01-Apr-21: What, as elections approach, do Palestinian Arabs think about their society's corruption?

Screen shot from a YouTube clip called "Super Rich Palestinians"

Here's how the opening paragraph of a brief but concentrated report entitled "Corruption in the Palestinian Authority" reads:

"Corruption is endemic in the Palestinian Authority, the private sector and NGOs. It is spreading across all sections of Palestinian society."

The work of a Palestinian Arab organization - AMAN, The Coalition for Accountability and Integrity, based in Gaza and Ramallah - the report takes readers on a walk through a depressing landscape, touching on massive misappropriation of funds by senior officials, corrupt actions on the part of the highest-level judges, embezzlement in the Palestinian Arab intelligence agencies, the widespread smuggling of medications, the distribution of counterfeit drugs. 

"Stamping out corruption is an urgent need", its authors say. 

"There is no doubt that corruption is not new to the Palestinian Authority and that it has been endemic since the very beginning in Ramallah... This corruption began from the first moment that the PA began to gather the Palestinian people’s money and aid and pour it into the Fatah budget, even though this money was given to the Palestinian people, not the PA or its officials who have divided it amongst themselves."

The name of the revered Palestinian Arab leader Yasser Arafat is, not surprisingly, sprinkled among the charges. So is that of the current president, Mahmoud Abbas. And not in a kind and gentle way. 

The report was published in 2013. Has progress been made since then? Not if the events unfolding in the current chapter involving vaccines to combat the Covid-19 pandemic are anything to go by.

Jake Wallis Simons, in an exposé publish on March 9, 2021 in The Spectator ["Corruption affects everything in Palestine – even vaccines"], suggests that the situation remains grim.

Visit certain parts of the West Bank and you’ll encounter mansions owned by senior officials in the Palestinian Authority (PA). By any standards – let alone those to which ordinary citizens are accustomed – they are impressive, with arches, colonnades and tall windows. If you’d been watching them in recent weeks, you might have seen vaccines being quietly delivered to these residences in unmarked cars, having been skimmed off the supply intended for medical workers.

Those, at least, were the allegations made by a number of Palestinian human rights and civil society groups. Last week, the Palestinian health ministry was forced to come clean. In a statement, the ministry admitted that 10 per cent of the 12,000 doses it had received had been put aside for government ministers and members of the PLO’s executive committee.

The rest, it claimed, had been given to workers treating Covid patients and employees of the health ministry. Aside from the 200 doses that were sent to the Jordanian royal court, that is. And those reserved for presidential guards. And those that had been given to the Palestinian national football team... 

According to AMAN, a Palestinian anti-corruption body linked to Transparency International, almost 70 per cent of Palestinians believe that their government institutions are corrupt. An EU report found that embezzlement had led to a loss of £1.7 billion of aid money between 2008 and 2012 alone. Huge sums are spent on fake companies and projects, including – in 2017 – a non-existent airline...

The Spectator piece (that's just an extract above) is a revealing essay, an easy and short read but with some important messages for the many who take an interest in the Middle East and its conflicts. It reflects a concern about which we have written (often) since shortly after our child's murder at the hands of Palestinian Arab terrorists in the service of Hamas. 

Jake's bottom line is one we share: 

It’s high time for those on the Left to stop using the conflict to burnish their own political credentials and consider the real roots of the problem.

To which we would add: And it's time foreign governments, especially of donor countries providing aid to the Abbas regime in Ramallah, realize the funds they hand over so casually are part of the solution to what ails Palestinian Arab society. 

We think there are lots of people who think the same way: ordinary Palestinian Arabs.

Getting a real and reliable sense of what they feel about important issues is harder than most people would imagine. This has to do with the massive distortions, the centralized control of Palestine's media, the fear of the multiple overlapping security forces, the relative ineffectiveness of the institutions of justice, and other similar dark realities. 

And also the way "government jobs, which are prized due to the weak private economy, are awarded on the basis of cronyism rather than merit" [source]. The latest data show [here] that unemployment in Hamas-controlled Gaza is a fraction under 50% and rising. For the West Bank, we're still checking and will update. If you were in their shoes, how ready would you be to go finding fault with public officials who perhaps hold the key to your salary-earning job and perhaps those of your spouse and/or children?

We have focused over several years on Palestinian Arab studies of Palestinian Arab views via the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (commonly called PSR). We summarized their published reports for the first time a little over eight years ago ["15-Jan-13: Update on the Palestinian Arab Terrorism Index"]. And since then about a dozen more times [click here].

In a blog post some five and a half years ago, we posed these question about opinion measurement:

Polls are fine and useful and so on but there's another way of gauging public opinion that most of the world uses regularly. When were the last elections in either of the two Palestinian Arab entities? Why are elections such a low priority for people ruled by autocratic regimes, living with significantly un-free media, and ostensibly desperate to have their voices heard? ["03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?"]

We're addressing this now because there are indications (and the matter is by no means certain) we're going to find out soon. 

Mercedes-Benz Palestine

The most recent PSR poll, published a week ago, is timed to throw light on where Palestinian Arab opinions stands as an exceedingly rare event - Palestinian Authority elections - seems to be appearing on the horizon. The full text of the PSR's Public Opinion Poll Number 79, released March 23, 2021, is online here. 

Actually, they are preparing for three separate but related upcoming elections: (1) For the Palestinian Legislative Council on May 22, 2021. (2) For President of the Palestinian National Authority on July 31, 2021; and (3) for the Palestinian National Council of the PLO on August 31, 2021,

Our interest is mainly limited to a sub-set of the analysis: what do its subjects think about corruption in the Palestinian Authority? 

