Hardened By Conflict: Israeli and Palestinian Views Challenge Peace Negotiators

By Alvin Richman

At the end of November, a peace conference scheduled to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, will attempt to initiate a process of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, starting with an agreed agenda and leading to a compromise settlement of core issues in the Middle East. The attitudes of the Israeli and Palestinian publics present traditional barriers as well as new openings to achieving such a peace settlement. The distrust between these two peoples has been hardened by recurrent conflict; they are sharply divided on several key issues; and there is no single country that both publics could view today as a friend and impartial peace broker between them. On the other hand, both Israelis and Palestinians have new concerns that compete with the threat they perceive from each other. Moreover, both publics now mainly accept the “two states for two peoples” formula.

The examination of these obstacles and opportunities below is based on 2007 surveys from three types of sources:

• Survey firms based in Israel including, but not limited to, the National Security and Public Opinion Project (NSPOP), February-March; the Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Truman Center), June; Keevoon Research Strategy and Communications, June; Peace Index/Tel Aviv University, June; the Dahaf Research Institute, June; and Maagar Mochot Survey Institute, July

• Survey firms based in the Palestine territories, including the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), June and September; Near East Consulting (NEC), September; Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC), August; and the Palestine Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), September

• Multicountry surveys, including a Gallup poll among Israelis and Palestinians (July-August) and a large multicountry study from the Pew Research Center that included the Israeli and Palestinian publics, as well as publics in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East (April-May)

The peace process

Majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians support the Middle East “peace process,” but neither public is optimistic that it will soon resolve their conflict. According to Gallup, 72 percent of the Israeli public said that “in principle they support the peace process with the Palestinians” (versus 24 percent opposed). Nearly as many Palestinians in the poll also supported, in principle, the peace process with the Israelis (67 percent, versus 38 percent opposed). Near East Consulting found a similar majority of Palestinians supporting “a peace settlement with Israel” (67 percent, versus 25 percent opposed).

Far fewer Israelis and Palestinians, however, believe it is possible to achieve peace. Thirty-one percent of Israelis in the NSPOP survey said they thought “it is possible to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, while 69 percent said it was not possible. A similar minority was confident (30 percent, versus 51 percent not confident) that the peace conference proposed by President Bush “will advance the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians,” according to the Maagar Mochot Survey Institute. In fact, barely one-fifth of Israelis in the Truman Center poll said they believed a political settlement with the Palestinians was attainable “within the next few years”; three-fourths thought either that it would take at least a decade to reach a settlement (33 percent), or that it would take many generations or they may never reach a settlement (43 percent).

Only a fourth of Palestinians (26 percent) told PSR in September that they expected the November conference in the United States “to succeed in making progress in the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis,” while 67 percent expected it to fail. Palestinian public support for participating in the conference appeared to depend as much on the context in which the conference was described as on the modest hopes of reaching a peace accord with Israel. A 72 percent to 23 percent majority supported “Palestinian participation in the peace conference that will be held in the autumn.” But support dropped to less than half (37 percent in favor versus 57 percent support) when the question wording mentioned the high-profile position of the United States in initiating the conference. (See Figure 1).