45% of Israeli Jews prefer war over peace. And the Palestinians?

Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, viewed from the Palestinian side of the security barrier. What the Israeli public sees as the ‘October 7 massacre’ looks very different in Palestinian eyes.

Dani Bar On writes in Haaretz on 9 November 2024

There are some phrases in Israel which, when uttered, create a sense of jamais vu, the opposite of déjà vu – namely, an experience in which something familiar appears strange. Phrases like “peace negotiations,” “two states for two peoples” or “direct talks” generate that feeling. These days stories about extraterrestrial aliens come off as more likely than those phrases. Indeed, according to a large-scale survey published this past September, 68 percent of Israel’s Jews oppose the two-state solution, with only 21 percent in favor – a decades-long low point. Moreover, 42 (!) percent of those Jews support the creation of one Jewish-supremacy state between the Jordan River and the sea.

You would have thought that with a blood-drenched war dragging on, the Palestinians would have had their fill of the Israelis, too, and that, consequently, support among them for two independent states would also have decreased, at the expense of the vision of a single Palestinian state – the apple of the eye of so many demonstrators on U.S. campuses.

Yet it seems that the opposite is the case. According to that same survey – conducted this past July by Dr. Nimrod Rosler and Dr. Alon Yakter, both of Tel Aviv University, Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, together with the Palestinian researcher Dr. Khalil Shikaki from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, aka PSR – 40 percent of the Palestinians living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem support the two-state solution. Among them there has even been a significant increase in support for this arrangement since before the so-called October 7 war, whereas among Israeli Jews there’s been a decline.

The Palestinians prefer this type of blueprint over the alternative of either a Palestinian-dominated state between the Jordan and the sea (33 percent) or a single, democratic state for both Jews and Arabs (25 percent). When Shikaki asked the question in September, without mentioning Israel – in other words, he asked Palestinians in the territories if they would agree to make do with a state in the territories occupied by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza – support climbed to 59 percent. Another poll, conducted by the Ramallah-based Institute for Social and Economic Progress, or ISEP, found backing to be even higher: 62 percent in the West Bank, 83 percent in the Strip.

Israelis who still believe in the idea of two states are liable to despair when they consider the variables of age and religious affiliation informing the responses of the overall Jewish public: Whereas among Israeli Jews in the 55-and-over age bracket there is 39-percent support for the two-state solution, among those in the 18-34 year-old cohort it’s 8 percent, dwindling to 3 percent among Orthodox Jews and 1 percent among the ultra-Orthodox.

A lone ray of light shone through when the question was asked more broadly. “If the choice is between a regional war including Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Yemen and possibly Iran, or a regional peace deal that includes Palestinian-Israeli agreement based on a two-state solution and Arab-Israeli normalization,” the survey asked, “what is your preference?”

Among the Palestinians, 65 percent replied that they would prefer regional peace over regional war – with a minimal discrepancy, on this question, between Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza. With respect to Israel’s Arabs, 89 percent of the respondents opted for the alternative of regional peace. Among Jews in Israel, peace won over war on points, but not by a knockout: 55 percent vs. 45 percent.

A similar result was obtained in a poll conducted in early October by the Agam Labs research institute, headed by political psychologist Nimrod Nir of the Hebrew University. When asked to express a preference for either a demilitarized Palestinian state with a so-called moderate government and the supervision of other Arab states, or annexation of the Gaza Strip, 55 percent of Israeli Jews chose a demilitarized Palestinian state, as opposed to 45 percent, who preferred annexation. Good news for those who are able to focus on the 55 percent-full glass.

At the same time, aversion to the two-state solution doesn’t mean that Israelis want the war to continue at any price. Every middling expert in the realm of surveys knows that the way questions are formulated can exert a critical influence on the responses. In the same survey, when Nir asked respondents to choose between the continuation of the war in the south at the price of the death of most of the hostages, or the war’s termination in exchange for their release, 75 percent of Israel’s Arab population and 72 percent of its Jewish population supported an end to the war. That’s not an exceptional finding: The Agam surveys have shown a majority of the Jewish population in favor of ending the war since at least March.

