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PALESTINIANS ARE SOURING ON HAMAS – AND THEY WANT AN END TO THE WAR
 
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Dahlia Scheindlin
December 30, 2024
Haaretz
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_ There's the bad news – apocalyptic destruction in Gaza, rampant
poverty, utter despair about the Palestinian Authority–and there's
more bad news: Over half of Palestinians still back the October 7
attack. Recent polls show that's not the whole story. _

Palestinian children at a tent camp in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza
Strip, on Sunday. Ninety-two percent of Gazan respondents in a recent
survey said they are displaced., Credit: Mohammed Salem / Reuters //
Haaretz

 

Most Israelis know one thing about Palestinian public opinion during
the last 14 months: that surveys show a large majority support Hamas'
attack on October 7.

In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – _refuah shlema_
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said "85 percent of [Palestinians] support the massacre on October 7,"
and this became axiomatic in Israel.

Survey findings in those first months were indeed demoralizing. In a
poll by the Arab World Research and Development (AWRAD) research
center from late October, three-quarters of Palestinians
[[link removed]] in
Gaza and the West Bank said they supported the "military operation"
(as per the question wording). Similarly, 72 percent thought Hamas
was "correct" to attack
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a December survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research. (Netanyahu's "85 percent" quote was close to PSR's finding
for the West Bank alone, where 82 percent said Hamas was correct.)

It was no less demoralizing in January when the Tel Aviv University
Peace Index
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that over 90 percent of Jewish Israelis thought Israel was using
the right amount of force
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not enough, and 87 percent justified the number of Palestinian
casualties.

However, nearly a year has passed since then. What's changed? If
Israelis want to understand current Palestinian attitudes, they need
to first step back and try to inhabit Palestinian experiences before
claiming to grasp their mind-set. Understanding what the Palestinian
public is going through, their concerns and often despair about
leadership, economic hardship and internal social gaps consume them.
There's more to Palestinians than a lust for force, or hatred of
Israelis, as per many Israelis' perceptions.

LIFE ITSELF IS BAD

A window into those experiences is offered by the normally soporific
methodology information about AWRAD's new survey from early December
this year. It is a stark starting point: 92 percent of respondents in
its Gaza sample were displaced. The standard "type of dwelling"
question yielded awful results: one-third live in a damaged home; 14
percent live in a formal tent community; and another 14 percent in an
informal tent community. Only 12 percent reported living in an
undamaged home, and a majority live in some type of makeshift
dwelling. Seven percent of Gazans said they were living in warehouses.

 
A man walks past a closed shop during a general strike in the West
Bank city of Jenin earlier this month.  (Credit: Zain Jaafar/Agence
France-Presse (AFP)  //  Haaretz)
Among West Bank respondents, nearly 90 percent reported that their
economic situation had become much (57 percent) or somewhat (31
percent) worse compared to one year earlier. To understand why,
Israelis would have to learn that immediately following October 7,
Israel slashed the transfer of Palestinian clearance taxes
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collects instead of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords,
a major source of PA revenue – transferring only partial sums in
mid-2024.

Israel also slammed the door to roughly 100,000
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worked in Israel or in settlements prior to the war – legally, with
security vetting. These legal laborers almost never attack Israelis,
and some have quietly trickled back in. Together with illegal
laborers, about one-fifth of the West Bank's labor force
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150,000) worked in Israel before the war; they lost their income
overnight.

The PA lost further tax revenues and, as a result, slashed public
sector salaries by up to half, causing a dizzying cycle of poverty
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now expected to reach 74 percent of all Palestinians in United
Nations 2024 forecasts
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Who can help? Not the Palestinian government, according to the people.
A PSR survey from September found that 72 percent of Palestinians do
not believe that their new government – established this March under
new Prime Minister Muhammed Mustafa – can improve the economic
situation in the West Bank or Gaza. In the recent AWRAD survey, West
Bankers listed job creation as their top priority, but 86 percent of
respondents said the Mustafa government's performance was
unsatisfactory on that issue.

 

The sense of utter despair regarding Palestinian leadership is a
consistent finding across Palestinian survey research, for years. As
the analyst Walid Ladadweh of PSR noted in a December policy briefing
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Gaza and the West Bank (approximately 70 percent) do not believe the
Mustafa government can deliver on _any_ of its core promises:
helping Gaza, bringing political reconciliation, improving the economy
or advancing elections, though AWRAD found that nearly 90 percent
support elections after the war.

