Dissecting Palestinian opinion polls

A recent poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza found that a majority of Palestinians support direct peace negotiations with Israel and a two-state solution to the conflict, but that most would prefer a single Palestinian state to any two-state solution.

Conducted in early October by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading polling firm based in Washington, D.C., and sponsored by the Israel Project, a nonprofit education organization, pollsters interviewed 854 Palestinians face to face in the West Bank and Gaza. Questions were asked in Arabic and covered a variety of topics, including support for Hamas and Fatah, feelings toward Iran and its president, and an assessment of what the priorities of the Palestinian Authority (PA) should be.

The in-depth survey reveals much about the collective Palestinian mindset, but its most confounding results focused on Palestinian public opinion regarding the prospects for a negotiated peace with Israel. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they favor direct negotiations between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet, given a choice between engaging with or struggling against Israel, 58 percent of Palestinians agreed with the statement “this is a time for armed struggle,” and only 36 percent chose the other alternative, “this is the time for engagement with Israel.”

The mixed results present a nuanced picture of Palestinian public opinion. “On the one hand, people seem willing to support the peace process and the two-state solution,” Alan Elsner, U.S. communications director for the Israel Project, said. “On the other hand, if you ask them about the ideal solution or their ultimate hopes, they’ll tell you about a ‘two-stage’ solution.”

Indeed, just 30 percent of those surveyed said they believe that a two-state solution should be permanent, while 60 percent said that establishing Jewish and Palestinian states side by side should be temporary, with the ultimate goal being the establishment of a single Palestinian state. Only one-fifth accepted the notion that Israel has “a permanent right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”

Other pollsters who work on Palestinian public opinion questioned some of the Israel Project survey’s findings. Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah, who has been polling Palestinians since 1993, said he “was surprised by the high levels of support for negotiation with Israel” and said the formulation of certain survey questions may be responsible for the unexpected results.

Shikaki took particular issue with the question about whether to engage with Israel or to pursue armed resistance. The “forced choice,” as he put it, between these two courses of action may have affected the response. “If a third choice was offered, like going to the U.N., or resorting to nonviolent resistance, support for engaging Israel and for armed resistance would have dropped dramatically,” Shikaki wrote in an e-mail.

PSR, Shikaki’s group, has found that most Palestinians prefer such alternatives. In a survey conducted around the same time as the Israel Project-sponsored poll (between Sept. 30 and Oct. 2), PSR found that 57 percent of Palestinians oppose a return to armed resistance. PSR surveyed 1,270 Palestinians in face-to-face interviews at 127 randomly selected locations around the West Bank and Gaza; in that survey, 69 percent of Palestinians said that if Palestinian negotiators were to pull out of peace talks with Israel, the next course of action should be to go to the United Nations Security Council to obtain recognition of a Palestinian state. A majority of Palestinians also supported either unilaterally declaring a state (54 percent) or resorting to nonviolent resistance (51 percent), should peace talks fail to produce an acceptable result.

“The goal is to obtain a more general gut reaction,” a spokesperson from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research wrote in an e-mail, explaining the use of the paired statement exercise. “Respondents are also able to answer ‘neither’ or ‘both’ to the statements. This is a fairly common polling exercise.”

Craig Charney, president of Charney Research, a New York-based firm that has been working in the Middle East for the past five years, described as “directly misleading” the Israel Project poll’s question asking whether subjects support a two-state solution or if “the real goal should be to start with two states, but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.” Sixty percent of Palestinians in the poll chose the “one Palestinian state” option. In reporting their key findings, the Israel Project concluded that Palestinian “support for a two-state solution is highly qualified.” Charney disagreed. “All this shows is that there are many Palestinians who wish that the Israelis weren’t there, just as there are many Israelis who wish the Palestinians weren’t there,” Charney said. “That’s not an option on the table, actually,” he added.

The Palestinians come across in both the Israel Project and the PSR surveys as deeply ambivalent about their prospects for the future, and both surveys show that, more than anything, Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank think the PA’s top priority should be creating more jobs. The PSR survey found that 28 percent of Palestinians feel the “spread of unemployment and poverty” should be the PA’s top priority, while 26 percent said the continued split between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank was most important. Sixteen percent said the continuation of Israeli occupation and of settlements in the West Bank should be at the top of the PA’s agenda.

The Israel Project survey also found that the top priority among Palestinians is increased employment, with 58 percent of respondents listing it among their top three PA priorities.

For the full results of the Israel Project-sponsored poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in early October 2010 go to theisraelproject.org. Or the full results of Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 37, conducted in the West Bank and Gaza by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) from Sept. 30-Oct. 2 go to http://pcpsr.org.