Here's what the PSR data tell us about the views of Palestinian Arab adults, via a sample of 1,200 polled face-to-face in 120 randomly-selected Palestinian Arab locations by Palestinian Arab interviewers speaking in Arabic during the period between March 14 and March 19, 2021:

• The perception of corruption in PA institutions: 84% 
• The perception of corruption in the Hamas-controlled institutions of the Gaza Strip: 70%
• Asked to assume that the PA (meaning Fatah) wins the elections, 36% of those polled say PA corruption will get larger; 16% say PA corruption will decrease. And though the poll report doesn't say this, we assume the remaining 48% expressed no opinion. If we're right, that's almost half the Palestinian Arab population who would rather not say. That may be the nmost significant statistic to emerge from this study. So now note the next bullet: 
• Related to corruption as Jake Wallis Simons explains above, nearly two-thirds of Palestinian Arabs (62%) say the vaccination process in the West Bank lacks transparency and justice. The percentage who say it is transparent and just is 33%. Evidently on vaccination, almost no one lacks an opinion.
• Also COVID-19-related: those dissatisfied with the PA's measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus are fully 50%. (Further break-down: In the West Bank which is ruled by Fatah/PA officials, those dis-satisfied are 61%. In the Gaza Strip which is dominated by Hamas, the dis-satisfied are 34%.) And 47% are satisfied.  

There's much more to think about, as there always is, in the PSR poll results. But the only other part we want to highlight at this point concerns overall goals and overall problems. Somewhat surprisingly, the problems and the goals seem not to match up - a phenomenon we have seen over and again among the Palestinian Arabs, (It's worth a short essay but not today.)

Main Palestinian Arab goals, according to PSR:

1. "To end Israeli occupation in the areas occupied in 1967 and build a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital: 43% 
2. "To obtain the right of return of refugees to their 1948 towns and villages": 31%
3. "To establish a democratic political system that respects freedoms and rights of Palestinians": 14%
4. "To build a pious or moral individual and a religious society, one that applies all Islamic teachings": 11%

And the most serious problem confronting Palestinian society today?:

1. Poverty and unemployment: 30%
2. Curbing the spread of corruption in public institutions: 25%
3. "The continuation of occupation and settlement activities" of the Israelis: 24%
4. "The continued  siege of the Gaza Strip and the closure of its crossings": 13%
5. "The lack of national unity": 6%

We'll know we're getting to a better place with our Arab neighbors when their goals align with their problems. Till then, there's not much room for optimism.

[This post, like many others before it, has been translated into the Polish language ("Co Palestyńczycy w obliczu zbliżających się wyborów myślą o korupcji w ich społeczeństwie?") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

26-Sep-17: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?

[Image Source: PCR]

It's been about nine months since we last addressed the core question of what Palestinian Arab opinion polls tell us about their hopes, fears, ambitions and values. That last review is here: "15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?"

As it happens, this morning has gotten off to a really rotten start with another Arab-on-Israeli terror attack at the entrance to the bucolic northern Jerusalem suburb of Har Adar. As we write this, reports say three Israelis were shot to death and a fourth is fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital. The gunman is dead. We will report on what we know about this later.

With the fresh extreme violence in mind, what do the data tell us? What do Palestinian Arab polls of Palestinian Arab opinion, reveal about support for murder of this kind and about the other issues that are on the minds of the people who play such an influential/complicated role on the lives lived by us Israelis?

As we have said here before, what the Palestinian Arabs think is something we're very interested in knowing. Relying on newspapers or electronic media coverage of their views, a person is likely to get someone's wishful projections or politically-skewed understandings rather than data-based analysis. The difference between the two is vast and unbridgeable.

There are some serious polling organizations that are themselves Palestinian Arab. We tend to focus on the findings of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research or PSR [website] headed by the respected Prof. Khalil Shikaki. We're doing that again now.

In PSR's Poll Number 65 (there have been three on which we did not manage to report since our last related post), which was published on September 19, 2017, we think these are the key findings (italicized texts are taken verbatim from the source)

A syndicated AFP photo shows the supporters of Fatah and of Abbas in the
Gaza Strip last week. There may be more out of camera range. [Image Source]