As an aside, the current Israeli leadership can mark a new low: The
September PSR survey found only 22 percent of Palestinians believe the
Mustafa government can deliver on its promised reforms. This is
statistically close to the 25 percent of Israelis
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in the 2024 Israel Democracy Index. The Mustafa government has nothing
resembling sovereign state power, and nearly none over Gaza. What's
the Israeli government's excuse?

Given the apocalyptic destruction in Gaza, the rampant poverty and
dismal perceptions of their government, the Palestinian frame of mind
is bleak. When asked to choose from six emotions, Gazans show a tie
for the top three: "fear," "helplessness" and "anger,. That was in a
September survey [[link removed]] by the fairly
new Institute for Social and Economic Progress
[[link removed]], an independent think tank. "Anger"
and "helplessness" got higher marks in Gaza than in either of the
group's two previous surveys this year. "Anger" reached its highest
point in the West Bank so far, with 47 percent (ranked first), up
nearly twenty points since October 2023.

 
Gazan men, some of them armed, walk during the funeral procession of
a victim of an Israeli strike on a home in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza
Strip, last week.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana / AP
WAR IS HELL

What does Palestinian anger, despair, economic or physical desperation
mean for their attitudes toward the war, occupation and the future?

First, Palestinians want an end to the war, full stop. Nearly
three-quarters of Gazans now prefer a permanent cease-fire instead of
settling for a temporary one, up from 58 percent in June, according to
ISEP's September survey. The portion who accept a temporary approach
– as per Israel's stalwart position to date – has dropped from 41
to 26 percent. An even greater majority in the West Bank, 82 percent,
chose a permanent cease-fire. (The survey offered three options of a
permanent cease-fire with variations, such as withdrawal of Israeli
forces and an end of the siege in Gaza.)

The surveys also show that the growing demand to end the war for good
is accompanied by an erosion of support for violence and force in
general.

Support for Hamas has followed a typical war-bump pattern, and it's
currently on the down-side: from 43 percent in PSR's December 2023
survey, 36 percent supported Hamas in September this year. In the
recent AWRAD survey, Hamas loses in any type of contest, whether for
legislative or presidential elections.

In Gaza, that support is usually in the single digits, reaching 10
percent at most in a presidential competition (when the Hamas
candidate, Khaled Meshal, goes up against Mahmoud Abbas, among other
competitors). And in PSR's September survey, Hamas had its lowest
showing since the war began, when asked who respondents would vote for
in a legislative election – 29 percent, though still slightly higher
than September 2023.

 
The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is seen behind the Israeli separation
barrier in the West Bank village of Abu Dis on the outskirts of
Jerusalem.Credit: Mahmoud Illean / AP
AWRAD asked Palestinians about the best way to end the occupation and
achieve a Palestinian state: Sixty percent chose "negotiations or a
peace process," by far the top response – three times the proportion
who chose "all-out military confrontation." Negotiations received much
higher support in Gaza (but even in the West Bank, twice as many
respondents preferred negotiations to a military approach).

Finally, regarding PSR's repeated question about whether Hamas was
correct to attack Israel on October 7, support has declined to its
lowest point so far in both areas. Only a minority (39 percent) of
Gazans say it was correct, and 54 percent of the weighted total of
Palestinians, down from 72 percent a year ago.

These findings are still demoralizing. And with 84 percent of Israeli
Jews who continue to justify what Israel has done in Gaza since
October 7 in the joint Israeli-Palestinian survey in July
[[link removed]], no one has a monopoly on bad
attitudes.

But any improvement in public attitudes should be seen as an
opportunity, and an imperative, to find an end to this hell.

_[DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN (PhD, Tel Aviv University) is a political
scientist, a public opinion expert, a political consultant, a policy
fellow at The Century Foundation, a columnist at Haaretz (English)
covering politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and foreign
affairs. _

_She has advised on nine national campaigns in Israel, where her
regular research focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, foreign
policy, democracy, human rights and civil rights, political analysis,
and comparative conflict analysis. Scheindlin also has regional
expertise in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, post-conflict societies,
and transitional democracies in 15 countries beyond Israel. _

_She is among the founders of +972 Magazine and has co-hosted several
podcasts including the Tel Aviv Review of Books and Election Overdose.
Dahlia has published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign
Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New
Republic among other publications, and appears regularly in
international media outlets. She is a board member of A Land for All,
and the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel
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published in September 2023, and she lives in Tel Aviv.]_
 

* Palestinians
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Israel-Palestine
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* Hamas
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* West Bank
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Ceasefire
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* Oct. 7
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* Hostages
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* war crimes
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* Genocide
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Occupied Territories
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* apartheid
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* AWRAD
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