Portside

Most Israelis know one thing about Palestinian public opinion during the last 14 months: that surveys show a large majority support Hamas' attack on October 7.

In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – refuah shlema – said "85 percent of [Palestinians] support the massacre on October 7," and this became axiomatic in Israel.

Survey findings in those first months were indeed demoralizing. In a poll by the Arab World Research and Development (AWRAD) research center from late October, three-quarters of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank said they supported the "military operation" (as per the question wording). Similarly, 72 percent thought Hamas was "correct" to attack in a December survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. (Netanyahu's "85 percent" quote was close to PSR's finding for the West Bank alone, where 82 percent said Hamas was correct.)

It was no less demoralizing in January when the Tel Aviv University Peace Index found that over 90 percent of Jewish Israelis thought Israel was using the right amount of force or not enough, and 87 percent justified the number of Palestinian casualties.

However, nearly a year has passed since then. What's changed? If Israelis want to understand current Palestinian attitudes, they need to first step back and try to inhabit Palestinian experiences before claiming to grasp their mind-set. Understanding what the Palestinian public is going through, their concerns and often despair about leadership, economic hardship and internal social gaps consume them. There's more to Palestinians than a lust for force, or hatred of Israelis, as per many Israelis' perceptions.

Life itself is bad

A window into those experiences is offered by the normally soporific methodology information about AWRAD's new survey from early December this year. It is a stark starting point: 92 percent of respondents in its Gaza sample were displaced. The standard "type of dwelling" question yielded awful results: one-third live in a damaged home; 14 percent live in a formal tent community; and another 14 percent in an informal tent community. Only 12 percent reported living in an undamaged home, and a majority live in some type of makeshift dwelling. Seven percent of Gazans said they were living in warehouses.

Among West Bank respondents, nearly 90 percent reported that their economic situation had become much (57 percent) or somewhat (31 percent) worse compared to one year earlier. To understand why, Israelis would have to learn that immediately following October 7, Israel slashed the transfer of Palestinian clearance taxes it collects instead of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, a major source of PA revenue – transferring only partial sums in mid-2024.

Israel also slammed the door to roughly 100,000 Palestinians who worked in Israel or in settlements prior to the war – legally, with security vetting. These legal laborers almost never attack Israelis, and some have quietly trickled back in. Together with illegal laborers, about one-fifth of the West Bank's labor force (over 150,000) worked in Israel before the war; they lost their income overnight.

The PA lost further tax revenues and, as a result, slashed public sector salaries by up to half, causing a dizzying cycle of poverty – now expected to reach 74 percent of all Palestinians in United Nations 2024 forecasts.

Who can help? Not the Palestinian government, according to the people. A PSR survey from September found that 72 percent of Palestinians do not believe that their new government – established this March under new Prime Minister Muhammed Mustafa – can improve the economic situation in the West Bank or Gaza. In the recent AWRAD survey, West Bankers listed job creation as their top priority, but 86 percent of respondents said the Mustafa government's performance was unsatisfactory on that issue.

The sense of utter despair regarding Palestinian leadership is a consistent finding across Palestinian survey research, for years. As the analyst Walid Ladadweh of PSR noted in a December policy briefing, a large majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (approximately 70 percent) do not believe the Mustafa government can deliver on any of its core promises: helping Gaza, bringing political reconciliation, improving the economy or advancing elections, though AWRAD found that nearly 90 percent support elections after the war.

As an aside, the current Israeli leadership can mark a new low: The September PSR survey found only 22 percent of Palestinians believe the Mustafa government can deliver on its promised reforms. This is statistically close to the 25 percent of Israelis who trust their government in the 2024 Israel Democracy Index. The Mustafa government has nothing resembling sovereign state power, and nearly none over Gaza. What's the Israeli government's excuse?

Given the apocalyptic destruction in Gaza, the rampant poverty and dismal perceptions of their government, the Palestinian frame of mind is bleak. When asked to choose from six emotions, Gazans show a tie for the top three: "fear," "helplessness" and "anger,. That was in a September survey by the fairly new Institute for Social and Economic Progress, an independent think tank. "Anger" and "helplessness" got higher marks in Gaza than in either of the group's two previous surveys this year. "Anger" reached its highest point in the West Bank so far, with 47 percent (ranked first), up nearly twenty points since October 2023.

War is hell

What does Palestinian anger, despair, economic or physical desperation mean for their attitudes toward the war, occupation and the future?

First, Palestinians want an end to the war, full stop. Nearly three-quarters of Gazans now prefer a permanent cease-fire instead of settling for a temporary one, up from 58 percent in June, according to ISEP's September survey. The portion who accept a temporary approach – as per Israel's stalwart position to date – has dropped from 41 to 26 percent. An even greater majority in the West Bank, 82 percent, chose a permanent cease-fire. (The survey offered three options of a permanent cease-fire with variations, such as withdrawal of Israeli forces and an end of the siege in Gaza.)

The surveys also show that the growing demand to end the war for good is accompanied by an erosion of support for violence and force in general.

Support for Hamas has followed a typical war-bump pattern, and it's currently on the down-side: from 43 percent in PSR's December 2023 survey, 36 percent supported Hamas in September this year. In the recent AWRAD survey, Hamas loses in any type of contest, whether for legislative or presidential elections.

In Gaza, that support is usually in the single digits, reaching 10 percent at most in a presidential competition (when the Hamas candidate, Khaled Meshal, goes up against Mahmoud Abbas, among other competitors). And in PSR's September survey, Hamas had its lowest showing since the war began, when asked who respondents would vote for in a legislative election – 29 percent, though still slightly higher than September 2023.

AWRAD asked Palestinians about the best way to end the occupation and achieve a Palestinian state: Sixty percent chose "negotiations or a peace process," by far the top response – three times the proportion who chose "all-out military confrontation." Negotiations received much higher support in Gaza (but even in the West Bank, twice as many respondents preferred negotiations to a military approach).

Finally, regarding PSR's repeated question about whether Hamas was correct to attack Israel on October 7, support has declined to its lowest point so far in both areas. Only a minority (39 percent) of Gazans say it was correct, and 54 percent of the weighted total of Palestinians, down from 72 percent a year ago.

These findings are still demoralizing. And with 84 percent of Israeli Jews who continue to justify what Israel has done in Gaza since October 7 in the joint Israeli-Palestinian survey in July, no one has a monopoly on bad attitudes.

But any improvement in public attitudes should be seen as an opportunity, and an imperative, to find an end to this hell.

[Dahlia Scheindlin (PhD, Tel Aviv University) is a political scientist, a public opinion expert, a political consultant, a policy fellow at The Century Foundation, a columnist at Haaretz (English) covering politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and foreign affairs. 

She has advised on nine national campaigns in Israel, where her regular research focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, foreign policy, democracy, human rights and civil rights, political analysis, and comparative conflict analysis. Scheindlin also has regional expertise in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, post-conflict societies, and transitional democracies in 15 countries beyond Israel. 

She is among the founders of +972 Magazine and has co-hosted several podcasts including the Tel Aviv Review of Books and Election Overdose. Dahlia has published in the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic among other publications, and appears regularly in international media outlets. She is a board member of A Land for All, and the author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel, published in September 2023, and she lives in Tel Aviv.]