A recent public opinion poll revealed that two-thirds of Palestinians support knife attacks against Israelis, while 54% oppose a two-state solution, The Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday.
In the survey, consisting of 1397 adults throughout the West Bank and Gaza, 67 percent of respondents said they supported the use of knife terror attacks against Israelis. Almost three-quarters (73%) said they were against young school girls carrying out these attacks.
Another finding showed that 60% of those polled support an armed intifada and 66% think an escalation in violence would positively serve them.
The poll, released by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, found that 70% of respondents also rejected the idea of a single-state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas remains deeply unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza, with 65% of those surveyed saying that they want to see him resign and 78% calling the PA corrupt.
After reviewing decades of Palestinian public opinion polling, Dan Polisar, the provost of Shalem College, observed in Mosaic last month that “Palestinian perpetrators of violence reflect and are acting on the basis of views widely held in their society.” Recent reports by the Middle East Media Research Institute and The New York Times shed light on the widespread incitement that stokes this extremism, which ranges from popular hashtags such as “slaughtering the Jews” to songs that encourage Palestinians to “Stab the Zionist and say God is great.”
These calls to violence, which various Israeli security experts and Palestinian activists blame for fueling the recent wave of stabbing, shooting, and car-ramming attacks against Israelis, are often amplified by top Palestinian political and religious leaders. In November, the PA’s official newspaper published an op-ed claiming that Israel was behind the ISIS terror attacks in Paris. A day earlier, the official Facebook page of Fatah posted an image equating Israel with ISIS.
In late October, Abbas said that Israel has been an occupying power since its creation, only two weeks after he claimed that Israel had “executed” a teen terrorist who was actually alive and recovering in an Israeli hospital. A month earlier, Abbas declared that Palestinians would not allow the “filthy feet” of Jews to defile holy places in Jerusalem.
[Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90 ]