Palestinian Society

The Jerusalem Report, a biweekly, English-language mag­a­zine on the Mid­dle East and Judaism, has an inter­est­ing arti­cle with poll results from Pales­tin­ian soci­ety. The arti­cle is not online, so I’ll just present the inter­est­ing num­bers taken by Pales­tin­ian pollsters:

• 51% do not trust their polit­i­cal lead­ers in general
• The per­cent­age of peo­ple who trust Hamas has declined from 41% in Jan­u­ary 2006 to 11% in June 2009
• 58%  dis­ap­prove of Hamas, and 38% approve
• Pales­tin­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Abbas has a job-approval rat­ing of 55% while Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has a 64% dis­ap­proval rating
• If a par­lia­men­tary elec­tion were held today, the Fatah party would beat Hamas by a mar­gin of 4 to 1
• If a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion were held today, Abbas would beat Haniyeh by 35% to 12% in a multi-party contest
• Pales­tini­ans are most con­cerned about inter­nal fight­ing and the econ­omy. In a sec­ond poll, the occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip ranked fourth out of the top-five concerns
• 70% favor the dis­ar­ma­ment of polit­i­cal fac­tions and the con­sol­i­da­tion of weapons with offi­cial secu­rity forces
• 68% think Hamas should stop advo­cat­ing the destruc­tion of Israel
• Slightly more than half said that all rocket fire into Israel should cease
• 55% favor a two-state solu­tion while 11% want a sin­gle, bi-national state
• 77% believe that Israel is not really a part­ner for peace
• 61% iden­tify them­selves as religious
• 49% want Pales­tin­ian law to be based on Islamic law
• 75% want a future State of Pales­tine to be a democracy
• 23% believe that their best ally is Egypt; the second-highest answer was “no one”

The mar­gin of error was 6 percent.