Three years ago, Palestinian Arabs thought October 7 might change their future by changing Israel. Polls show how much that ambition has changed.
In December 2023, 72% of Palestinian Arabs said Hamas was correct to launch the October 7 attack.70% believed Hamas would emerge victorious.63% preferred armed struggle as the best way to achieve Palestinian goals.
Nearly three years of war produced something very different.
According to PCPSR’s August 2026 poll, only 20% now believe Hamas won the Gaza war. Hamas political support has fallen to 24%. Half of Palestinian Arabs say “armed resistance” (aka massacring Jewish civilians) failed to protect them or end the “Israeli occupation” and instead brought destruction. Among Gazans, 65% say so.
Support for armed struggle has fallen from 63% to 27%. 44% now choose negotiations as the most effective strategy.
Their priorities have shifted with it.
Asked in the August 2026 poll what the next Palestinian legislature should address, Palestinian Arabs answered:
19% — Unifying the West Bank and Gaza
18% — Stopping the killing in Gaza
15% — Improving the economy
11% — Rebuilding Gaza
10% — Confronting “settler terrorism”
9% — Combating corruption
Settler violence ranks fifth.
That is a very different Palestinian Arab story from the one dominating international headlines. Palestinian Arabs put reunification, ending the Gaza fighting, economic recovery and rebuilding Gaza ahead of attacks from West Bank Jews.
While the ambitions of October 2023 were directed outward, towards ending the Jewish State, the priorities of August 2026 are directed inward, to unification, rebuilding and recovering.
And Hamas remains part of that project.
The Palestinian Authority wants candidates in the coming elections to accept the commitments of the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its agreements with Israel. 66% of Palestinian Arabs oppose that requirement. Only 27% support it.
Because Palestinian Arabs envision Hamas remaining part of their future.
Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% said it would remain both an armed resistance and political movement. Another 36% said it would become solely a political movement. That means 89% see Hamas continuing as a political movement in some form.
There is a historical lesson in what happens after a genocidal society launches a disastrous war and loses.
Postwar Germany did not rebuild by simply disarming the Nazi Party and inviting it to contest elections. The Nazi Party was abolished and banned. Its political structures were dismantled. Germany’s reconstruction required a break with the movement that had led it into catastrophe.
Palestinian Arabs are not making that equivalent break. While they increasingly recognize that Hamas’s war failed, they want Hamas to be part of the Palestinian future.
As the western media and United Nations narrows a focus on violence committed by Israeli Jews against Palestinian Arabs, those same Arabs are no longer focused on those Jews. Instead, the Arabs prioritize rebuilding after the disaster while maintaining the eliminationist ideology in their society for a future war.
When a head of state opens a student conference, the message extends far beyond procedural remarks. It is a statement about the values and aspirations a society hopes to pass to its next generation.
That is why Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s patronage of the 11th General Conference of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) deserves careful attention. In its official announcement, the conference proudly celebrated the organization’s history by declaring that it produced leaders including Yasser Arafat, George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, and Walid Khalidi.
Three of those names stand apart.
George Habash founded and led the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), responsible for airline hijackings, bombings, and attacks on civilians. Nayef Hawatmeh founded the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), whose history likewise includes attacks targeting civilians. Yasser Arafat led Fatah during decades in which its armed wing carried out numerous attacks against civilians before the Oslo era.
No one reading the official announcement could miss the point. This was not merely a history lesson. It was an effort to present these figures as part of the proud lineage of Palestinian student leadership.
That should concern anyone who hopes for a future of coexistence.
Every society chooses whom to celebrate before its young people. Some elevate scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, artists, and peacemakers. Others elevate military heroes. But when organizations whose leaders orchestrated attacks on civilians are held up as exemplars at a student conference, the lesson is unmistakable: these are people worthy of admiration and emulation.
PA President Mamoud Abbas continued that the program is “a school for developing future leaders, and a bridge connecting generations of Palestinian students in the homeland and the diaspora,” and the hope that Palestinian Arabs who “invest in the education and awareness of their youth cannot be defeated by occupation or have their cause extinguished.”
