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A poll shows Palestinians overwhelmingly support Oct. 7. What does that mean?
(JTA) — When a recent survey showed that nearly three-quarters of Palestinians supported Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Israeli officials and commentators cited it to justify their country’s war in Gaza, which aims to depose the terror group.
“Palestinians need to focus on prioritizing the building of their nation, rather than trying to destroy ours,” read an online post by Act4IL, an Israeli government-run social media feed. “It’s not a conflict about borders, it’s about the mere fact that Palestinians don’t want us here.”
For Israelis and others who hope to see Palestinians reject Hamas and its attacks on Israelis, the poll offered little reason for optimism. It found that 72% of respondents approved of Hamas’ decision to launch the Oct. 7 attack, in which the terror group killed 1,200 Israelis, took more than 240 captive and committed numerous atrocities.
That finding was no outlier. According to the survey, support for Hamas has increased since September, particularly in the West Bank, where it has tripled. More than 60% of respondents say violence is the best means of ending the Israeli occupation. Most Palestinians — particularly in the West Bank — approve of Hamas’ conduct during the war.
Writing in Israel Hayom, an Israeli right-leaning paper, commentator Nadav Shragai said the results underscored the argument that “commitment to perpetuate the struggle against the Jews and the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people comes from the grassroots level, from the Palestinian public en masse.”
But the pollster who conducted the survey and other analysts of Palestinian affairs say the results, while sobering, paint a more complex picture. Several told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the increased support for Hamas is an indictment of the past decade or so of Israeli-Palestinian relations, in which the two sides have not conducted any sustained peace negotiations. In the absence of diplomacy, they say, Palestinians have turned to violence.
“The prevailing perception is that the Palestinians do not have the option of resorting to diplomacy and negotiations to end the Israeli occupation, that this is not a viable means of ending the Israeli occupation so they’re left with nothing but violence,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which conducted the poll.
“And the only group in Palestinian society that can deliver violence effectively against Israelis is Hamas,” he said. “So we will continue to see support for Hamas going up as long as the majority or substantive number of Palestinians do not see diplomacy as viable.”
The poll, conducted between Nov. 22 and Dec. 2 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, reached 1,231 adults in face to face interviews, 750 in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip. It has a margin of error of 4%.
Shikaki, perhaps the most widely respected Palestinian pollster, pointed out wrinkles in the data. Support for Hamas as a movement, according to the poll, is softer than support for its actions. In addition, support for the two-state solution — in other words, the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel — has risen slightly since the last edition of the poll and stands at 34%, though 70% of respondents don’t think U.S. efforts toward that outcome are “serious.”
Perhaps most significantly, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian respondents said they did not know or were in denial that the events of Oct. 7 included mass atrocities. Some 85% of respondents said they did not see videos showing the violence of the day and, when told of the atrocities, only 10% believed they occurred.
Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, said such denial is typical in the throes of a war, especially one in which close to 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health Ministry. (That figure does not differentiate between civilians and combatants and does not denote deaths from misfired Palestinian rockets. It is roughly in line with Israeli estimates of Palestinian casualties in Gaza.)
“Hearts harden and you demonize the other,” said Telhami, who is also a veteran pollster. “And then you block because you see whatever it is that you’re doing as justified, and whatever your side is doing as justified.”
The same is true of the Israels, he said. “When you look at the Israelis, they still think their army is doing its best to save civilians, even though we have thousands killed,” he said.
That assessment is reflected in a recent poll of Israelis by the Israel Democracy Institute, which found that nearly all Jewish Israelis, 91.5%, believe the army is observing the rules of war and international law, while 81% believe that the army should not take Palestinian suffering into account when planning its military operations in the war. The poll reached 503 Hebrew speakers and has a margin of error of approximately 4%.
Other analysts agreed that Palestinians see violent attacks as their best hope following the collapse of the peace process launched in the 1990s. Scholars say settlement expansion, settler violence against Palestinians and Israel’s recent advances in normalizing relations with a support of Arab and Muslim countries have contributed to the isolation fueling Palestinian backing for violence as a means of achieving their goals.
