Six in Ten Palestinians

When people wonder who it is that stands in the way of peace in the Middle East we might point to a recent poll that shows that 60% of Palestinians reject a two state solution:

Only one in three Palestinians (34 percent) accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg.

Respondents were asked about US President Barack Obama’s statement that “there should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.”

Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it.

Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians’ real goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then move to it all being one Palestinian state.

Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.

Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools.

When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.

These results will unfortunately leave much of world opinion unmoved. It's an odd thing about the Left that they always seem to assume that where there's conflict the fault must lie with the party most closely allied with the U.S.

Or they see the conflict through the lens of Marxism: The Palestinians live in squalor, the thinking goes, and the Israelis are relatively wealthy, so the Palestinian plight must be caused by Israeli oppression, exploitation and intransigence. The problem would go away if the Israelis would simply stop defending themselves and/or just went away themselves, and then there'd be peace in the region.

According to the Left, since the Israelis unreasonably refuse to do the one thing that would bring peace, i.e. commit suicide, Palestinian anger and violence is manifestly the Jews' fault. QED.