Is there hope for peace if Palestinians back violence? Illustrative banner of terrorists and Dome of the Rock. By Joshua Spurlock
Almost 6 out of 10 Palestinian youth support ongoing knife attacks on Israelis according to a new poll, while two-thirds doubt that negotiations and diplomacy can solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The poll, done by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre and posted to their website, found that Palestinians aged 15-29-years-old in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) were more moderate than their counterparts in Gaza but still held some extreme views.
For example, support for knife attacks was overwhelming in Gaza, with 78.6% of Palestinian youth there backing the attacks, as opposed to 46.4% support in the West Bank. But that wasn’t true in every case—slightly more West Bank youth backed lone wolf attacks (12.8%) as the “best way for young Palestinians to instigate positive political change.” In Gaza, 10.7% backed the isolated terrorism.
While Gazans tended to take more extreme positions than West Bank young persons, both were strongly opposed to working with “like-minded Israelis” to end the conflict with Israel: 58.1% of West Bank resisted cooperation, while 75.1% of Gazans felt that way.
The poll indicates a troubling degree of extremism among Palestinian young people, against the backdrop in which some of the terror attacks in the current wave have been carried out by Palestinian teenagers.
Anti-Israel sentiment among young persons was on the mind of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday. In comments released by his office, the Israeli leader announced an investigation into a school in the Arab area of Jerusalem on whether an invite by the school to “parents of terrorists who had committed attacks to appear before pupils” is incitement.
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, April 26, 2016)