Last week, a small Palestinian delegation walked into the mourners’ tent of the Amar family in the Druze village of Julis. They shook hands with the relatives of Brig. Gen. Munir Amar, who was killed in a March 25 plane crash, and said that President Mahmoud Abbas had sent them to express his condolences for the tragic death of their loved one. This was not an insignificant event. Amar headed the civil administration in the West Bank and was the face of the Israeli occupation authorities. Part of his job was to sign off on orders for the demolition of Palestinian homes in Area C (under full Israeli control).
The visit was the latest in a series of recent gestures by the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah toward Israeli society. The others included friendly interviews with Abbas on Israeli media, an invitation from Abbas to opinion makers to dine with him at his headquarters, the Muqata, and joint activities with Israeli-Palestinian organizations such as the Geneva Initiative. At the same time, a public opinion poll indicates that Israeli Jews are still marching to the right — to the far right.
The Peace Index for March 2016, published by the Israel Democracy Institute, shows that a sizable majority of the Jewish public rejects the distinction between global terrorism, nurtured by radical Islam, and Palestinian terrorism, nurtured by the desire to shake off the Israeli occupation. Of those polled, 64% said they agree with the idea espoused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that global terrorism and Palestinian terrorism are one and the same.
The obvious conclusion is that most Jewish Israelis believe the violent conflict with the Palestinians is unrelated to the occupation. If ending the occupation would not end the violence, then ipso facto, there is no need for negotiations over the fate of the territories. Furthermore, the majority of the Israeli Jewish public, 62%, believe that the staying power of their society, given the current round of violence, is stronger than that of the Palestinians: 69% of those on the right believe this, 59% in the center and 44% on the left. Only 5% think the Palestinians will outlast the Israelis. In other words, Israelis are in no rush to change the status quo.
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