• Violence: 35% of those polled "think that the most effective means of creating a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel is armed action". Negotiation gets 33% and "popular non-violent resistance" 26%. In the December  2016 poll, armed action got slightly more: 37%. A year ago, it got 34%. Those slight rises and falls are less significant than the reality that a third of the Arabs living closest to us see the best solution to the differences between as being achieved by murder and terror. A third. But it gets worse...
• Non-violence? Now bear in mind that "popular non-violent resistance" is an expression that means something quite different for the Palestinian Arabs and their advocates - including their president - than for most other people. Abbas and people around him use it to refer to lethal measures like hurling rocks at Israelis and their vehicles: non-violent resistance in  their lexicon includes rock hurling, knifings and vehicle-rammings. That's plainly terrorist violence, whatever advocates for the Palestinian Arabs claim, and it means that nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian Arabs are for it. 
• An "overwhelming majority" are "worried about the future of liberties in Palestine". Contributing factors, over and above the decades of heavy-handed, thuggish rule by a self-preserving clique of aging Abbas/Arafat regime kleptocrats (our observation, not PSR's) include a marked rise in PA arrests of reporters and "activists"; a new presidential decree enacting an oppressive piece of regulation that they call a "cybercrime law"; and upcoming changes to the PA's Law of the Judiciary. 
• Related to the first point: A large majority of Palestinian Arabs (85% of West Bank Arabs) now say they are afraid to criticize their PA masters. Fully half of them believe Abbas' PA has become "a burden on the Palestinian people". 
• This is evidently affecting their political outlooks. If presidential elections were held today, the Hamas candidate "Haniyeh would win against Abbas. Findings also indicate a decline in support for Fatah, particularly in the Gaza Strip where Hamas is more popular. In the West Bank however, Fatah remains more popular than Hamas." Just 3 months ago, PSR found that each candidate had the same level of support if this were a two-horse race. No longer. 
• But even before they get to elections, there's no doubting the appetite for immediate political change: "67% of the public want president Abbas to resign... Three months ago, 62% said [this]... Demand for Abbas’ resignation stands at 60% in the West Bank and 80% in the Gaza Strip."
• Gaza is one big set of problems for Fatah and its leader: "It is certain that [Mahmoud Abbas, president-for-life of the PA] would lose any presidential elections in the Gaza Strip to Hamas’ Ismael Haniyeh". 
• Worth recalling that the last time Palestinian Arabs were given the chance to vote for a president was in January 2005 when Abbas won; he has held tenaciously on to power ever since. The only previous presidential election, dominated by Yasser Arafat, was in 1996.
• For the rather touchy Abbas and his hangers-on, there's more bad news and it involves Abbas' fiercest rival: "Fatah is fast losing its popularity in the Gaza Strip, standing at 28% today compared to 40% only nine months ago. Those who still support Fatah in the Gaza Strip are shifting loyalty to Mohammad Dahlan whose popularity among Gazans has more than doubled during the past nine months, from 9% to 23% today, while his popularity among West Bankers did not change, remaining hardly at 1%."
• In a three-way race, the convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti who lives in an Israeli prison cell, would easily beat both Abbas and Haniyah.
• Support for violence against Israelis has risen over the previous poll, "despite the fact that a majority remains opposed to it", partly because of "the lack of trust in diplomacy. Findings show that about three quarters believe that the Trump Administration is not serious about Palestinian-Israeli peace making and an even higher percentage believes that the Administration is not an honest broker and that it is biased in favor of Israel".
• When they watch television, here's where they tune in: Al Jazeera (Qatar-owned, Qatar-based) 20%; Ma'an TV 14%; Hamas' Al Aqsa TV 13%; Palestine TV (controlled by the PA) 12%; Filasteen al Youm/Palestine Today 11%; Al Arabiya (Saudi-owned, Dubai-based) 6; Hamas' Al Quds TV 4%; al Mayadeen (satellite-news station based in Beirut) 3%.
• The popular perception of corruption in the PA and its institutions is now at 77%. This is actually something of an improvement; in a 2014 PCR poll, it stood at 81%.
• On the list of "Most vital Palestinian goals and problems", the top item with 40% support is the need "to end Israeli occupation". A mere 12% think the "first and most vital goal should be to establish a democratic political system that respects freedoms and rights". The most serious problem confronting their society today is poverty and unemployment (26%) with "the spread of corruption in public institutions" second at 25%.
• The violent confrontations that took place on Jerusalem's Temple Mount in July 2017 in the wake of the brazen and cold-blooded killing of two Israeli Druze security men [see our post] occupied much of the thinking of the Palestinian Arab public. In PSR's words and despite those other concerns we just listed, the "the installment of metal detectors at the entrance to al Haram al Sharif gates were the most important event during the period in question". 
• As for Israel's decision to quickly remove them, a minuscule 7% of Palestinian Arabs attribute this to King Abdullah II of Jordan despite Jordan's not-so-subtle PR efforts to grab the limelight, as in this Arab media quote: “Without the Hashemite custodi­anship and the steadfastness of the Jerusalemites, the holy sites would have been lost many years ago.” (Those of us old enough to remember life in Jerusalem pre-1967 recall how the Old City of Jerusalem was under illegal Jordanian military occupation from 1949 until freed in the Six Day War.)

There's not much here to feel good about. As their own societies - both Fatah and Hamas - explore new kinds of tyranny, between one-third and two-thirds of them hold tight to a vision of more violence as a solution to their problems. The future of their children, meanwhile, along with their health, their schools, their environment and their economy remain mired in self-inflicted gloom, failure and inertia.

PSR 65 was based on a sample size of 1,270 adults interviewed face-to-face (not by phone) in 127 locations selected randomly. The statistical margin of error is 3%. 

25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing

Abbas [Image Source: AP]

Someone has done some useful number-crunching to give up-to-date and stats-based proportion to the Palestinian Authority's blood-soaked Rewards for Terror scheme.

A paper published online yesterday, ["Palestinian Payments to Incarcerated Terrorists and Martyrs’ Families Rise in 2017", Yossi Kuperwasser - JCPA Institute for Contemporary Affairs, July 24, 2017] analyzes the PA's detailed budget for 2017.

Naturally, the "usual allocations for salaries to imprisoned and released terrorists" are there. So are the so-called "martyr" payments. They get transferred to the families of Palestinian Arabs killed or injured in what the PA disingenuously calls the “struggle against Zionism” - in reality, the decades-long Palestinian Arab terror campaign against Israelis and Jews.

How does the Palestinian Authority's economics management track record look when compared with say Israel's. Catastrophically might not be overstating it. Just three indicators point to the direction of things:

• In terms of GDP per capita (most recent published data, in US dollars), Israel produces $33,783 [2016 numbers]. The number for the PA is $1,997 [source]. Half a century ago, tiny Israel with almost zero natural resources, already had a GBP per capita about two and a half times what the PA has today.
• GDP growth: The PA's most recent data shows growth of 0.7 per cent. Israel's was 3.8 per cent. Inevitably the chasm is going to keep widening.
• According to the useful Nationmaster website, in 2012 terms (the latest comparison they offer). Israel's economy produced exports of $90.2 billion. That was 54 times larger than the PA's most recent exports. 