“Hamas’ actions putting Gaza on the world stage apparently look quite effective to Palestinians,” Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli public opinion expert, wrote in Haaretz after the poll came out. “Given the renewed urgent international attention to reviving diplomacy to resolve the conflict, Hamas made a good argument for using force.”
Yousef Munayyer, who heads the Palestine-Israel Program at the Washington D.C.-based Arab Center, said Hamas was garnering support as the more able agent to achieve Palestinian national ambitions, not for its Islamist ideology.
He pointed to a question near the end of the poll that asked respondents about what the “most vital Palestinian goal” should be. Forty-three percent responded ending Israel’s occupation and establishing a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, while 36% said the priority should be Palestinian refugees returning to their homes in Israel’s recognized borders — a demand Israeli officials have long viewed as tantamount to the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Smaller percentages favored focusing on building an Islamic society, or strengthening democracy for Palestinians.
The poll, said Munayyer, “calls on us to be cautious about interpreting support for Hamas as support for the religious ideology, in terms of the way society should be structured.”
The poll showed cratering support for the Palestinian Authority, led by Mahmoud Abbas. Biden wants a reconstituted Palestinian Authority to govern the Gaza Strip once the war is over. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that’s out of the question, and has depicted Abbas as not much better than Hamas — although cooperation between Israel and P.A. forces has so far kept a lid on violence erupting in the West Bank.
Disdain for Abbas may be the one area where Palestinians agree with Netanyahu. Some 60% of respondents want the Palestinian Authority dismantled and nearly 90% want Abbas to step down. Ronni Shaked, a research fellow at the Truman Institute at Hebrew University whose specialty is Palestinian society, said Palestinians see Abbas and the P.A. as it currently stands as little better than collaborators.
“In their eyes, he is working with the Israelis, for the Israelis, he cooperates and coordinates the security with the Israeli people,” Shaked said. He noted also that the polling was conducted during an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinians in Israeli prison on security offenses. Israel released roughly three prisoners for every hostage.
That boosted Hamas in Palestinian eyes because of the priority Palestinians place on the release of the thousands of prisoners held by Israel, Shaked said.
”It’s a consensus among all the Palestinians, Hamas, Fatah [Abbas’ party], whatever you want, that to release the prisoner is … No. 1 for the society.”
The poll showed that 81% of respondents believed that Hamas’ primary goal in its Oct. 7 attack was a “response to settler attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and on Palestinian citizens and for the release of prisoners from Israeli prisons.”
Shikaki, who has been polling Palestinians since the outset of the Oslo process, said shifts in public opinion occur when diplomacy becomes viable, something that Biden is hoping to achieve even in the face of Netanyahu’s opposition to the P.A. and its low standing among Palestinians.
“For a long time, we never had a majority in support of violence,” he said. “Support for violence started to rise when two, three years ago, violence by settlers increased considerably.”
Shaked was pessimistic. He said violence had become part of the Palestinian ethos since the collapse of the 1990s-era peace process and the launch of the Second Intifada in 2000. What was needed, he said, was a strong Palestinian leader who repudiated violence, and long-term teaching for peace to supersede decades of teaching violence.
“The ethos of the Palestinians has not changed,” he said. “They have the same collective memory, the same collective emotion, the same collective societal beliefs about the delegitimization of the Jewish people.”
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The post A poll shows Palestinians overwhelmingly support Oct. 7. What does that mean? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Majority of New York City Hate Crimes Targeted Jews in 2024, New Data Shows
Anti-Israel protesters target a synagogue in Queens, New York on July 14, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Jews were targeted in the majority of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City last year, according to new data issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
On Monday, the NYPD released its end-of-year crime report, which recorded a precipitous drop in crime overall but also the disturbing numbers on antisemitic hate crimes. Out of the 641 total hate crimes tallied by the NYPD, 345 targeted Jews, which, in addition to being a 7 percent increase over the previous year, amounted to 54 percent of all hate crimes in the city.
As The Algemeiner previously reported, antisemitic hate crimes in 2024 posed a major threat to the quality of life of New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community, which was the target in many of the incidents. In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery.
In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
Days after the week-long antisemitic hate crime spree, three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the Crown Heights neighborhood.
The explosion of hate continued a trend. In 2023, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City, according to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jews.
Other major cities and states have recently reported increases in antisemitic hate crimes.
In Los Angeles County, antisemitic hate crimes rose 91 percent in 2023, from 127 the prior year to 242 in what the LA County Commission on Human Relations (LACCHR) described as “the largest number of anti-Jewish crimes ever” in the city.
Additionally, the state of Massachusetts saw more antisemitic hate crimes in 2023 than at any time since government officials began tracking such data eight years ago, according to a report issued by its Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS).
A striking 119 antisemitic hate crimes were reported to law enforcement agencies, EOPSS said, a total which, in addition to eclipsing 2015’s total of 56 incidents, amounts to a 70 percent increase over the previous year. Antisemitic hate crimes also constituted 18.8 percent of all hate crimes reported in 2023, a figure which trails only behind the percentage of hate crimes which targeted African Americans.
The report added that 68.9 percent of the antisemitic incidents involved property destruction or vandalism, a total of 82, while another 19 percent involved intimidation. Some physical assaults, six, were recorded or reported to the police.
“The local increase reflects national trends. Our data showed that over 10,000 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the US since Oct. 7, 2023, an over 200 percent increase compared to incidents reported to us during the same period a year before,” Peggy Shukur, vice president of the ADL’s East Division, told The Algemeiner when the information became public. “Behind every one of these numbers are people who have experienced the harm, fear, intimidation, and pain that reverberates from each of these incidents. The fact that numbers increase by 70 percent is a grim reminder that antisemitism continues to infect our communities in real and pervasive ways.”
Overall, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US spiked to a record high in 2023, and American Jews were the most targeted of any religious group in the country, according to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Majority of New York City Hate Crimes Targeted Jews in 2024, New Data Shows first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Vows ‘Hell Will Break Out in the Middle East’ if Gaza Hostages Not Released by His Inauguration
US President-elect Donald Trump makes remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, US, Jan. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
US President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday reiterated his threat to seek retaliation against Hamas if the Palestinian terrorist group does not release the remaining hostages in the Gaza Strip.
“If [the hostages] aren’t back by the time I get in office, all hell will break out in the Middle East, and it will not be good for Hamas. And it will not be good, frankly, for anyone. All hell will break out,” Trump told reporters.
Trump made the comments during a wide-ranging press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He stood alongside Steve Witkoff, the recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East for his incoming administration.
“They should’ve never taken them. They should’ve never been the attacker of Oct. 7, but there was. Many people [were] killed. They’re no longer hostages,” Trump added.
On Oct. 7 of last year, Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages to Gaza during their invasion of southern Israel. During the onslaught, 45 Americans were killed and 12 were abducted.
About 100 hostages, both dead and alive, remain in Gaza, including seven Americans. Three of them — Keith Siegel, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Edan Alexander — are thought to still be alive. Three others — Itay Chen, Gadi Haggai, and Judi Weinstein Haggai — are believed to be murdered by the terrorist group, with their bodies still in the Palestinian enclave. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed last month that Israeli-American hostage Omer Neutra was killed during the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, and his body was taken by terrorists into Gaza. Neutra was initially presumed to be among the living captives.
In total, 100 hostages remain in Gaza, and at least a third of them are believed to be dead.
Trump said on Tuesday that families of hostages have approached him in tears, desperately begging for a deal to secure their loved ones’ release from captivity.
The president-elect emphasized the importance of dispatching a “great negotiator” to broker a ceasefire deal to halt fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and free the remaining hostages, gesturing to Witkoff. Trump added that although he does “not want to hurt the negotiations,” he believes that reiterating his threats to unleash “hell” across the Middle East will incentivize Hamas to reach a deal in the upcoming weeks.
Trump has repeatedly vowed to take aggressive action to secure the return of the remaining hostages. He has previously promised that Hamas will have “hell to pay” if the terrorist group does not release those still held captive in the Gaza Strip.
“Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But i’’s all talk, and no action!” Trump posted last month on the social media platform Truth Social. “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity.”
“Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!” he added.
The post Trump Vows ‘Hell Will Break Out in the Middle East’ if Gaza Hostages Not Released by His Inauguration first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Lawmaker Says Washington Funding Taliban, Pens Letter Urging Trump to Halt Aid
US Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) on Dec. 5, 2024. Photo: Mattie Neretin / CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) recently penned a letter to President-elect Donald Trump claiming that Washington is “funneling” money to the Taliban government in Afghanistan and calling on his incoming administration to stop such foreign aid, citing the Taliban’s extensive history of supporting Islamist terrorism.
“I write to express my strong concerns with foreign aid being funneled to the Taliban and my desire to work with your administration to stop tax dollars from going to terrorists,” Burchett wrote in the letter dated Jan. 2. “It was brought to my attention the US State Department, under the Biden administration, was funneling money to the Taliban.”
Burchett claimed that after questioning US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the top American diplomat “admitted that non-governmental organizations paid nearly $10 million of foreign aid to the Taliban in taxes.”
The lawmaker said that sending foreign aid to the Taliban undermines US national security, arguing that American government agencies are incapable of tracking how the Islamist movement spends US dollars.
“The larger issue, which Secretary Blinken failed to acknowledge, is the shipments of cash payments in United States dollars to Afghanistan’s central bank,” Burchett wrote. “These cash shipments are auctioned off and after that, they are nearly impossible to track. This is how the Taliban is being funded and plans to fund terrorism around the world.”
We have got to quit funding the Taliban under @realDonaldTrump. $40 million a week to our enemies is a slap in the face to those who served. pic.twitter.com/MVgMnSo1Gn
— Rep. Tim Burchett (@RepTimBurchett) January 6, 2025
The lawmaker did not provide any direct evidence in the letter to support his claims, although the US has provided extensive aid to Afghanistan. According to an October 2023 report from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US has provided nearly $2 billion in humanitarian assistance for Afghans since mid-August 2021, making Washington the largest humanitarian donor in Afghanistan. It is unclear how much of that money has ended up in the hands of the Taliban, which the US and other countries have designated as a terrorist group.
“The United States of America should not fund its enemies abroad. I implore you to take action to put an end to wasteful foreign aid spending and to support efforts in Congress to put Americans first,” Burchett wrote. “I look forward to working with you during your second term as president.”
Burchett added that he plans on reintroducing legislation that would require the State Department to “discourage foreign countries from providing financial or material support to the Taliban, and to report on direct-cash assistance programs and Taliban influence over Afghanistan’s central bank.”
He claimed that while the bill — first introduced in 2023 — passed the US House “unanimously,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) refused to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.
Following the release of Burchett’s letter, billionaire and X/Twitter owner Elon Musk, who will serve in the Trump administration as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, sparked a debate online regarding the allegations.
“Are we really sending US taxpayer money to the Taliban?” Musk wrote on X on Monday.
The distribution of American taxpayer dollars to Afghanistan has emerged as a hot-button issue for Republicans in recent months. In December, US Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) blasted Blinken over the transfer of US dollars to the country.
“There’s an American citizen out there, literally woke up this morning losing 30% of their paycheck. And a good percentage of that is going to the Taliban or other programs abroad,” Mast said. “And this is something that we all need to think about, and we will be thinking about deeply for the next two years. There’s a joke that’s made often out there about kids going to college to learn basket weaving, and what a joke that would be. But the United States right now is literally sending tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban. 14.9 million, to be exact, to teach Afghans how to do carpet weaving.”
“Even worse, by the numbers, we spent $9 billion to resettle 90,000 roughly Afghan refugees here since the fall of Afghanistan. My simple Army math tells me that’s about $100,000 a person. That’s absurd. So my question for you. We do not even have an embassy in Afghanistan. We have no diplomats there. What are we doing giving them $1?” Mast continued.
The Taliban infamously provided a safe haven for al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks and was accused of sheltering Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group afterward. A US-led military coalition subsequently removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan in 2001.
In 2021, however, the Taliban once again seized power in Afghanistan, amid US President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from the country.
The post US Lawmaker Says Washington Funding Taliban, Pens Letter Urging Trump to Halt Aid first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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