Center for Palestinian Research and Studies Polls Keep a Finger on the Palestinian Pulse

By Ella Bancroft

Not long after Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority returned to Gaza and Jericho, the Center for Palestinian Research and Studies began polling operations from its headquarters in the West Bank city of Nablus, which still was under Israeli occupation. Ever since, it has taken regular polls of Palestinian attitudes toward everything from the peace process and the Oslo accords through party preferences to evaluations of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Having watched over the past half-century the progressively stronger tilting toward Israel in the U.S. media, Congress, and now the executive branch and possibly even the federal courts, I’ve long had my reservations about the objectivity of polling organizations. Poll results can be heavily influenced by almost imperceptible changes in the wording of questions, and also by their timing.

For example, right after Israel’s stunning victory in the June war of 1967 (which the U.S. press falsely presented as an Israeli defense against Arab attacks), 55 percent of Americans said their basic sympathies lay with Israel, and only 4 percent favored the Arabs. By contrast, right after the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians that started on Sept. 15, 1982, the day Israel occupied West Beirut, Americans split almost evenly in a poll, with 32 percent saying their basic sympathies lay with the Israelis and 28 percent saying their basic sympathies lay with the Arabs.

So when the polling of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza began, I watched the results with great suspicion. Would the organization become a cheering section for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority? If it did, it presumably would find it easier to work in areas under PA control. Or would it try to slant its reports to show the Palestinians as extremists, a result that might be welcomed by Israel and the U.S. media and possibly the U.S. government? That was a legitimate question because much, perhaps most, of CPRS funding comes from the U.S. foreign aid (USAID) program.

Month after month I’ve studied CPRS polls, looking for telltale signs of bias, but found none. Instead, I’ve watched Palestinian public opinion fluctuate in fairly predictable—and generally reassuring—patterns, reflecting fewer of the extremes of left and right readily found in the Palestinian diaspora. In fact, it turns out, Israelis seem to be both more volatile and politically fickle than are Palestinians.

I’ve also watched once-burning existential questions for the Palestinians become “mature issues,” where opinion changes little from month to month, and the real interest is in watching for the differences between opinions expressed by the highly educated and those by the uneducated, on the assumption that opinions trickle down from “opinion leaders” to the masses, and thus long-term opinion trends can be spotted and predicted. (The polls also shatter the stereotype of Arab women with no opinions of their own. Palestinian men and women differ just as widely on some issues, like gun control, as do American men and women.)

Looking for the reasons the polls have remained uncorrupted, I’ve come up with three. First, the USAID money is administered in a way that insulates it to some degree from exerting undue influence. In the case of the CPRS, it is paid through the International Republican Institute (IRI), an affiliate of the Republican Party set up to promote pro-democracy activities (with USAID funds) world-wide. There is a similar Democratic Party institute with exactly the same purpose which, in the Middle East, has been particularly active in monitoring the progress of democracy in Yemen. This has included sending international observers, many of them Arab Americans, for Yemeni elections, and monitoring the degree of press freedom there.

Second is the personality and reputation of 44-year-old Khalil Shikaki, CPRS founder and director, who comes to Washington twice a year to discuss his organization’s activities at IRI press conferences. These attract large audiences of foreign correspondents as well as Middle East specialists in the U.S. national capital. Khalil Shikaki is the younger brother of Fathi Shikaki, the Islamic Jihad founder who was assassinated by Israeli agents on Malta in late 1994, setting off retaliatory suicide bombings that many blame for the election of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel. The brothers, the eldest two in a family of nine siblings, bore a startling physical resemblance, but Khalil, the Western-educated scholar, espouses moderate political methods.

Finally, CPRS has on its board of directors a number of Palestinians well-known in the U.S. as dedicated spokespersons for Palestine, including Dr. Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Dr. Rashid Khalidi. However, the former has become an outspoken critic of Yasser Arafat.

That’s all a roundabout way of saying I’m convinced that those taking the polls are honest and highly professional, and that the Palestinians they contact answer without fear that their responses will be used against them. Therefore, Palestinians are becoming the most probed and researched national group in the Arab world.

Below is a CPRS sampling of what Palestinians answered between March 5 and 7 when a poll was completed among 822 respondents in the West Bank and 506 in Gaza, thus reflecting the proportional division of Palestinians between the two wings of the future Palestinian state. The total of 1,328 Palestinian respondents 19 years and older gives the poll a margin of error of 3 percent. Of those approached, 3 percent declined to respond.

Positive evaluation of the Palestinian Legislative Council reached 49 percent, compared to 51 percent in December 1997 and 42 percent in September 1997. But only 28 percent of respondents believe the Palestinian political system is moving in the direction of democracy and protection of human rights, while 47 percent believe it is moving in a middle direction between democracy and dictatorship.

Only 46 percent believe the status of democracy and human rights is good or very good at present, about the same as a year earlier. A clear majority of 56 percent believe that people in the West Bank and Gaza cannot criticize the PA without fear, a slight drop from 58 percent in September 1997.

As for specific legislation under consideration by the Palestinian Legislative Council, 72 percent of Palestinians support requiring PA approval for holding public meetings, while 23 percent oppose it. An even larger majority of 74 percent supports requiring Palestinian factions and organizations to license any weapons they may have, while only 20 percent expressed opposition to this requirement “under present conditions.” Another large majority of 72 percent supports legislation requiring Palestinian factions and organizations to register at the Palestinian Ministry of Justice as political parties, while only 16 percent opposed such a requirement.

Finally, 22 percent feel great comfort when dealing with official Palestinian offices, 32 percent feel some comfort, and only 16 percent feel uncomfortable while dealing with Palestinian officials.

As for party affiliations, 45.6 percent support Yasser Arafat’s Fateh, an increase of 7 points since December 1997, while Hamas came in second but with only 9.1 percent support, a decrease of 3 points. Support for the PFLP was 2.5 percent, for Islamic Jihad 2.4 percent, and for the DFLP 1.1 percent. Total support for Islamists of all kinds declined from 18 percent to 14 percent in three months, and support for independents and non-affiliated candidates decreased by 3 percentage points to 35 percent.

A majority of 61 percent believe that corruption exists in PA institutions, while only 26 percent believe it does not. In earlier polls, those believing in the existence of corruption in Palestinian institutions were 57 percent in April 1997, 63 percent in June, 65 percent in September, and 63 percent in November, 1997.

Despite the current deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, 67 percent of the Palestinian respondents continue to support the Oslo accords, while 29 percent oppose them—a range that was reflected in three 1997 polls as well. However, while support for the peace process was 85 percent among illiterates, it plummeted to 44 percent among respondents with B.A. degrees.

And what about the differences between men and women? Women supported weapons registration by 27 percent compared to men at 17 percent; women supported the Oslo accords by 74 percent compared to men at 58 percent; and 70 percent of men and only 58 percent of women thought PA corruption would increase or remain the same in the future.

The Palestinian attitudes measured are generally good news for the peace process. Unfortunately, however, the problem is with Israeli attitudes, or rather what Palestinian Education Minister Hanan Ashrawi described on April 29 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC as Israeli support for the “unholy alliance between right-wing political extremists and Israeli religious parties” that keeps Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in power.

Ella Bancroft covers world affairs for the U.S. and foreign press.