Daniel Polisar Article on “What Palestinians Want” Shapes Conversation about Recent Wave of Terror in Israel
What do Palestinians want? Shalem Provost Daniel Polisar has a pretty good idea. Over the past year, he conducted a comprehensive, first-of-its-kind analysis of Palestinian public opinion, the initial findings of which were published this past November in a groundbreaking article for Mosaic Magazine. Showing how ordinary Palestinians view Jews, the Jewish state, and terrorist attacks against civilians, the essay, which was Mosaic’s featured article of the month, quickly became one of the most widely read pieces on the current situation in Israel. Cited by, among others, Powerline, Real Clear Politics, the Daily Alert, and US News & World Report, it was also discussed at length by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, and occasioned a series of responses by well-known scholars and journalists, including Times of Israel senior analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. Finally, the article’s key findings were presented as an op-ed by Polisar in The Los Angeles Times.
Basing his results on more than 330 surveys carried out over the last two decades by leading Palestinian research institutes, as well as those of half-a-dozen international polling experts, Polisar writes that polls demonstrate a consistent tendency among Palestinians “to ascribe to Israel greater power than it actually wields—along with intentions so diabolical as to lead it to act in ways detrimental to the Jewish state’s own interests, so long as this will cause suffering to Palestinians.” Indeed, he continues, “three of every five Palestinians living next door to Israel believe its aspirations are to reconquer the Gaza Strip and the Arab-populated areas of the West Bank, annex them, and expel the more than four million Arab residents currently living there”–this, despite the fact that in the past quarter-century, “not a single Israeli Knesset member, respected public figure, or major media personality has advocated such a view in public or is reliably claimed to have expressed it in private.”
Such beliefs, Polisar explains, combined with the fact that most Palestinians do not recognize any Jewish rights to part of the historic Land of Israel—72 percent of Palestinians insist that it is “morally right to deny that ‘Jews have a long history in Jerusalem going back thousands of years’”—provides fertile ground for the Palestinians’ justification of acts of violence against Israeli Jews. Indeed, the data shows that Palestinians reject the pejorative term “terrorism” to describe Arab attacks on Israelis—even as they embrace that same term when it’s used to describe Israeli attacks against Palestinians. For example, “98 percent [of Palestinians] said the 1994 killing of 29 Palestinians in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein was terrorism, but only 15 percent were willing to label as terrorism a 2001 attack by Palestinian suicide bombers that killed 21 Israelis at the Dolphinarium night club in Tel Aviv.”
While research for the article began long before the recent spate of terror attacks, Polisar explains, it is his hope that its findings can assist those seeking to formulate an effective response. “A common feature of the commentary on this new Palestinian wave of terror is that the perpetrators are ‘lone wolves.’ Yet far from acting alone, they are in truth reflecting deeply held attitudes in their communities,” says Polisar. “By recognizing these attitudes for what they are, we can, I hope, begin the process of changing them.”
Polisar’s piece will shortly be released in Hebrew, with the aim of stirring debate within Israeli society about the meaning and ramifications of the recent wave of violence.
