that the
inception of those wars was wholly unconnected with Palestinian actions, and
that Israel consciously intended to target civilians in those wars and so
carries sole responsibility for the suffering that followed. Majorities also
believe that Israel is largely or wholly to blame for breakdowns in peace talks
with Palestinian leaders, and even that Israel bears primary responsibility for
the inefficacy and incompetence of Palestiniandomestic governance:
for the deadly 1994 clashes between PA police and Hamas, for the even deadlier
2007 takeover of Gaza by Hamas, and even for the inability of Hamas and Fatah
to reconcile in 2015.
Israel, that is to say, is at fault
not only for the Palestinians’ physical conditions—economic underdevelopment,
water or fuel shortages, and the like—but also for the failures of Palestinian
leaders with regard to their own people and for the homegrown Palestinian
political culture of autocracy and schism.
That the intentions of one’s enemy,in this
case Israel, are believed to be diabolical is perhaps not so unexpected in any
inter-ethnic conflict. The same is not true, however, when it comes to
Palestinian views of Israeli power. Israelis (and Jews) are seen by most
Palestinians as not only ruthless and dishonest but also as strong and clever.
At the same time, this evil nemesis is seen, conveniently, as too monstrously
immoral to survive. A narrative emerges from these consistent responses:
Palestinians are comfortably certain that Israel is the cause of both their
dilapidated condition and their inner failings but, luckily, is also doomed to
implode, and in not much more than two decades’ time.
More arresting still is the finding about Palestinian
support for political violence, particularly against civilians. Not only do
Palestinians support such terror, but their support outstrips all other Arab
peoples. However much they share the basic perspectives of neighboring Arabs,
in this they are detached from the broader politics of the Arab world. That
uniqueness is a more revealing finding than the simple fact of their support.
As Arab states break apart in sectarian turmoil, majorities throughout the Arab
world say they oppose violence
against civilians, in part because this violence has been so consistently
turned against themselves. The Palestinian experience of such systematic
violence against civilians, however, primarily consists of the violence they
themselves have inflicted on the “usurper” Israelis, not of violence visited
upon them by jihadist zealots.
And that’s no
accident. It is sometimes whispered among Palestinians that the Israeli enemy,
for all his evil ways, at least provides a bulwark against the hordes rampaging
through the region. That whisper conveys recognition of a fact: the Jews, in
their successful efforts to defend themselves from the collapsing Arab order
beyond their borders, also shield the Palestinians from that collapse.
The Israeli left
often laments that Palestinian society has yet to produce a leader who grasps
the extent to which the fulfillment of Palestinian national aspirations depends
on the acquiescence of Israeli public opinion, and thus the strategic
imperative for Palestinians to help build trust across the bleeding trenches of
the conflict. Polisar’s examination of Palestinian opinion suggests a new
reading of this failure. In the Palestinians’ own image of Israel—an entity
malevolent in its intentions, overwhelmingly powerful, at once protective of
them and a legitimate target for “resistance,” and ultimately destined to fall
of its own internal contradictions—they have constructed a mental cocoon, an
escape from moral and political agency. Polisar rightly laments the
“patronizing” tendency of foreign observers to view Palestinians as “powerless
pawns,” but his findings suggest it is not only Westerners who reduce
Palestinians to passive figurines, but Palestinians themselves.
Of course, it would beintellectually
dishonest to detach these Palestinian sensibilities from hard reality. Israel
really is much more powerful than its Arab neighbors, and in ways deeper and
more abiding than military might alone. Within that power relationship,
Palestinians languish in legal and economic limbo while Israel has surged ahead
both in material prosperity and in most global measures of national happiness.
Similarly, it is an uncomfortable but undeniable truth that in the wake of the
worst bouts of Palestinian violence, broad swaths of Israeli public opinion
have tended to swerve toward favoring a final and definitive separation, often
through calls for territorial withdrawal. It is hence not really so difficult
to understand why Israel might be viewed by outsiders like the Palestinians,
unfamiliar as they are with the internal tensions and complexities of Israeli
politics, as simultaneously powerful and weak, oppressive and intimidated.
Yet to grant all
this is still not to explain why Israel should be seen as guilty of the bloody
Fatah-Hamas impasse, or how Palestinians’ explicit support for terror manages
to coexist with the conviction of their own blamelessness for Israeli military
responses, or how, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of Israeli success,
Palestinians can conclude with apparently perfect candor that Jewish nationhood
is terminally fragile. In each of these beliefs, borne out in the survey data,
Palestinians are using Israel to answer an implicit question about themselves
and their condition, and the answer is always the same: we are powerless, and
therefore exempt from responsibility.
Polisar concludes
that, taken together, these deep-rooted and time-tested Palestinian views place
the onus for any movement toward peace on Palestinian leaders who might effect
a change in attitudes. Yet the peculiar role that Israel seems to play in
Palestinian minds suggests that this may be too optimistic. In Israel, the
Palestinians appear to have found not only a real-life culprit for their
real-world condition but the phantasm in which they can safely place all of the
stymied hopes of their history and all the inner failings of their society. As
long as Israel continues to serve as the meta-answer to every discomfiting
question, effectively functioning as the Palestinians’ internal mechanism for
denying their own agency, no alternative narrative has a chance of success. Put simply, too much is at stake.
About the author
Haviv Rettig
Gur is The Times of Israel‘s senior analyst.
