...Simply put, would-be terrorists contemplating an attack can be reasonably confident that if they succeed in killing or injuring Israeli civilians, their actions will earn support and praise in their society — for themselves, their families, and the militant group to which they belong, whether or not they live to enjoy it personally.
Daniel Polisar..
Times of Israel..
10 June '16..
Link: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-public-opinion-is-behind-tel-aviv-terror-attack/
Wednesday night’s shooting attack in Tel Aviv, in which Palestinian terrorists killed four Israelis and wounded several more, has been widely covered in the Middle East and across the globe.
In seeking to explain what led two young Arabs from a small city in the West Bank to open fire on civilians enjoying an evening out in a trendy dining and market area, journalists and public figures have highlighted the continued campaign of incitement by Palestinian officials and clerics — as exemplified by
the full-throated praise for the perpetrators by the Islamist Hamas movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, and the justifying of the attack by leading spokesmen for the Fatah movement, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in the West Bank. Others, eager to deflect blame from the wielders of violence, sought, predictably, to pin responsibility on Israeli policies. Remarkably, however, no attention has yet been paid to publication of a public opinion survey Thursday that casts a clear and disturbing light on what stood behind the previous day’s shooting spree.
The highly-regarded Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) asked a series of questions to a representative sample of 1,270 Arab residents of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza earlier this month, including whether they supported or opposed the April suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus in which a young Palestinian from the Bethlehem area injured more than 20 Israelis. According to
a press release summarizing the results, Palestinians expressed their support by a margin of more than two to one (65% to 31%). Though Westerners might be surprised that such a large majority would stand behind an attack aimed at civilians, this finding was unremarkable to anyone following PSR’s surveys over the past two years. Since August 2014, PSR field workers have on eight occasions asked Palestinians about their attitudes regarding “attacks against Israeli civilians within Israel,” and each time the majority expressed support. In the
March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60% of Palestinians backed such attacks.
Yet there were 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, as there was a slight
increase, five percent, between the portion of Palestinians who in March 2016 favored attacks on civilians and the number who in June 2016 applauded a bus-bombing that injured nearly two dozen flesh-and-blood Israelis.
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.
When PSR conducted an
October 2003 poll, the Second Intifada was raging, Yasser Arafat was PA president, and suicide bombings in Israel’s cities were the weapon of choice of Hamas, Fatah, and other Palestinian militants. A clear majority of Palestinians, 54%, backed attacks on Israeli civilians in general, but when asked about “the bombing operation in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, which led to the death of 20 Israelis,” the ranks of supporters swelled to 74%. In
PSR’s September 2004 survey, 54% again expressed in-principle support for armed attacks against Israeli civilians, but regarding “the latest bombing attack in Beer Shiva in Israel early in this month which led to the death of 16 Israelis,” that figure rose to 77%.
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