Defenders may argue that these figures are important because they shaped the Palestinian national movement. History should indeed be taught honestly. But there is an important distinction between teaching history and celebrating it. Germany teaches students about Adolf Hitler without holding him up as a model. The United States studies the Ku Klux Klan without celebrating its founders. Context matters. So does moral judgment.
A student organization launching a new generation of leaders has every opportunity to highlight Palestinians who built universities, hospitals, businesses, charities, diplomatic institutions, or scientific achievements. Instead, its official narrative deliberately included men whose names are inseparable from campaigns of terrorism.
If Palestinian leaders genuinely seek to prepare young people for peace, they should be encouraging students to surpass the generation that embraced violence—not to walk in its footsteps.
Peace requires more than negotiations. It requires choosing different heroes.
In July 1980, the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel. Its opening declaration remains one of the clearest statements of Zionist purpose ever enacted by the State of Israel:
“Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.”
The law settled a question that had haunted Jewish history for centuries. Jerusalem would never again be divided by barbed wire, minefields, and sniper positions. The city reunited in 1967 would remain the political and spiritual heart of the Jewish state.
Forty-six years later, it is worth asking a simple question:
What does “united” mean?
The answer cannot be limited to municipal boundaries. It cannot be measured solely by roads, tax collection, or police jurisdiction. A united city is ultimately a civic reality. It is a city whose residents share a common framework of governance and belonging.
Image of man walking through Herod’s Gate in Old City of Jerusalem (FirstOneThrough with AI)
When Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967, the decision to grant permanent residency rather than citizenship to the Arab residents made practical sense. The future of the broader Arab-Israeli conflict remained uncertain, and the status of Jerusalem itself was still contested internationally.
But those residents’ children are no longer children.
An Arab born in eastern Jerusalem in 1981 is now in his mid-forties. He has spent his entire life under Israeli administration. He attended schools in Jerusalem, received healthcare through Israeli institutions, worked in Jerusalem businesses, and raised a family in Jerusalem. For an entire generation born after the Jerusalem Law, the temporary arrangement has become a permanent condition.
An Arab born in Nazareth in 1981 became an Israeli citizen at birth. An Arab born in Jerusalem in 1981 generally remained a permanent resident. Both have lived under Israeli sovereignty their entire lives. One votes in national elections while the other does not.
If Jerusalem is truly united, how should that distinction be understood nearly half a century after the Basic Law was enacted?
The question is no longer theoretical. In recent years, thousands of eastern Jerusalem Arabs have applied for Israeli citizenship, reflecting a significant shift from earlier decades. The demand exists. What many applicants encounter instead is a cumbersome process that can stretch for years.
The issue has taken on added significance since October 7.
Hamas named its attack the “Al-Aqsa Flood” because it sought to seize sovereignty in Jerusalem. For decades, Hamas and other rejectionist movements have portrayed Jerusalem as a city temporarily under Jewish control and awaiting liberation.
A confident nation answers such claims by strengthening the institutions of sovereignty.
The ramifications would extend far beyond voting rights in Israel.
The Palestinian Authority presents “East Jerusalem” as the capital of a future Palestinian state. International organizations continue to describe “East Jerusalem” as occupied territory, while critics accuse Israel of apartheid and permanent disenfranchisement.
Yet what would happen if large numbers of Arabs born in Jerusalem after 1980 chose Israeli citizenship?
Hamas would struggle to explain why residents supposedly awaiting liberation had instead chosen participation in Israeli democracy. The Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to claim as its constituency citizens voting in Israeli elections. International institutions would confront a reality more complicated than diplomatic formulas unchanged since 1967. Critics would have to reconcile accusations of apartheid with a policy that expands citizenship and voting rights.
Jerusalem also offers a practical test for Israel’s broader sovereignty debate. Politicians who advocate annexing parts or all of Judea and Samaria should first explain their position regarding Arabs born after 1980 in Israel’s declared and united capital. If no consensus exists in Jerusalem, it is difficult to imagine one elsewhere.
Every party seeking to govern Israel should therefore answer a simple question: Do you support an expedited path to citizenship for Arabs born in eastern Jerusalem after the passage of the Jerusalem Law?