UNRWA school girl in Jerusalem explains why she and her friends
have to prepare for war. Your taxes at work. [Video source]

What are the PA's goals when they're not talking overt propaganda? How they spend their cash gives it away:

• The PA budget shows that salary payments to "incarcerated and released terrorists" this year will cost their economy $153.4 million. That's 13% more than it spent for the same thing in 2016.
• This will be somewhat hidden (hiding is a core PA regime skill) by being channeled to recipients via the Palestinian National Fund, the financial arm of the PLO. Israel designates the PNF as a terrorist organization. A cursory look at what it says about its own activities makes that sound pretty accurate. This recent analysis says the PNF, a by-word for massive Palestinian Arab corruption, is now controlled by Mahmoud Abbas. It's one of the key sources of his political power.
• Those payments via the PNF used to be made directly by the PA until that provided to be too much of a political liability. The switch to the PNF was made overnight is mainly cosmetic.
• Payments to "families of those killed or wounded in the struggle against Zionism" are going to rise this fiscal year to about US$ 193 million. 
• Taken together, those two expenditure categories (living terrorists, families of dead terrorists) amount to an outlay of US$ 344 million just for 2017. The Kuperwasser paper says that's 7% of the total PA budget.
• It's also just under half of all the foreign aid the PA expects to get this year. You don't need to be an economist to understand how much more could done - in the positive, life-affirming sense - with foreign aid than what the Palestinian Arabs do.
• Then there's this: "The amount of welfare support per family under the poverty-line is much smaller than salaries provided to terrorists and their families..." So being poor - which is a result of pretty much everything the Abbas regime does for its people - is less of a challenge than fighting more and killing more. 

That the PA stands squarely behind its terrorists and their terrorism is beyond doubt. Palestinian law calls them - the people who break into kitchens of pizzerias and murder by knives and exploding guitar cases - the “fighting sector” of Palestinian Arab society.

UNRWA education: Return on investment [Video source]

Kuperwasser points out:

This ongoing pattern stands in sharp contrast to the Palestinian commitments in the Oslo Accords and to international law and conventions. It also reflects the fact that until now, no real pressure has been put on the Palestinians to stop the payments.

This might change soon if the US legislates into law the Taylor Force Act which is currently before Congress.

But the US is not the only country providing aid to the Abbas regime (one-half of every dollar, euro and or shekel of which goes into the appalling Rewards for Terror pot. Here are some others [via this source]:

• During the 2006–2007 period, main bilateral donors to the PA were the US, Japan, Canada, Norway, Germany, Sweden, Spain and France
• In addition, the two major non-bilateral donors were UNRWA and the EU (through the European Commission). 
• "From 2000 the European Union had provided over €1.6 billion to UNRWA... In 2013 UNRWA received $294m from the US, $216.4 million from the EU, $151.6 million from Saudi Arabia, $93.7 million from Sweden, $54.4 million from Germany, $53 million from Norway, $34.6 million from Japan, $28.8 million from Switzerland, $23.3 million from Australia, $22.4 million from the Netherlands, $20 million from Denmark, $18.6 million from Kuwait, $17 million from France, $12.3 million from Italy, $10.7 million from Belgium as well as $10.3 million from all other countries, totaling just over $1 billion in 2013.

Unlike most other aspects of the thuggish violence practiced by Fatah, the PLO and their cohort, the evil done via the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme [click here for more of our posts about it] is enabled - funded and perpetuated - by ordinary tax-payers in (mainly) Europe and North America and the faceless government bureaucrats who silently sign the wire transfers behind closed doors.

There are efforts to slow it down or defeat it - see "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look" and "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad". But as the current PA budget shows, neither the cashflow nor the enthusiasm of its stewards show signs of diminished ardour.

29-Jan-17: What's the exchange rate for American dollars into Palestinian Arab terror killings?

PA President Mahmoud Abbas meeting with US Secretary of
State John Kerry in Ramallah in November 2015 [Image Source]

The underhanded attempt, in the waning hours of the Obama administration, to ship $221 million to Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority, is now - surprisingly - on ice. 

As Associated Press reported on January 23, 2017

Officials say the Obama administration in its waning hours defied Republican opposition and quietly released $221 million to the Palestinian Authority that GOP members of Congress had been blocking. A State Department official and several congressional aides said the outgoing administration formally notified Congress it would spend the money Friday morning. The official said former Secretary of State John Kerry had informed some lawmakers of the move shortly before he left the State Department for the last time Thursday. 

Two days later, in a report jointly attributed to its Middle East analyst Avi Issacharoff and to AP, Times of Israel said the cash transfer had been stopped:

The Trump administration has informed the Palestinian Authority that it is freezing the transfer of $221 million which was quietly authorized by the Obama administration in its final hours on January 20, a senior Palestinian source has told The Times of Israel. US officials conveyed to PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on Tuesday that the funds were not expected to be handed over in the immediate future, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. On Tuesday, the State Department said it was reviewing the last-minute decision by former secretary of state John Kerry to send the funds to the Palestinians despite objections to the transfer by congressional Republicans. The department said it would look at the payment and might make adjustments to ensure it comports with the Trump administration’s priorities... ["Palestinians say Obama’s last-minute $221 million payout frozen by Trump", Times of Israel, January 25, 2017]

To be clear, no one serious is saying the Palestinian Arabs don't need aid or shouldn't get it. (Without getting into the matter of their endemic and world-class corruption, anyone can see they have huge needs, massively wasted resources and a kleptocratic and vastly inadequate leadership. They ought to be getting help.) The problem is that foreign aid to the Palestinian Arab gets turned by them into something lethal and hideous.

We have devoted dozens of posts in this blog to the open scandal of European and United States funding of the terrorism-addicted Palestinian Authority whose payments program (click on Rewards for Terror to see them) for the benefit of convicted and imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists is one of the major factors in ensuring the carnage and devastation continues.