Let’s return to the issue of the two states. Political scientist Prof. Colin Irwin from the University of Liverpool, who has been involved in helping to resolve a number of conflicts worldwide, is very far from thinking that the situation is a lost cause. “Pollsters who haven’t worked during peace processes do not understand how it works,” Irwin explains. “In real negotiations, a binary scale is worthless.”

Instead, respondents should be asked to grade their opinion on a scale, he says: that is, to decide whether the proposed solution is “necessary” in their view, “desirable but not necessary,” “not especially desirable but acceptable,” “not desirable but can be lived with” – or “definitely unacceptable.” Last May, when Irwin put such a question to Israelis, both Jews and Arabs – via Israeli pollster Mina Tzemach – 43 percent said that from their point of view, a two-state solution is “definitely unacceptable.” Irwin thinks this is an encouraging figure, given that it came in wartime, and adds triumphantly that this rate was lower than that of Protestants (52 percent) who were firmly opposed in 1998 to a power sharing agreement in Northern Ireland, before the Good Friday accord was signed there.

In November 2023, about a month after the war’s outbreak, in a survey conducted by Dr. Nader Said, from the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development institute, AWRAD, 98 percent of Palestinian respondents stated that “they will never forget and will never forgive what Israel did and is continuing to do during this war.” How can peace be made under such circumstances?

Irwin: “You [i.e., pollsters in general] will get such an answer in every conflict in the world. Don’t tell me how bad the situation is. There are places in the world where there are worse conflicts. Be realistic. Grow up already. We need to ask questions that promote peace, not poison the atmosphere. Ask about security. What would make Israelis and Palestinians sleep at night without fear. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

* * *

Like an emergency-medical team that swoops in on the victim of a traffic accident, public opinion researchers are milling around a blood-drenched slice of land between the Jordan and the sea. Some are taking the pulse of peaceful intentions, others are monitoring the level of murderousness and of the revenge impulse, still others are attaching a sensor to the index finger to examine the levels of despair and optimism. There are frequent studies being conducted both among Jews and Arabs in Israel, and within Palestinian society in the West Bank and also in Gaza, despite the obvious technical limitations (more on that below).

The results of the surveys conducted among the Palestinians in recent months show a large disparity between those in the West Bank and those in Gaza. Though in both regions there is, overall, readiness to make do with a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, there are major differences of approach regarding the short term. Gazans are exceedingly weary of the war, long for tranquility and are less supportive of an armed struggle, whereas West Bank Palestinians think that at the moment what will be most helpful to the Gazans is friction with Israel.

If there is one datum that’s worth remembering from this article, it’s that of ISEP, a new institute in Ramallah, which is led by a group of young Palestinian social scientists. In a poll conducted in September they asked residents of Gaza what they thought the “current national strategy” should be. Seven percent said “escalation,” 93 percent said “de-escalation.” In the West Bank the situation is the reverse: Two-thirds said they were in favor of “escalation.”

Palestinians, like Israeli Jews, are caught up in a media maze of mirrors. However, they are exposed to information Israelis don’t see – coverage of the widespread damage and killing going on in Gaza. The result is radically different reactions and emotions among Israelis and Palestinians.
Based on the findings of his organization’s surveys, notes ISEP co-founder and CEO Obada Shtaya, “In the past half year Israel has succeeded in radicalizing the West Bank.” He adds, “This is the first time that one can say, based on data, that the West Bank is about to explode.”

The difference between the West Bank and Gaza is also apparent in the degree of support in each place for the attacks of October 7, 2023. Surveys show a sharp decline in support among Gazans for the Hamas assault – today it stands at 20 percent to 40 percent, depending on which poll you believe. A decrease is being recorded in the West Bank, too, but a more moderate one. A clear majority there apparently still thinks that it was the right move. The leading reason, according to one survey, is that, “Force is the only way to end the occupation.”

On this point it’s important to be clear that what the Israeli public perceives as the “October 7 massacre” looks very different in Palestinian eyes. When PSR’s Khalil Shikaki asked Palestinians in September whether Hamas had perpetrated atrocities “such as killing women and children in their homes,” 89 percent said it had not.