Such a program could include security screening, an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel and its laws, and a streamlined administrative process. Those who prefer permanent residency could retain it. Those seeking citizenship would no longer spend years navigating bureaucratic obstacles.
Jerusalem was reunited in 1967 and anchored in law in 1980. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Jerusalem Law approaches, Israelis should decide whether the next step is to complete the city’s civic integration.
The question is larger than citizenship. It is about the meaning of a united Jerusalem and the confidence of a sovereign nation in its eternal capital.
One of the most common claims in the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Jews took the land from Palestinian Arabs and denied them self-government.
History tells a different story.
For four hundred years, the Holy Land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. There was no Palestinian Arab state.
After World War I, Britain took control under the Mandate for Palestine. Again, there was no Palestinian Arab state.
In 1947, the United Nations proposed creating both a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it and chose war.
When the fighting ended, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem while Egypt controlled Gaza. For the next nineteen years, neither country established a Palestinian state. Neither granted sovereignty to the local Arab population. Neither created independent Palestinian governing institutions.
The first meaningful Palestinian self-government did not emerge under Ottoman rule, British rule, Jordanian rule, or Egyptian rule.
It emerged through agreements with Israel.
The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian Authority and transferred governing responsibilities in Palestinian cities to Palestinian leaders. For the first time in modern history, Palestinian Arabs exercised substantial self-rule in the territory where they lived.
Signing of Oslo II Accords
Then in 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza, leaving the territory entirely under Palestinian administration.
Israel is often accused by Israel haters of having stolen a Palestinian state. Yet no Palestinian state existed under Ottoman rule, British rule, Jordanian rule, or Egyptian rule. The first meaningful Palestinian self-government emerged only through agreements negotiated with Israel.
On May 28, 1964, the Palestinian National Charter was adopted in Jordanian-controlled Jerusalem. At that time, the West Bank was under Jordanian rule and Gaza was under Egyptian rule.
The Charter explicitly excluded both territories from its claims. It focused on Israel.
“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area.”
The Charter did not challenge Arab sovereignty. It only challenged Jewish sovereignty.
Palestinian leaders supplied the national cause; Arab governments supplied the armies.
The Charter left little doubt about its objective. It declared:
“The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal.” – Article 17
And that “liberation” of the land is the common cause of all Arabs:
“Arab unity leads to the liberation of Palestine, and the liberation of Palestine leads to Arab unity.” – Article 12
The Palestinian movement was therefore born not as a campaign against an Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but as a movement that denied the legitimacy of Israel itself, and one in which the entire Arab world must unite.
The Charter’s author, Ahmad Shukeiri, was born in Lebanon and was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1957 to 1962. His pan-Arab worldview called for Arab armies to destroy Israel:
“Those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive.” – Ahmad Shukeiri June 1, 1967
Another widely reported statement attributed to him declared:
“The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.“
Ahmad Shukeiri, circa 1965
Shukeiri’s brothers-in-arms said much the same.
In October 1964, Syrian leader Salah Jadid declared:
“Our army will be satisfied with nothing less than the disappearance of Israel.”
“The Arab national aim is the elimination of Israel.”
That same year, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaimed:
“We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.”
Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Arif described Israel as:
“an error which must be rectified.”
In June 1967, the Palestinian movement and the surrounding Arab states were speaking a common language. The PLO and Arab leaders denied Israel’s legitimacy and spoke openly of its disappearance, elimination, and destruction.
The rhetoric was matched by action. Egypt expelled the United Nations Emergency Force from Sinai, followed by Egyptian troops pouring into the peninsula. The Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping. Military alliances linked Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders.
Against that backdrop, Nasser announced on May 26, 1967:
“The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.“
Nine days later, war began.
Today, one of the most recognizable slogans associated with the Palestinian movement is “From the River to the Sea.” People often pretend that it is a call to free the West Bank and Gaza from “occupation” but the Arabic phrase speaks to the deeper truth as outlined by history.
“Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Filastin ‘arabiyyah” meaning “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”
Whether controlled by Jordan or Egypt or a hoped for Palestine, the Palestinian movement at its core has always been an anti-Israel movement to destroy the presence of Jews in “any part of Palestine.”
