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.
Successive U.S. administrations have modulated their support for Israel based on their perception of the Israeli government’s willingness to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Those that were seen as willing to surrender Judea, Samaria, Gaza (which Israel abandoned in 2005) and Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority were supported. Those that were perceived as unwilling to cough up land to the P.A. were ostracized, condemned and subverted.
Throughout the years, Israeli political leaders, military leaders, academics and journalists have produced voluminous reports that exposed the P.A.’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 U.S. State Department officials over the years—and a couple of even less committal guffaws from U.N. and E.U. 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 Oct. 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, simply want to make peace with Israel that includes a Palestinian state, they say.
Since Oct. 8, U.S. officials—and their counterparts in the European Union, the United Nations 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.
As President Joe Biden and his advisers have said repeatedly, “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. It does not stand for the dignity of Palestinians.”
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 Oct. 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 P.A. controlled areas in Judea and Samaria, and 22.7% in Gaza).
Do you really have to ask that question? They want the land that Israel occupies. Nothing will change that desire.
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