Hearing what they want to hear

One of the reasons why Israel's conflict with the 'Palestinians' has persisted for so long is the world's inability to acknowledge the simple truth that the 'Palestinians' don't want peace.

Last week, Pew Research published a poll with a seemingly encouraging headline: “Despite Their Wide Differences, Many Israelis and Palestinians Want Bigger Role for Obama in Resolving Conflict.” The poll indeed showed pluralities of both groups wanting President Barack Obama to up his involvement, and if you only read the headline, the implication would be clear: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solvable if America would just push a little harder, and both sides truly want it to do so.

Yet reading the entire poll produces the opposite conclusion: The conflict clearly isn’t solvable right now, because when asked whether there’s “a way for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully,” a whopping 61 percent of Palestinians said “no,” while only 14 percent said “yes.” (Israelis, in a triumph of hope over experience, said “yes” by a 50-38 margin.) In other words, a huge majority of Palestinians said that even if a Palestinian state is established, the conflict will continue as long as Israel continues to exist. So where does that leave the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace?

Palestinians have actually been telling pollsters this for years. In a 2007 poll, for instance, 77 percent of Palestinian respondents said “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.” And in a 2011 poll, 61 percent of Palestinians said they saw a two-state solution only as a stepping-stone to Israel’s ultimate eradication. Thus the problem isn’t that Palestinians are dishonest about their intentions; it’s that Westerners consistently choose to ignore their frank avowals and focus instead on anything that could possibly be interpreted as grounds for optimism–like the desire for greater American involvement voiced in last week’s poll.

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When Palestinians say they want more American involvement, what they mean is more pressure on Israel to make unilateral concessions. But like Garcia-Margallo, Pew wanted to see hope where none exists.

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