The June 1967 Six-Day War did not create the current dynamic in the Israel-Arab conflict. It was the conclusion of the first chapter of the Palestinian-led pan-Arab rejection of Jews living in and having sovereignty in land they view as purely Arab.
On November 1, 2026, Palestinians are scheduled to elect a new Palestinian National Council (PNC), the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Before they can choose their leaders, however, they must answer a more fundamental question: Who gets to vote?
The PNC claims to represent Palestinians everywhere, not merely those living in the West Bank and Gaza. Its members help determine the leadership and direction of the Palestinian national movement itself. The question of voter eligibility is therefore inseparable from the question of who is represented.
The new electoral framework approved by President Mahmoud Abbas reserves 200 seats for Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and 150 seats for the diaspora.
The allocation itself reveals a dilemma.
The Palestinian national movement claims to represent over fourteen million people worldwide. Yet more than nine million live outside the territories. A fully proportional system could allow voters in Jordan, Europe, North America, and elsewhere to dominate institutions that claim to represent Palestinians living in Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, and Gaza. The 200-150 split appears to give preference to those who live with the consequences of Palestinian political decisions over the larger voices from around the world.
That raises a more difficult question.
Who qualifies as Palestinian?
Should Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin – like Queen Rania – vote? What about Americans, Canadians, or Europeans whose grandparents left the region decades ago? How many generations removed from Palestine remain eligible?
Queen Rania of Jordan, also a Palestinian
The question may be most consequential in Jordan, where millions of people of Palestinian origin – estimated at 70% of the population – already participate in the political life of another state. Would Jordanian citizens vote in elections for a body that claims to represent Palestinians globally? If so, how many generations removed from Palestine remain eligible?
The question becomes even more complicated inside Israel.
Roughly two million Israeli Arabs vote in Israeli elections and participate in Israeli political life. Many also identify as Palestinian. Will they vote in elections for the Palestinian National Council?
Jerusalem creates an additional complication. Palestinian leaders seek participation from Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem, which they view as part of a future Palestinian state. Israel considers Jerusalem part of Israel, and many Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem hold Israeli citizenship.
If eastern Jerusalem residents vote while Arab citizens of Israel elsewhere do not, Palestinian leaders will be drawing distinctions that many people may find difficult to explain. Why should an Israeli citizen in eastern Jerusalem participate while an Israeli citizen in Haifa, Nazareth, Acre, or Jaffa cannot?
Arabs in the Old City of Jerusalem. Some are Israeli citizens while others only residents. Who will be invited to participate in Palestinian elections? (photo: First One Through)
The Jerusalem question raises another issue Palestinian leaders will eventually have to address.
If current residency in eastern Jerusalem or the West Bank is enough to qualify someone to participate in Palestinian national elections, what about the hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in those same areas?
Palestinian leaders consider eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank part of the territory of a future Palestinian state. More than 700,000 Israeli Jews live there today. Will any of them be eligible to vote for the Palestinian National Council?
The issue extends beyond contemporary residents. Before 1948, the term Palestinian was often used in a geographic sense. Jews living in Mandatory Palestine carried Palestinian passports and considered themselves Palestinian.
A descendant of an Arab family that left Jaffa, Haifa, or Jerusalem generations ago may be eligible to vote despite never having lived there. A descendant of a Jewish family that lived continuously in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, or Tiberias for centuries almost certainly will not be allowed to participate in PNC elections.
The distinction reveals that eligibility is not based solely on current residence, geography, or even historical presence in the land. The electorate is being defined through a more specific combination of ancestry, identity, and connection to a particular historical community.
For decades, Palestinian leaders have often left the boundaries of Palestinian identity deliberately broad. Political movements can operate with ambiguity. Elections cannot.
The voter rolls will reveal whether Palestinian nationhood is principally based on residence, citizenship, ancestry, ethnicity, geography, national affiliation, or some combination of all six. Ethnicity alone cannot fully explain the answer. Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, and many others share substantial linguistic, cultural, familial, and ethnic ties. The decisive factor appears to be a connection to a particular place and to people who lived there at a particular moment in history.
That is what makes the exercise so unusual. A Palestinian born in Chile, Canada, or the United States may qualify because a grandparent once lived in Jaffa or Jerusalem. A Jordanian or Syrian whose family never lived in Mandatory Palestine may not qualify despite sharing many of the same cultural and ethnic characteristics. A Jew – regardless of where he currently or historically lived – may be excluded.
Every eligibility rule will draw a line. Some people will be included while others will be excluded. Every decision will reveal how Palestinian leaders understand nationality, citizenship, ancestry, and belonging.
In many ways, Palestinians are attempting something few modern national movements have ever attempted: defining a political nation across multiple countries, generations, and citizenships while simultaneously deciding who belongs to it.
Imagine a movement claiming to represent all Black people whose families lived in North Carolina before 1948. Descendants living in California, London, or Johannesburg could vote even if they had never visited the state. Non-Black current residents of North Carolina could not. The electorate would be defined by ancestry tied to a place and a moment in history.
Whether one finds that model compelling or problematic, the Palestinian election will force its architects to explain where they draw those lines.
Whatever rules emerge, millions of people will discover whether they are considered part of the Palestinian political nation, observers of it, or something in between.
Most elections choose leaders. This election may do something far rarer: define the nation itself.
Before Palestinians can elect their leaders, they must first answer a more difficult question:
In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:
Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.
After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.
These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.
Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.
Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.
By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.
There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.
The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.
Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.
For years, one of the most common accusations leveled against Israel has been the charge of “apartheid.” International NGOs invoke it routinely and campus activists repeat it endlessly. Much of the Western conversation now treats the claim not as an argument to be debated, but as an established fact.
The accusation carries a very specific implication: that Arab citizens of Israel are a permanently segregated and oppressed population fundamentally excluded from the society around them, and that Israel is a racist illiberal regime.
But the polling data emerging from inside Israel tells a profoundly different story. Not a simplistic story. Not a utopian story. But a far more human and complicated one.
For decades, much of the world has spoken about Arab Israelis without ever seriously listening to them. Western activists speak in the language of revolution. International NGOs speak in the language of permanent oppression. Campus protesters speak in the language of “decolonization,” “resistance,” and “right of return.” The underlying assumption is always the same: Israeli Arabs are presumed to be a permanently alienated population waiting for the eventual dismantling of the Jewish state.
Yet the actual polling of Arab Israelis increasingly points somewhere else entirely.
The newest evidence comes from a May 2026 study by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. The survey found that 75.8% of Israeli Arab 12th graders support volunteering for non-security national service. Even more striking, 77.2% supported Arab political parties joining Israeli governing coalitions, while substantial numbers supported joining coalitions across the political spectrum rather than only left-wing alliances. More than half reported a strong sense of belonging to the State of Israel.
This is not the polling profile of a population preparing for insurrection. It is the polling profile of a population increasingly interested in civic participation, integration, and practical coexistence.
The trajectory matters even more than the raw numbers. In 2010, support for national service among Arab youth stood at only 43%. In fifteen years, support nearly doubled. That is not statistical fluctuation. It is societal evolution.
Then came October 7.
If the fashionable revolutionary narrative were true, one might have expected Arab citizens of Israel to radicalize after the Hamas massacre and the Gaza war that followed. Yet a 2024 survey from Tel Aviv University found that 57.8% of Arab Israelis said the war had actually strengthened feelings of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.
That may be the single most important polling result of the post-October 7 era.
Because it directly collides with the apartheid framework so dominant in Western discourse. Apartheid systems do not typically produce growing feelings of shared civic destiny during wartime. Whatever tensions and inequities exist inside Israel, the polling increasingly suggests Arab Israelis themselves do not see their future primarily through the lens of permanent separation.
The polls also tell a subtler story about the so-called “right of return,” perhaps the most emotionally charged issue in the entire conflict. Western activists frequently present the demand for millions of Palestinian descendants to move into Israel proper as though it were universally embraced by all Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Arabs alike.
That finding matters enormously because a genuine two-state framework implicitly rejects the maximalist interpretation of “right of return” that would demographically dissolve Israel as a Jewish-majority state. The same survey found only small minorities supporting one-state frameworks built around domination or elimination of the other side.