Now (without denigrating the fine efforts of other commentators like PMW) there's a clear statement of how this works and why it should be stopped, via a well-crafted op ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the past 10 years, Washington has provided more than $4 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The goal has been to promote a government in the Palestinian territories capable of assuming the responsibilities of a sovereign state, including the recognition of the state of Israel as a legitimate member of the community of nations. The aid has focused principally on security and criminal-justice programs, U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored assistance for schools, health clinics, water and economic development, and generalized support for the Palestinian Authority’s budget. But unlike the many nongovernmental organizations that contribute charitable funds to the region, American assistance programs, while obliged to vet how the money is spent, have yet to ensure effectively that taxpayer dollars are not diverted to support acts of terror... ["Stop American Aid to the Palestinians Until the Terror Ceases", David Aufhauser and Sander Gerber in the Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2017]

Aufhauser and Gerber note that in authorizing the funds transfer, outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry violated

an informal agreement with Congress not to do so... Lawmakers had good reason to oppose the transfer. Much like with the $400 million cash ransom paid to Iran last year, no meaningful effort was made to account for how the money was to be spent or to prevent it from being used to kill innocents. [WSJ again]

Does funding of the European and US kind bring about more acts of Palestinian Arab terror?

[T]here is no question that this is happening. First, the State Department has acknowledged the diversion in reports to Congress, as documented most recently in a Dec. 16, 2016, Congressional Research Service report... [M]oney is fungible, and it is sophistry to argue that funds provided for good deeds do not enable the bad deeds of the same political entity, particularly given the scarcity of resources. Second, the Palestinian Authority’s support for killing—such as the stabbing rampage that took the life of Taylor Force, a West Point graduate, in Jaffa, Israel, last March—is indisputable because it is codified in law. Statutes pledge to “martyr” families triple the income for life of the average salary in the West Bank, free tuition, health insurance and clothing allowances. So popular is the program of pensions for the maiming and killing of civilians that, according to its own 2016 budget, the Palestinian Authority dedicates more than 500 full-time civil servants to its administration, at a cost of around $315 million, or roughly 8% of the budget of the would-be Palestinian state... [WSJ again]

In another WSJ op ed last summer (quoted in our post "14-Aug-16: Who actually cares that foreign aid is diverted from needy Gazans to terror? Not who most people think"), the writer urges

a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government... The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy... No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. [WSJ, August 11, 2016] 

Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the data above:

• Total US foreign aid funding to PA in past decade: $4 billion
• Percent of total PA budget that goes to PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: 8%
• The yield delivered up by the PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: We define that to mean the number of people (Israelis or visitors to Israel) murdered in Palestinian Arab-on-Israeli terror in the decade between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2016 [data source]: 180.
• How much US foreign aid produced each dead terror victim? We compute that by taking the US dollar share of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme; then divide that by the number of victims: 8% x $4 billion / 180 = about US$1.8 million. That's the value of US foreign aid (unrealistically assuming only US foreign aid is funding the PA's scheme) attributable to each of the victims murdered in this past decade's Palestinian Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks.

(This quick calculation is meant to provoke discussion and serve as an indicator of how terribly wrong things have gone. But be aware that the assumption that the sole funder is the US is inaccurate. Europe gets "credit" for providing a large share of the funding for the scheme. If we had added European funding to the numbers, the value of foreign aid per dead Israeli victim would be far higher.)

Congressional ignorance is not part of the explanation for why this still goes on. In July 2016 (as we noted in "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look"), the US Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted hearings into how the Abbas regime's payments scheme works. It was was told that about a tenth of the PA's annual budget was spent on

"paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families... [T]he Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violation of the Oslo peace accords with Israel." ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", Eli Lake writing for Bloomberg July 1, 2016]

There's nothing especially sophisticated about how the PA hides the payment scheme. Dr Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI], described for committee members how

the PA transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by [Palestinian Arab] law. Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release. ["Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year", Morgan Chalfant in Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

Here's Eli Lake again:

One problem is that the payments to terrorists' families are exceedingly popular these days. Ziad Asali, the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, told me that in recent years the media and politicians have elevated these payments to something "sacred in Palestinian politics." Asali said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and others are too weak to stop it. "This is where we find ourselves now. The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way," Asali said. "But I think nobody really has the stature and clout to confront these issues publicly." ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", Eli Lake for Bloomberg, July 1, 2016]

If Asali is referring to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs (which he seems to be doing), the numbers show he has it back to front. We explained that in a recent blog post based on a March 2016 Palestinian Arab poll of Palestinian Arabs:

60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks... We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. ["15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

It's gotten worse since then. In December 2016, that 60% figure indicating "in favor of armed attacks and a return to armed intifada" had risen to 62% [see "15-Dec-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think now?"]

The Obama administration (as distinct from the Congress) paid no noticeable attention to the impact of its Palestinian Arab foreign aid on people's lives and deaths during its two terms. Now there's a new regime in Washington. Will they do better? Will the Europeans? 

A lot rides on the answers.

30-Nov-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs *not* want?

Palestinian Authority boss among friends yesterday
in Ramallah [Image Source]

If you saw our earlier post of the day ["30-Nov-16: Remind us again just how central the conflict with Israel is to the Arab world"], you will be aware that not only did the largest and controlling faction of the Palestinian Authority - Fatah - just re-elect Mahmoud Abbas to be its leader in its first general assembly in more than seven years. But its 1,400 delegates did so unanimously.

(A Guardian piece from 2015 on extremely one-sided election results makes for some good background reading, and suggests names of politicians who might be green with envy at Abbas' attainment.)

Oh, as the New York Times report that we quoted points out, and in a hall into which journalists were not admitted. For several reasons, that's a shame (and "shame" is just what we mean). Among them is the fact that Abbas's advisor for Strategic Affairs said in the Jerusalem Post ten days ago that "the upcoming congress will be a turning point for Palestinian politics". In the Palestinian Arab context, a turning point might be very welcome. And certainly worth reading about if reporters knew what they were.

