By KHALED ABU TOAMEH, JPOST
The number of Palestinians who support attacks against Israelis continues to rise and more than half of them favor suicide bombings, according to a poll published this weekend.
The survey also showed that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is still more popular than Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The percentage of Palestinians who support “resistance operations” against Israeli targets rose from 43.1 percent in September 2006 to 49.5% at present. Support for this option was highest in the Gaza Strip, at 58.1%, with 24.5% in the West Bank agreeing.
Palestinians who support bombing attacks against Israeli civilians rose from 44.8% in June 2006 to 48% in September 2006 and to 50.7% now.
Again, more Gazans support these operations (65.1%), compared with 42.3% of Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Palestinian public is divided on the rocket attacks on Israel: 39.3% said the firing of these rockets was “useful” to Palestinian national interests, while 35.7% said they were harmful.
The poll results showed a general feeling of frustration with regards to the future of the Palestinian cause and the peace process in light of the ongoing Israeli military operations and the split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Both Fatah and Hamas continue to lose support among the Palestinians, and the level of trust in political leaders also dropped.
Support for Abbas fell from 18.3% in November to 11.7% this month. The poll also showed that fewer Palestinians are satisfied with Abbas’s performance.
Support for Haniyeh also went down, from 16.3% in November to 13.3% this month. The same applies to Fatah’s imprisoned leader, Marwan Barghouti, whose popularity moved down from 14.3% to 12.8% during the same period.
With regards to confidence in the political parties, support for Fatah decreased from 40% in November to 32.5% this month, while Hamas’s popularity went down from 19.7% to 17.8%.
The poll, conducted by the Jerusalem Media & Communications Center, covered 1,190 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points. It was held from April 8-13.
I guarantee that all the numbers will increase exponentially with the next success in killing Jews. The more audacious the attack, and the more Jews Killed and maimed the more popular are the leaders of the groups who carry out those attacks. No society that I am familiar with worships as cult or pop idols those who carry out successfully ,attacks against the Jews here. Most of the low popularity of Pali leaders today stem more from lack of terrorist success than with mundane things like standards of living and individual hardships or corruption which by the way is a normal fixture in this part of the world and is an expected norm.
If more than half of all Palestinians believe in terrorism and would personally strap bombs to their children’s bodies to kill Israelis (or place bombs on their own bodies), then that means that Israel no longer needs to make surgical strikes (and is within its rights to engage in randomly responding to random attacks) because most Palestinians, along with their terror leaders, are soldiers of death, annihilation and destruction.
Never before in the history of war have a people been so united in the cause of terror and war, so fully behind the deadly politics of their leaders and so brainwashed by their cult to kill. The Palestinian people have turned into zombies of mass murder – unable to understand the meaning of peace and the purpose of living and unable to comprehend the horror of what they have become.
Time for Americans and Israelis to unite and fight fire with GREATER FIRE!