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Voices from Gaza: public opinion on Hamas — 15 Comments

1. If I understand correctly, Hamas’ public approval scores were about the same in the West Bank as they were in Gaza.

2. Nathan Sharansky writes about being pulled aside by his father when Stalin died. His father told him when he went to school the next day to cry, and be sure it looked real. Sharansky referred to all of Soviet life as “double thinking”. You thought one way, and behaved in another.

   I don’t know the situation in the West Bank but I’d think any opinion that could be construed as pro-Jewish would be dangerous, Hamas or no. That said, I would expect some small difference. If there really is none it would make me wonder.

3. “Interestingly, 64% have a negative view of Iran.” @AGHamilton29

   Only 64%? Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims each view the other as belonging to a heretical religion. Obviously Iran’s current support is viewed as an ameliorating factor. Though only while the little and great Satans remain.

   Here’s a perhaps better metric of Gazan’s true feelings about Israel; in an anonymous poll 84% of Egyptians agreed with Islam’s death penalty for apostasy… how much more animosity do they have for the Jew?

   It’s a virtual certainty that the great majority of those in Gaza who do not support Hamas simply disagree as to how best to achieve a Palestinian state that extends from “the River to the Sea”.

   A ‘state’ in which ALL Jews, atheists, agnostics, Marxists and individuals of the LGBTQ+ persuasion have been exterminated and, in the most brutal manner possible.

4. Art Deco
   If I understand correctly, Hamas’ public approval scores were about the same in the West Bank as they were in Gaza.

   Actually, Hamas had HIGHER public approval scores in the West Bank. AWRAD: Public Opinion Polls Gaza Survey 7th October.: 87.7% positive view of Hamas in the West Bank, versus 59.6% positive view of Hamas in Gaza. Guess that 17 years of being ruled by Hamas, or having your dwelling turned to rubble, had an influence on that.

   Table 29: How do you view the role of the following parties?Disaggregated by region) Hamas

   WB GS
   Very positive 61.9% 28.9%
   Somewhat positive 25.8% 30.7%
   Somewhat negative 4.6% 16.6%
   Very negative 5.6% 22.7%

   When nearly 40% of Gazans express a negative opinion of Hamas, to me that indicates the poll has some validity.

   Approval of Hamas’s October 7 “military operation:” 83% in West Bank, 64% in Gaza. West Bank: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

5. this is why abu mazen, is the least worst option, compared to barghouti, of the Al Aqsa Brigades, the military arm of Fatah

6. This is a very long and interesting interview of a young man of Palestinian descent living in Great Britain. He was brought up to hate Jews in a household that was very religious. He has since become an apostate and disowned by his family. He thought that most of the population of Gaza were in favor of Hamas.

   https://youtu.be/MW2NS7jGR0s?si=PdI_IZNCUOVGH2pg

7. While I’m uncertain as to what Palestinians think about Hamas, I’m very certain of what they think about living along side Israel. Neo has put it vey well in previous posts. They have never accepted that idea, and that’s all that really matters.

   The “two-state solution” is nothing but a cudgel to be wielded by Israel’s enemies. Evidently we’re all supposed to pretend the Palestinians are on board – they’re not. Until that changes there will never be peace.

8. If you haven’t seen these two satire videos by Dani Buller, they are awesome.

   Difficulty Level: Israel
   https://twitter.com/askdani__real/status/1722557575596560736

   A few words about Bin Laden’s “Letter to America”
   https://twitter.com/askdani__real/status/1725185727451873719

9. Who are the Gazans? They are Arabs who fled West to the Mediterranean’s edge after failing to kill enough of the Jews of the new state of Israel in 1948, who fought back hard. Gazans had an apparently free election in 2006 in which Hamas became their government.
   No Arab country will take Gazans as immigrants or residents.

   Until they change and become civilized, they are stuck physically and in Islam, a brutal ideology and not a religion. Islam in Arabic means “obedience”. There is no place for conscience in Islam. Their vaunted prayers are the recitation of snatches of the Koran. They may be praying, “kill the Christian, kill the Jew” for all I know.
   Israel has no ethical or other good reason to supply Gaza with water, to treat its sewage, or do anything at all for them.
   Note the Gazans have not joined the Muslim flood into Western Europe. It may be that Hezbollah prevents their entry into tiny Lebanon, from which it is a short distance to Syria. But Assad likely will not let them transit Syria.

10. Foreign Affairs Magazine: What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas. Before the War, Gaza’s Leaders Were Deeply Unpopular—but an Israeli Crackdown Could Change That. (October 25)

