October 1st, 2004.
With Israel’s unilateral retreat from the Gaza Strip on the horizon, the
Palestinian Arabs believe anti-Jewish terrorism has done more to help them
achieve their nationalistic goals than bilateral negotiations ever could have.
This according to the results of a new Palestinian public opinion poll. The
results appeared to contradict Western assertions that the vast majority of
Palestinian Arabs oppose violence against their Jewish neighbors, and that
Islamic terrorism in this region is a fringe phenomenon rather than a widely
accepted strategy.
Between September 23 and 26, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research conducted a poll among a random sampling of 1,319 Arabs in Judea,
Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
The poll found that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs continue to support
the terrorist murder of Jewish men, women and children.
Seventy-seven percent said they stood firmly behind the massacre of
Israeli civilians in a double suicide bombing aboard public buses in the Negev
town of Beersheva last month.
Similarly, 75 percent said they back the continued firing of Kassam rockets by
Hamas into the Negev town of Sderot. Two Israeli preschoolers were killed in a
Kassam attack last week.
Attacks such as the Beersheva bombings and the constant rocket barrages on
Sderot have served the Palestinians in achieving their nationalistic goals more
than bilateral negotiations with the Jewish state ever could, some 64 percent of
respondents said.
This is especially true in light of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to
unilaterally retreat from the Gaza Strip, which 74 percent of those polled saw
as a clear victory for Palestinian terrorism.
Eighty-three percent of respondents indicated that with victory in hand, they
would now be willing to consider a mutual cessation of violence.
Also included in the survey was a list of practices that have become
commonplace over the past four years, which the respondents were asked to
label as either ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’.
Among those practices the Palestinians would like to see abolished were the
assassination of PA officials and Arab journalists, the burning of PA offices and
the kidnapping of foreign aid workers and journalists.
The firing of mortars and rockets at Jewish towns and the brutal mutilation and
murder of Palestinians suspected of cooperating with Israel in its war on terror
were deemed acceptable practices by the vast majority of respondents.