But turning point or not, it's worth considering whether re-electing the feckless, reckless, terrorism-friendly "moderate" Abbas to be its leader is something that reflects popular Palestinian Arab will. 

The answer is clearly no. 

We refer often in this blog to Palestinian Arab public opinion as measured by Palestinian Arab public opinion polls. (They're very likely the only polls worth studying in this context.) In our most recent post on polls ["18-Oct-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think and feel now?"] we provided evidence that, in terms of the latest Palestinian Arab opinion poll numbers:

two thirds demand Abbas resignation, Fatah has not gained any additional support during the last three months, and a majority of Palestinians believes that the PA has become a burden on the Palestinian people... Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 34%...

And to this:

Dissatisfaction is related to the sense that Palestinian Arabs live lives mired in official corruption: 80% of them say they believe the PA's institutions are corrupt. The signs are they are astute enough to understand that press freedom is not going to make things better. Only 17% say there is press freedom in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, belief in freedom of the local press stands at 16%.

Aljazeera, November 26, 2016 [Source]

Bottom line: the Palestinian Arabs have just gotten precisely what they overwhelmingly don't want: more Abbas kleptocracy, corruption, nepotism, suppression, missed opportunities, stagnation.

Israel's hand in this? None.

The prospects of an Abbas-led regime bringing us all closer to peace? Roughly the same.

The one positive thing to come from this mess? That true to their core values as an honor/shame society and in the words of last week's Aljazeera news report [here], "Fatah will give Abbas an honourable exit".

And what, other than saving innocent lives on all sides, bringing an end to the weaponization of Palestinian Arab children and ending the reign of a massively corrupt, geriatric and manipulative regime, could be more important than that?

08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look

Shell Game: Back in February 2013, the man on the left was
the PA's then Minister of Prisoners Affairs. He's boasting 
of the huge number of prisoners receiving guaranteed 
monthly salaries from the PA. [Source Video: PMW]

Eli Lake, writing for Bloomberg last week ["The Palestinian Incentive Program for Killing Jews", July 1, 2016] says

Whoever said crime doesn't pay hasn't talked to the family of a Palestinian terrorist. For the Palestine Liberation Organization and the related Palestinian Authority, the killers of Jewish Israelis are considered "martyrs." And as such, their families are paid for the service these murderers have done for the Palestinian cause. [Bloomberg - Eli Lake]

A few days later, and in the wake of several especially shocking Arab-on-Israeli terrorist murders, the US Congress' House Foreign Affairs Committee conducted hearings into how that works. We're not claiming to be objective by-standers in the discussion: we know that all the members of the Hamas gang who bombed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 have been, and some still are, major takers of those payments.

The Committee was told on Wednesday that the Palestinian Arab government spends about a tenth of its annual budget

"paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families... [T]he Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violation of the Oslo peace accords with Israel."

Describing how the payments to Palestinian Arabs who have carried out murderous assaults on frequently-unarmed Israeli civilians are made - it's a process we call the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme - in recent months, Dr Yigal Carmon, president of the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI] told committee members that

the PA transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by [Palestinian Arab] law. Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release. ["Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year", Morgan Chalfant in Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

This is relevant to the stabbing, ramming and/or shooting attacks on Israelis by non-uniformed, seemingly random Palestinian Arabs that have come to be frequently termed in parts of the news media as the work of "lone-wolf" attackers. It's become a currently fashionable term. The chairman of the House committee turned his attention to that aspects and argued (as we have repeatedly done in this blog):

“These terrorists are not, in fact, lone rangers. They are not lone wolves,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), who chairs the committee, in opening remarks during the hearing. “Instead, these terrorists are the product of the programming done by the PA’s perverted culture that glorifies the willingness to die or to spend time in prison in pursuit of killing or maiming Israelis.” [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

Roughly 250 such Arab-on-Israeli attacks have been carried out or attempted since the outbreak of the latest wave of extreme violence in October 2015. More than 30 Israeli lives have been lost, and dozens of Palestinian Arabs have been killed by Israeli police and security actions during and after them.

How does that "perverted culture" stay funded? It's a non-trivial question. Dr. Carmon, in the written testimony he filed in conjunction with his appearance before the committee, includes a revelation which is, not surprisingly, consistent with those we have published here in the past year. Let's call it the mechanics of the shell game, the one that the Abbas regime, and Mahmoud Abbas himself, use to hide the true nature of the PA payments:

[Mahmoud] Abbas issued a presidential order according to which the payments to prisoners would no longer be made by the PA's Ministry of Prisoners' Affairs. Instead, they would be disbursed by a PLO Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. The aim of this deliberately misleading move was to alleviate pressure on the PA by donor countries that do not wish their money to be channeled to support terrorism. However, the offices remained the same and the official in charge remained the same under a new job title. The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA. [Quoted in "Is U.S. Foreign Aid Funding Terrorists?", Josh Luckenbaugh for MRCTV, July 7, 2016]

What that reporter could have said but did not - and we will - is that this transparent blood-soaked fraud is fully understood and known to officials throughout the foreign ministries, and other parts of the governments, of all the Western nations who provide the funding. 

The United States and the European Union are the major sources of that cash, but Norway is prominent in the list as well and so are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany in their own right. We have written a stream of background pieces about it - for instance (and the list is much longer than these pieces) "27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad"; "27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in"; "28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?"; "31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme"; "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"; "04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self"; "13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme"; "25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak"; and "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers". 

As we said, there are many others.

In his appearance before Congress, Carmon called the PA scheme a “deliberately misleading move” to assuage concerns from donor countries worried about their money being funneled to terrorists.