Shikaki told Haaretz that in one poll he asked participants why they had not watched videos documenting the atrocities. “The majority replied that the main source of the content they are exposed to doesn’t show them.” According to an AWRAD survey from last May, the majority of the Palestinians, especially from the Strip, get most of their news via social media, in particular Telegram, and by word of mouth.

“The social media are not a tool of enlightenment,” Shikaki says in summary. In short, Palestinians, like Israeli Jews, are caught up in a media maze of mirrors, however, they are exposed to precisely the sort of information Israelis don’t see – especially, coverage of the widespread damage and killing going on in Gaza – and their views are formulated accordingly. The result is radically different reactions and emotions among Israelis and Palestinians, as reflected in data collected by Shikaki and colleagues from Tel Aviv University.

Their survey found that both Israeli Jews and Palestinians believe that the other side wants to commit genocide against them or expel them from their land. A large majority among both – 83 percent in one, 84 percent in the other – agreed with the statement: “I believe the victimization of (our side – Jews/Palestinians) is the worst compared to other people that suffered from persecution and injustice.” Both sides apparently think that the other side’s level of humanity is indefensible. Fifty-two percent of Palestinians and 73 percent of the Jews surveyed vigorously justify the killing carried out by their side against the other.

The exceptional responses came from Israel’s Arabs, who are in many ways positioned between the two societies. They did not justify the killing, either by Israel or Hamas. From this poll and from others, the Israeli Arabs come across as more judicious and more peace-loving than almost any other population group in the region, and in particular more than Jews in Israel: At 72 percent, Arab citizens’ belief in the two-state solution is higher than that of the other groups, according to the Scheindlin-Shikaki survey. Moreover, according to an April poll by the Washington-based Pew Research Center, only 9 percent of those citizens think Hamas should maintain control of Gaza at the end of the war (another 37 percent “would like the people who live in Gaza to decide who governs”).

* * *

And what do the Gazans themselves want? When asked in September by pollster Shikaki whom they would prefer to see in charge in the Strip on “the day after,” slightly more than a third opted for Hamas. A third is not a small proportion. But for one thing, it’s a dramatic decrease since May, when almost half of all Gazans gave that response. When two other surveys suggested that possibility, support for Hamas rule plunged to 6 percent in an AWRAD survey in August, and 4 percent in an ISEP poll the next month.

Apparently some of the respondents say they’ll support a unity government because they assume that Hamas will in any case dominate it. ISEP asked “what Hamas ought to do after the war,” to which only a third of the Gazans replied that they should be given a significant role; the rest averred that the organization should have only a symbolic role, or didn’t have an opinion.

In contrast, over half of West Bank Palestinians think Hamas should play “a leading role in both government and resistance after the war.” In survey after survey, the Palestinians of the West Bank show themselves to be more militant than the residents of the Gaza Strip, notwithstanding the fact that Hamas’ core of support in Gaza was originally, at the time of the election there in 2006 and thereafter, larger than in the West Bank.

In that election, the Hamas slate, which was given the blandly inoffensive name of “Change and Reform,” received 46 percent of the votes in Gaza, and slightly more among Palestinians in general (44 percent). It’s important to emphasize that about half the current population of the Strip was born after that election. On the eve of the war, Shikaki estimates, about 38 percent of the people of Gaza supported Hamas. For their part, Said (from AWRAD) and Shtaya (ISEP) think that this is a wild exaggeration and that support for Hamas doesn’t exceed 20 percent at most.

“There are many positive trends in our data,” Shtaya told Haaretz, after reviewing multiple gloomy data. “One is that the Palestinians want an election immediately. Second, in future elections, Hamas and Fatah will get 30 percent combined. The Palestinians are ready for change. In Gaza today, the proportion of people who think they would vote for a new candidate is 60 percent.”

When people in Gaza grasped that Israel is not aiming for a cease-fire, their support for a peace process started to decrease. They become fatalistic and are ready to go farther [in the struggle against Israel].

In another poll, conducted in the West Bank by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center last May, two-thirds of the respondents stated that they had no confidence in any of the Palestinian leaders – not in Marwan Barghouti, who is serving several life sentences in an Israeli prison, not in Yahya Sinwar, who has since been killed, and not in anyone else.

