What Do the Palestinians Want?

November 20, 2023

by: Caroline Glick ~ JNS

Monday, 20 November 2023 | For more than a generation, the Israeli left and Western leaders have insisted that the Palestinians want peace. They want a state of their own. They want Israel to leave the Gaza Strip, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. And once they get these things, they will live at peace with Israel.

Throughout the years, Israeli political leaders, military leaders, academics and journalists have produced voluminous reports that exposed the PA’s support for and involvement in terrorism. They have produced encyclopedia-length dossiers, documentary movies and intelligence reports exposing how its education system indoctrinates children from birth to embrace the cause of Israel’s annihilation and imbued the entirety of Palestinian society with a genocidal, Nazi-styled jihadist outlook that seeks the utter elimination of Judaism and Jews from the face of the planet.

Beyond a few half-hearted condemnations from US State Department officials over the years—and a couple of even less committal guffaws from UN [United Nations] and EU [European Union] officials—none of these reports, documentaries, or exposés have impacted the West’s devotion to the so-called “two-state solution,” or Westerners’ tendency to blame the absence of peace on “right-wing” or “extreme right-wing” Israelis who reject territorial concessions to a society and a governing authority that aspire to wipe Israel off the map.

Over the past 30 years, Israeli leftists have, at times, paid lip service to the problem. But due to a combination of political interests, ideological brittleness and dependence on Western allies, the bulk of the Israeli left refused to accept the strategic implications of the absence of a Palestinian leadership—or society, for that matter—that is willing to countenance Israel’s right to exist, with or without Judea and Samaria, with or without Jerusalem.

On October 7, the sadism and scope of Hamas’s slaughter shocked the whole of Israeli society to its core. Polling data indicates that there has been a sea shift of opinion among Israeli leftists regarding the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.

The same cannot be said of the West. Led by the Biden administration, Western governments have uniformly insisted that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians. Most Palestinians, including those in Gaza, want to make peace with Israel that includes a Palestinian state, they say.

Since October 8, US officials—and their counterparts in the EU the UN and beyond—have insisted nearly every single day that if Israel strikes too hard in Gaza, if it denies so-called “humanitarian aid” to the people of Gaza, then it will draw these poor people to Hamas, guaranteeing another generation of war.

In other words, by this telling, until Israel launched its counterstrike in Gaza, the Palestinians opposed Hamas and were its unwilling victims. But once Israel deployed its ground forces in Gaza, these people were forced into Hamas’s waiting arms.

Weighing the Results of an Opinion Poll

On Thursday, Birzeit University near Ramallah published a survey of Palestinian opinion that responded to this central Western claim. Their answer was as nuanced as a brick.

Researchers from Birzeit gathered the data through face-to-face interviews with thousands of Palestinians throughout Judea and Samaria and at three points in southern Gaza. They also spoke to residents of southern Gaza and with evacuees from the combat zones in northern Gaza.

Some 75% of Palestinians support the Hamas-led slaughter of October 7. Another 11% don’t have an opinion. They’re neutral about whether it’s a good idea to rape and torture, and behead, burn alive and abduct women, men, children and infants. Still, three-quarters of Palestinians think it’s a terrific accomplishment.

Likewise, 75% of Palestinians seek the annihilation of Israel. They want a Palestine “from the river to the sea.” This position is distinct from a position of supporting a Jewish-Arab state from the river to the sea, or the so-called “one-state solution,” which only 5.4% of Palestinians support. Another 17.2% support the two-state solution, (13.2% in the PA controlled areas in Judea and Samaria, and 22.7% in Gaza).

If Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinians, it’s hard to understand who represents them. Seventy-six percent of Palestinians support Hamas. Eighty-eight percent of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support Hamas, and 60% of Gaza residents support Hamas. The PA enjoys the support of just 10% of Palestinians.

The only groups that enjoy more support than Hamas are the terror groups that have no aspiration to do anything other than kill Jews—Iran’s Islamic jihad, the PA’s Fatah’s al-Aqsa Brigades, and Hamas’s terror cells Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades all enjoy even higher levels of support than Hamas itself.

Palestinians believe that there is no credible reason for anyone to support Israel. To the extent that Israel is supported by Western nations, the Palestinians attribute it to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power and money. A total of 92% believe that the “Jewish Lobby” is behind Western support for Israel. And 96% believe that Western support for Israel owes to economic interests.

As to the Westerners insisting the Palestinians are peaceful and hate Hamas, the Palestinians hate them as much as they hate Israel: 98% of Palestinians hate the United States and 97% hate Britain.

If there is any ray of hope emanating from the data, it comes in the disparity between the positions of Palestinians in Gaza, and those in Judea and Samaria. Whereas 88% of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria support Hamas, only 60% of Gazans do.

The reason undoubtedly owes to the Israel Defense Forces’s combined forces operation in Gaza. It works out that seeing their homes destroyed and being forced to evacuate dampens somewhat the Gazans’ support for genocide and its perpetrators.

When Westerners approach the Palestinians, they do so through the prisms of their own preferences and values, and with a drop (or an ocean) of hostility towards the Jewish state.

Westerners assume that the Palestinians seek a future of prosperity freedom and peace because that is what they aspire to preserve for themselves. But this isn’t the case—or at least not in the way that Westerners think. The Palestinians want a better life. But their conception of a better life is a life of jihad, of killing infidels. What motivates them is not prosperity but genocide.

Actions don’t lie, and neither does the data. The Palestinians are a society unified by their common goal of annihilating Israel. That is who they are. That is what they want.

Posted on November 20, 2023

Source: (Excerpt of an article originally published by the Jewish News Syndicate on November 19, 2023. Time-related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See original article at this link)

Photo Credit: Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90/jns.org