“The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA,” Carmon told lawmakers. He said that countries who provide aid to Palestine, including the United States, are “complicit” in inciting terrorism because the Palestinian Authority uses foreign donations to subsidize terrorists and their families. By providing this support, the PA is encouraging terrorism in violation of its Oslo commitment. Furthermore, the PA has been using money granted by donor countries for this purpose, and by doing so, has made [the funders] complicit in encouraging terrorism as well,” Carmon said. [Washington Free Beacon, July 7, 2016]

We're not sure Dr Carmon's term "encouraging terrorism" is the best way to look at this. Numerous public opinion polls taken of their view on violence and terror and their utility consistently suggest that not much encouragement of the Palestinian Arabs is needed.

Eli Lake, in the article we mentioned above, describes efforts made by the US and Israel in particular to disincentivize Abbas' PA regime from continuing its Rewards for Terror Scheme. He writes:

One problem is that the payments to terrorists' families are exceedingly popular these days. Ziad Asali, the president and founder of the American Task Force on Palestine, told me that in recent years the media and politicians have elevated these payments to something "sacred in Palestinian politics." Asali said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and others are too weak to stop it. "This is where we find ourselves now. The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way," Asali said. "But I think nobody really has the stature and clout to confront these issues publicly."

Really? How great it would be if a statement like "The vast majority understand there has to be an end to violence; it's not serving the Palestinians in any way" were true.

But if Ziad Asali is referring to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs (which he seems to be doing), the numbers show he has it back to front. And we mean Arab numbers compiled by Arab pollsters. We explained that in a recent blog post:

In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks... We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. ["15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?"]

So in the face of this, and the overwhelming support that lethal violence gets among the people we call our neighbors, what legal and financial steps make sense? And what does the Obama administration (as distinct from the Congress) say? And how about the Europeans?

It's a big subject. We will come back to it in the next few days.

15-Jun-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?

Gazan Palestinian Arabs dance for joy as word gets out of a terrorist
massacre in a Jerusalem synagogue, November 18, 2014 [Image Source: AP]

Unless you make an effort to be informed on these matters, it can seem confusing to get a grasp on the views Palestinian Arabs hold. In reality it's not that hard to get it right. We do wish more people tried.

The perceived difficulty doesn't stem from a lack of credible, unbiased data. Plenty of it is out there, and has been for years based on polls conducted by professional Arab organizations using solid polling techniques and respectable science.

The problems - and there are plenty - start with the fact that analysts tend to attribute views to the Palestinian Arabs based on speeches of prominent figures, interviews with officials and (forgive us) a degree of wishful, or even malicious, thinking. They end up being certain of things that look suspiciously unsupported. And those packaged statements of sentiment tend to get adopted at large because so many want them to be true.

For us, examining the data is better. 

We have posted here several times about poll data in the past and despite all the political correctness in the air, we believe it's hard to avoid reaching concrete fact-based conclusions. See:

• 10-Dec-14: What else do Palestinian Arabs want, beyond the 80% who say killing of ordinary Israelis is a good thing?"
• 22-Sep-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?
• 14-Dec-15: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?
• 16-May-16: What do the Palestinian Arabs think?

For those of us hoping for peaceful relations and better lives for everyone impacted by the conflict, what the data show is depressing, frustrating, even chilling. Perhaps that's why they are quoted so rarely and taken into account so little. But that's self-defeating.

Here's the latest installment.

The current views of Palestinian Arabs are captured in a study that was released just a few days ago by a respected source. It's Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 60, made public last week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), whose head is Dr. Khalil Shikaki. (PSR's previous findings take a central role in those earlier posts we listed above.) 

This latest poll was carried out between June 2 and June 4, 2016 via face-to-face (as distinct from phone) interviews among 1,270 adult Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 127 randomly selected locations. (The margin of error is 3%.)

Shikaki [Image Source]

Leaving aside the numbers, the findings are sometimes expressed in ways that obscure rather than clarify. For instance, when the summary at the top of the report says the poll data show "a continued and significant drop, particularly in the West Bank, in support for stabbing attacks...", many will feel a flutter of optimism in our breasts. But then you look at the numbers and reality smacks you over the head. The pollsters measure a thing they awkwardly term "Support for use of knives in the current confrontations with Israel". On that, indeed, there's been a drop in the past 90 days. It's come tumbling down from 44% to 36% among West Bank Arabs. And from 82% to 75% in the Gaza Strip. 

Yes, technically a fall. But a solid majority continues to rule. 56% of the Arabs on the other side of the fence favour stabbing Jews to death (a blunter term - but frankly a more accurate one). 

Underlining the seriousness of that Palestinian Arab devotion to murder, support for a specific terror assault - the cowardly bombing attack on a Jerusalem city bus ["21-Apr-16: The Hamas jihadists claim the Jerusalem bus bombing as one of their own"] in the Talpiot neighbourhood of the capital, injuring some 20 ordinary Israelis - got support from 65% of the Palestinian Arab respondents. 

Translated into the realities of our daily lives: two out of every three Arabs we meet in Israeli hospitals and on our light rail commute are with the bombers. 

Amazing. Also appalling. And whether you're sympathetic to those voices or hostile to them, you cannot ignore them - especially if they live in your cities and country, travel on the same roads you do, and frequent the same universities and hospitals and public transport and pizzerias.

If there's some logic to favoring bombings over knifings, the pollsters did not explore it or reveal what they learned. (We will get back to the distinction between general support and enthusiasm for a specific outrage in a few paras.)