Besides the supporters of Hamas, Fatah and a few smaller parties, in early 2023 Shtaya and his colleagues located a large cohort of people who are not politically affiliated, but who tend toward progressive views. These left-wing independents, who account for about 40 percent of the entire Palestinian public, are more widespread in the West Bank than in the Strip; most under 30, and there are more women than men among them.

“This group gives a grade of zero to all the parties,” Shtaya explains. “It’s a massive political force, as large as Hamas and Fatah combined, and one that is waiting to organize.”

Well, is that good for the Jews? I asked Shtaya, as I explained to him briefly, with some embarrassment, the history of that problematic phrase. He replied that the majority of Palestinians, including the progressives among them, are ready to accept the two-state solution – in other words, to concede 78 percent of the territory of the homeland. “If Israel wants that, they are ready to agree,” he said. “If Israel wants them to leave – that won’t happen.”

* * *

Conducting surveys in the Gaza Strip today is not child’s play. It’s difficult to sample a population, most of whom have been uprooted, it’s hard to ask people questions during a war, it’s complicated to get to those who remain in the north of the Strip or even to figure out how many people are still there. In some cases the suspicion also arises that Hamas has faked the results with its own hands, as was the case with a survey that Shikaki conducted last March. At any rate that’s what the Israeli army claimed in a press communiqué it issued in August.

Appended to that announcement was a document found in Gaza, in which a certain “Abu Khaled” informs his colleagues that he has finished “correcting” – his word – Shikaki’s survey, as he did in the past. He also adds a comparison between the results of the “corrected” and “real” versions. For example, in the latter survey, fewer than a third of the Gazans supported an armed struggle against Israel, whereas in the corrected version their number jumped to 39 percent.

Of this it can be said that even the monsters of Hamas, if and when they falsify data, do not dare to claim that a majority in Gaza favor a violent struggle against Israel – and that in itself tells us something about the sentiment there. But the question also arises of whether the data was actually tampered with. Shikaki rules out this possibility, but to be on the safe side he says has stopped working with paper forms (that in the past were distributed by his institute’s Gazan pollsters), which are more amenable to manipulation. When conducting his poll in September, for instance, the surveyors used handheld digital devices, as do their colleagues at AWRAD and ISEP. Such devices transmit the raw data directly to outside the Strip, and it’s far more difficult to fiddle with that.

“I would view the surveys in Gaza like a meta-analysis,” suggests Nirit Avnimelech, co-managing director of Public Opinion Research Israel, a polling company, who’s familiar with the capabilities and the limitations. The results of a survey conducted in Gaza must be examined with caution, she says, but findings that remain similar over time may be significant. “It’s not carved in stone,” she agrees, “but it’s also not without value.” For this reason, most of the data in this article that originate in Gaza are backed up by another survey that arrived at a similar result.

As far as is known, no serious professional surveys have been undertaken in the West Bank or the Strip since the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October. Shikaki thinks that Sinwar’s popularity will increase because of the circumstances of his killing, but that the basic attitudes of his supporters or detractors will remain unchanged. Obada Shtaya’s view is that many Gazans hoped the war would end after Sinwar’s death, but he thinks that the fact that Israel did not seek openly to end it and that, in his view, it actually stepped up the pace of its attacks, is liable to have an adverse effect on public opinion there. “From the Gazans’ point of view,” he says, “that corroborates the feeling that the story there is not Sinwar, but everyone.”

Nader Said, citing a new and as yet unpublished survey, says there are indications of a rebound effect in recent months in the Strip. “When people grasped that Israel is not aiming for a cease-fire, their support for a peace process started to decrease,” he says. “They become fatalistic and are ready to go farther [in the struggle against Israel].” His fear is that, in the absence of a horizon and in light of the vast psychological crisis plaguing the Strip, Gazans are liable to be drawn to even more fundamentalist terrorist organizations like ISIS.

“How will what you [Israel] did in the West Bank and Gaza give them security over time?” he asks. “If you want to make peace, this is the time to do it, it’s enough already. People are burying their parents, their children. Blood will only bring more blood.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety