The Palestinian Arab Terrorism Index Update

All we are saying is give peace and machine guns a chance:
Nablus, January 3, 2013 [Image Source]

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
15 January '13..

What do people actually think?

Until better mind-reading technology is developed, the one way to gauge the opinions people hold is to ask them and to use proven survey methods to measure and understand the answers. Perfect? No, but it's hard to deny that professionally conducted surveys give us some insight.

The Palestinian Arabs have several active survey organizations that periodically test viewpoints and trends. One of the more prominent is the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), headed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki. His office put out a release on Sunday [online here] analyzing what it calls "Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 46". It contains a wealth of insights which have gotten very little coverage in the news media. This is a shame because, being a Palestinian Arab analysis of Palestinian Arab opinion, it would appear to be saying something worth hearing.

The analysis, carried out with the support of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Ramallah, covers a swathe of issues, and is certainly worth a few minutes of reading time. The old saying goes that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Even so, these findings, based on surveys done in December 2012 after the UN decision to make the Palestinians a non-member state, and following the ceasefire in Gaza, are real and well documented even if (as with all surveys) the analysis behind them is open to discussion.

We'll jump to the terrorism question. Asked (via Question 61) whether they support armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel (code terms to mean "we are not asking you about Israeli soldiers" and "we are not asking you about attacks in the so-called occupied territories, but inside the pre-1967 borders") , responses fell into three groups reflecting each of the two Palestinian Arab regimes as well as both taken together.

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