Israelis frequently get told that Mahmoud Abbas, the extremely long-serving president of the Palestinian Authority. is a peace partner, the peace partner. This happens even though there has never been the smallest bit of actual evidence that he wants to reach a compromise settlement with the Israelis or capable of doing that given the belligerence among the people he rules. Israelis, acutely aware that Abbas is in the twelfth year of his four year elected term with no sign of anyone being able to get rid of him, see him as a man seriously lacking in support from his own ranks. 

Consistent with one after another past polls, the latest Palestinian Arab opinion poll numbers show

two thirds demand Abbas resignation, Fatah has not gained any additional support during the last three months, and a majority of Palestinians believes that the PA has become a burden on the Palestinian people... Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 34%...

Dissatisfaction is related to the sense that Palestinian Arabs live lives mired in official corruption: 80% of them say they believe the PA's institutions are corrupt. The signs are they are astute enough to understand that press freedom is not going to make things better. Only 17% say there is press freedom in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, belief in freedom of the local press stands at 16%.

Abbas: A steady two-thirds of his constituency want to see him quit
and go home and take the corruption with him [Image Source]

Who will replace Abbas when, as he must, he eventually goes? Here's the current field: 

1. Marwan Barghouti 30%
2. Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas) 22%
3. Rami al Hamdallah 6%
4. Khalid Mashaal 5%
5. Mustapha Barghouti 5%
6. Mohammad Dahlan 5%
7. Saeb Erekat 2%
8. Salam Fayyad 2%

Any Israeli government making concessions to a political figure as despised and disregarded as Abbas is would be accused - justifiably in our eyes - of reckless mismanagement of their electoral mandate. 

The pollsters examined how Palestinian Arabs view next steps, on the demonstrably safe assumption of an "absence of peace negotiations". "Return to an armed intifada" gets 54%, compared with 56% three months ago. Are we closer to, or further away from, things getting worse?

More than half (56%) want the Palestinian Authority to abandon the Oslo agreement today (63% held that view 90 days ago). Walking away from the Oslo agreement gets slightly more support among West Bank Arabs (57%) than among Gazans (55%).

(And this side-issue: Which US presidential candidate is seen as better for the Palestinian Arabs? 12% say Clinton. 7% go for Trump.)

We quoted Dr Daniel Polisar when we last wrote about PSR opinion poll data [see "03-Nov-15: What do they mean when the Palestinian Arabs say they oppose terror?"]. We felt his views added a lot to our understanding, so we went looking again just now at his most recent analysis. 

Writing in the wake of last week's terror attack on the Sorona Market complex in central Tel Aviv ["Palestinian public opinion is behind Tel Aviv terror attack", Times of Israel, June 10, 2016], Dr Polisar makes some sharp observations about how Palestinian Arab public opinion has evolved in the past years. In our words, a summary of his views:

• There is a clear pattern of what he terms "sympathy and even adulation" among ordinary Palestinian Arabs for bloody attacks directed at Jews. How this works - at the "in principle" level and when actual terrorist outrages are done - is truly disturbing.
• In PSR’s September 2004 survey, in-principle support for armed attacks on Israeli civilians stood at 54%. When asked how they felt about a specific bombing attack carried out in Be'er Sheba a few weeks before the poll, an attack in which 16 Israelis were murdered, support for that specific outrage sky-rocketed to 77%. 
• PSR's June 2006 poll found about a slightly higher level of general support for terror attacks on Israeli civilians: 56%. Questioned again about one specific terror bombing in Tel Aviv two months before, with a death toll of 11 Israelis, support zoomed to 69%.
• PSR's March 2008 poll found general support for terror attacks on civilians reached an all-time high of 67%. There had been two Arab-on-Israel terror attacks just before the polling interviews. One was a bombing on Israelis in Dimona during February: 78% said they were in favor of that. Then there was a much more lethal terror attack on a high school for religious boys in Jerusalem [see "9-Mar-08: Terrorism. Their world. Our world."]: eight Israeli children were murdered. Support for that specific atrocity (unarmed children! in their school!) was measured at the stratospheric level of 84%. 
• PSR stopped asking about specific terror attacks after that. (Perhaps they were embarrassed. Perhaps the results generated negative feedback.) 
• Since August 2014, PSR has done eight more polls, each one including a question about Palestinian Arab attitudes to “attacks against Israeli civilians within Israel”. Each time, the majority expressed support.

In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed Arab-on-Israeli-civilian terror attacks. Dr Polisar notes, and most of us would probably agree, that there are

good reasons to expect, or at least to hope, that support for a concrete case of violence would be lower than for attacks against civilians in general. After all, it is one thing to favor in principle the use of bombs or guns against Israeli civilians and something else, after seeing coverage of the grisly results of a particular suicide-bombing, to declare one’s support. But in practice, the opposite effect can be observed...  Disturbingly, this pattern has been consistent during the past decade and a half, with only a brief exception, as high percentages of Palestinians have supported terror attacks on Israeli civilians in general, while even higher percentages have backed specific bombings and shootings that killed and wounded Israelis.

Here's what we said when we last looked at the poll numbers. We believe, and the polling data bear it out consistently over years, that when columnists and analysts speak of the desire of Palestinian Arabs to live in peace, to get on with ordinary, quiet, constructive lives - as compelling as this interpretation is, the data don't support it. It's, to put it kindly, wishful thinking unsupported by any evidence and contradicted by what we can measure based on Arab pollsters. 

Anyone paying attention to the incitement pumped, generation after generation, into their communities and heads will not be surprised. What the people living on the other side of the fence are saying is clear, credible and measurable. Being optimistic about the prospects for the sort of painful compromise that leads to peaceful relations is counterfactual and foolish, as much as we wish it were otherwise. 

That's a message we wish the public figures pushing their literally-hopeless "peace plans" would internalize. (And no, we have not given up hope of something better ahead, but specific things must happen first, all of them connected to how Palestinian Arab children are educated.)