In other words, the polling increasingly suggests Israeli Arabs distinguish between support for Palestinian national aspirations and support for eliminating Israel altogether.
That distinction is almost entirely absent from Western activist discourse.
Arab Israelis clearly continue to identify deeply with Palestinians culturally and emotionally. They remain sharply critical of many Israeli government policies. A March 2025 survey by the Institute for National Security Studies found extremely low trust among Arab Israelis in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
But dissatisfaction with the government has not translated into broad support for Hamas or revolutionary confrontation. Quite the opposite. Poll after poll since October 7 has shown far greater fear of instability, communal violence, and economic disruption than enthusiasm for armed struggle. The dominant priorities emerging from repeated surveys are public safety, economic opportunity, education, housing, infrastructure, and reducing violent crime inside Arab communities.
Communities preparing for revolution do not consistently rank municipal policing, school quality, infrastructure investment, and economic mobility among their highest priorities. Citizens do.
The polling increasingly shows Arab Israelis sounding less like Western campus radicals and more like citizens trying to improve daily life for their families.
This is why the rise of pragmatic Arab political participation inside Israel matters so much. Figures like Mansour Abbas represent something many outsiders still struggle to understand: a growing willingness among Arab Israelis to work within Israeli political institutions rather than reject them outright.
Then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (L) shakes hands with the leader of the United Arab List Mansour Abbas during a Knesset session in Jerusalem, Israel, June 13, 2021. — AP/File
But here again, the crucial issue is what Arab Israelis increasingly appear to want done about those grievances. The polls suggest the overwhelming preference is not dismantling Israel, but improving their place within it.
Feeling of “shared destiny” with Jewish Israelis after Oct. 7
57.8% said war strengthened it
Polling shows sharply increased hostility after war
Preferred priorities
Crime reduction, housing, education, infrastructure, jobs
Conflict, statehood, war recovery, resistance politics
Support for two-state solution
72%
Lower and declining in recent polling
Participation in Israeli institutions
Increasingly normalized
Generally viewed as illegitimate
Attitudes toward Hamas after Oct. 7
Little evidence of broad support
Significantly higher support in multiple polls
The table reveals a profound disconnect between Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, as well as in the ideological activism abroad and lived reality inside Israel itself.
The activists chanting “globalize the intifada” imagine permanent struggle. Yet the polling increasingly points toward coexistence mixed with frustration, and integration mixed with cultural distinctiveness.
Which is why another recent trend in Western media coverage increasingly looks detached from reality: the insistence on replacing the term “Israeli Arabs” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as though the latter fully captures how this population sees itself.
These citizens are clearly Arab. Clearly connected culturally and emotionally to the broader Palestinian story. But the surveys increasingly show they also see themselves as participants in Israeli civic life, Israeli institutions, Israeli politics, Israeli education systems, and the Israeli economy. They vote in Israeli elections and increasingly support joining Israeli governing coalitions. Increasingly support national service and increasingly express a sense of belonging to the state itself.
Western activists speak the language of permanent revolution and endless “resistance.” The polling shows Arab Israelis speaking the language of citizenship, coexistence, opportunity, safety, and practical reality.
Israeli Arabs make up 21% of the Israeli population. Their numbers have grown faster than Israeli Jews since 1948. And they increasingly feel at home inside the Jewish State.
Israeli Arabs enjoying the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel (photo: First One Through)
Every May, “Nakba Day” protests erupt across Western cities under the claimed banner of justice and liberation. Organizers describe them as commemorations of displacement and suffering. Yet listen carefully to the chants, read the signs, and study the ideology driving many of these demonstrations, and a darker reality emerges.
Nakba Day events are not about building a future alongside a Jewish state. They are about keeping alive the dream that the Jewish state should never have existed at all, and must be destroyed.
That is why the rhetoric so often revolves around “resistance until liberation,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.” The message is unmistakable. The war of 1948 is not viewed as tragic history. It is viewed as unfinished business.
For 78 years, generations of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) and their supporters have been taught that the central injustice was not war itself, nor the suffering that war inevitably unleashed on all sides, but Jewish sovereignty. The catastrophe, in this telling, was that Jews regained independence anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
That poisonous premise has trapped both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis inside an endless cycle of bloodshed.