    The argument that the entire population of Gaza can be held responsible for Hamas’s actions is quickly discredited when one looks at the facts. Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings, published here for the first time, reveal that rather than supporting Hamas, the vast majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s ineffective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine and Israel existing side by side…… Arab Barometer’s survey of the West Bank and Gaza, conducted in partnership with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, provides a snapshot of the views of ordinary citizens on the eve of the latest conflict. The longest-running and most comprehensive public opinion project in the region, Arab Barometer has run eight waves of surveys covering 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006……..
    Our most recent interviews were carried out between September 28 and October 8, surveying 790 respondents in the West Bank and 399 in Gaza. (Interviews in Gaza were completed on October 6.) The survey’s findings reveal that Gazans had very little confidence in their Hamas-led government. Asked to identify the amount of trust they had in the Hamas authorities, a plurality of respondents (44 percent) said they had no trust at all; “not a lot of trust” was the second most common response, at 23 percent. Only 29 percent of Gazans expressed either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in their government. Furthermore, 72 percent said there was a large (34 percent) or medium (38 percent) amount of corruption in government institutions, and a minority thought the government was taking meaningful steps to address the problem. ….
    The salience of Gaza’s economic troubles also came through clearly in the survey results. According to the World Bank, the poverty rate in Gaza rose from 39 percent in 2011 to 59 percent in 2021. Many Gazans have struggled to secure basic necessities because of both scarcity and cost. Among survey respondents, 78 percent said that the availability of food was a moderate or severe problem in Gaza, whereas just five percent said it was not a problem at all. A similar proportion (75 percent) reported moderate to severe difficulty affording food even when it was available; only six percent said food affordability was not a problem…. Most Gazans attributed the lack of food to internal problems rather than to external sanctions. Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on Gaza since 2005, limiting the flow of people and goods into and out of the territory. The strength of the blockade has varied, but it grew notably stricter after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. Nevertheless, a plurality of survey respondents (31 percent) identified government mismanagement as the primary cause of food insecurity in Gaza and 26 percent blamed inflation. Only 16 percent blamed externally imposed economic sanctions. In short, Gazans were more likely to blame their material predicament on Hamas’s leadership than on Israel’s economic blockade.

    Sounds as if all the aide money Hamas has diverted to arms procurement and tunnel-building has had an effect on Gazan’s food supply.

    Leadership style is not the only thing Gazans find objectionable about Hamas. By and large, Gazans do not share Hamas’s goal of eliminating the state of Israel. When presented with three possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as well as an option to choose “other”), the majority of survey respondents (54 percent) favored the two-state solution outlined in the 1993 Oslo accords. In this scenario, the state of Palestine would sit alongside the state of Israel, their borders based on the de facto boundary that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War. The level of support for this resolution has not changed much since 2021; in that survey, 58 percent of respondents in Gaza selected the two-state solution.
    It is somewhat surprising how little traction alternative political arrangements had gained among Gazans before the onset of recent hostilities, given how implausible a two-state solution now seems. The survey presented two other options: an Israeli-Palestinian confederation—in which both states are independent but remain deeply linked and permit the free movement of citizens—and a single state for both Jews and Arabs. These garnered 10 percent and nine percent support, respectively.
    Overall, 73 percent of Gazans favored a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the eve of Hamas’s October 7 attack, just 20 percent of Gazans favored a military solution that could result in the destruction of the state of Israel. A clear majority (77 percent) of those who provided this response were also supporters of Hamas, amounting to around 15 percent of the adult population. Among the remaining respondents who favored armed action, 13 percent reported no political affiliation.
    By and large, Gazans do not share Hamas’s goal of eliminating the state of Israel.

    This poll indicates a big change in Palestinian attitudes after October 7 and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.

11. There is a drastic difference in support for the two-state solution in the polls mentioned in the Foreign Affairs article, compared to the poll (Table 33) mentioned in another thread. The Foreign Affairs article found 54% support for the two-state solution in October, before the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and stated this wasn’t very different from a 2021 poll which found 58% support in Gaza for the two-state solution.

    By contrast, the poll mentioned in another thread, published on November 14, found 22.4% support in Gaza for the two-state solution (13.3% in West Bank, and 17.2% overall). But I am not sure from the PDF precisely when the poll was taken.
    “Public Opinion Polls Gaza Survey 7th October Tables of Results
    14 November 2023”

    https://www.awrad.org/files/server/polls/polls2023/Public%20Opinion%20Poll%20-%20Gaza%20War%202023%20-%20Tables%20of%20Results.pdf

12. Caroline Glick, JNS, “What Do the Palestinians Want?”: https://www.jns.org/what-do-the-palestinians-want/

    Concluding paragraphs:

    Westerners assume that the Palestinians seek a future of prosperity and freedom and peace because that is what they aspire to preserve for themselves. But this isn’t the case—or at least not in the way that Westerners think. The Palestinians want a better life. But their conception of a better life is a life of jihad, of killing infidels. What motivates them is not prosperity but genocide. And this is why their hope needs to be extinguished.

    Israelis took the measure of the Palestinians on Oct. 7, and opinions have shifted sharply towards the positions that the Israeli right has advocated on behalf of for more than a generation. The world as a whole would do well to take their measure as well. Actions don’t lie, and neither does the data. The Palestinians are a society unified by their common goal of annihilating Israel. That is who they are. That is what they want.

13. the islamic emirate of gaza, is much like it’s counterparts in kabul, also the erstwhile citadel of raqqua, of the islamic state, it’s not coincidental they are all backed by Qatar,

14. the trap

    https://twitter.com/marklevinshow/status/1725978240341225537

15. Heh, piling on poor Honest A.
    Not that he doesn’t deserve it…
    (Hmmm. But maybe he should blame Russian Interference(TM)? Though the way I see it, “Biden” has been ASKING—even BEGGING—Putin to “interfere”, as it were. Creates kind of a nice smoke screen, it really does!)

    In any event, I expect he’ll be pulling out his “But I have relatives who were killed in the Holocaust” song and dance routine any time now…
    …since he’s gotta keep proving his “bona fides”…. (Otherwise, some people—like, say, Mark Levin—might start wondering what he’s REALLY up to…giving all that treasure to the Mullahs and their friends like he’s been doing…while backstabbing the State of Israel…)

    File under: Don’t shoot me, I’m only the arsonist.

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