A movement built around the belief that Israel must someday disappear cannot produce coexistence. A political culture that teaches Jews are foreign colonial invaders rather than an indigenous Middle Eastern people returning to the land where Jewish civilization was born cannot produce peace. A worldview that refuses to acknowledge Jewish history in Jerusalem, Jewish ties to Hebron, or the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Judaism is rooted in antisemitism, not “anti-Zionism.” It is a deep “deformity” in Palestinian culture.
And so Nakba Day has increasingly become less a memorial to suffering than a ritual of perpetual war.
There is nothing wrong with mourning loss. Every nation remembers tragedy. The problem begins when remembrance becomes a doctrine that denies another people’s right to exist. To basic human rights. No peace movement can emerge from teaching generation after generation that coexistence itself is betrayal.
It is time to break that cycle.
Replace Nakba Day with Two State Day. A day dedicated not to reversing 1948, but to building 2048.
Imagine a new annual movement where Palestinian Arabs openly recognize that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. One where activists acknowledge that Jewish attachment to Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, but stretches back thousands of years. One where the Temple Mount is recognized not merely as a Muslim site built atop forgotten ruins, but as the spiritual center of Jewish civilization.
Imagine a Two State Day where Palestinian leaders finally say openly that Jews are not crusaders, not European interlopers, not temporary occupiers, but a people who originated in the very land they returned to.
And imagine Israeli Jews responding not with suspicion, but with an outstretched hand.
Imagine Israeli Independence Day celebrations where Muslim neighbors, Arab citizens, and Palestinians willing to embrace coexistence are invited to participate. Imagine Jewish speakers recognizing Palestinian suffering and aspirations, while Muslim speakers recognize Jewish indigenousness, Jewish history, and Israel’s permanence. Imagine both peoples publicly declaring that neither side is leaving and neither side’s history will be erased.
That would not erase either people’s narrative. It would humanize both.
The current version of Nakba politics freezes Palestinians psychologically in 1948, teaching generation after generation that justice means reversing history rather than building a future. It glorifies “resistance-violence” while discouraging reconciliation. It romanticizes intifada while Palestinians themselves continue paying the price in blood, corruption, isolation, and failed leadership.
This ideology has harmed Palestinians no less than Israelis.
Every year spent teaching children that Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv must someday be “liberated” is another year not spent building functioning institutions, economic opportunity, civil society, or genuine pathways to coexistence. Every rally that denies Jewish legitimacy hardens Israelis further against compromise and strengthens extremists on all sides.
The world has already seen where this road leads. October 7 was not born in a vacuum. It emerged from decades of indoctrination insisting that Jewish sovereignty itself is intolerable “in any part of Palestine” and that violence against it is inherently righteous “resistance.” The cheering crowds in Western capitals after the massacre exposed how deeply this toxic worldview has spread far beyond Gaza, chumming for the anti-Jewish horde.
But history is not destiny.
Two State Day could become something profoundly different. A day not of denial, but of mutual recognition. A day where SAPs mourn losses without denying Jewish legitimacy. A day where Jews acknowledge Palestinian Arab suffering without questioning Israel’s basic right to exist. A day where both peoples reject the poison of perpetual grievance and choose coexistence over endless war.
The future cannot belong to people still marching psychologically toward 1948. It must belong to those willing to build 2048.
A future where Palestinian children are not taught that Jews are foreign usurpers, but neighbors with ancient roots in the same land. A future where Jewish children no longer grow up expecting every concession to be answered with more violence. A future where the Temple Mount is not a symbol of exclusion, but proof that the land carries the sacred history of multiple peoples.
Real peace will never emerge from chants demanding the disappearance of one side or the other. It begins only when both peoples recognize each other’s humanity, legitimacy, and permanence.
For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:
Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.
That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.
It does not.
PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?
Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.
Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags
After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.
That became the baseline.
The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.
Then came the only real exception.
Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.
Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.
Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.
By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.
Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.
In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.
Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998
Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.
Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.
The pattern is unmistakable.
When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.
For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.
Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.
The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.
America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.
After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.
First One Through 