Half of Jerusalem’s Palestinians Would Prefer Israeli to Palestinian Citizenship
David Pollock/Washington Institute/August 25/2015
Findings from a new poll suggest that those who care about democracy and peace should pay more attention to the desires of the Palestinians who actually live in Jerusalem, not just of those who claim to speak on their behalf from outside the city. Jerusalem is one of the most sensitive issues in Arab-Israeli and Muslim-Jewish-Christian relations. Recent violent incidents in the city have kept it in the political and media spotlight. Yet for all the talk about it, only very rarely have its roughly 300,000 (overwhelmingly Muslim) Palestinians been asked what future they want. New research presented here fills that gap, in a most unexpected way.
In a mid-June poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (based in Beit Sahour, the West Bank), 52% of Palestinians living in Israeli-ruled East Jerusalem said they would prefer to be citizens of Israel with equal rights — compared with just 42% who would opt to be citizens of a Palestinian state. This remarkable result confirms and extends a trend first observed five years ago. In a similar poll in September 2010, one-third picked Israeli over Palestinian citizenship; by September 2011, that proportion had risen to 40%. As of today it has risen again to just over half. This is dramatically different from results in the West Bank or Gaza, where a mere 4% and 12%, respectively, would prefer Israeli citizenship. The latest poll was based on personal interviews by local survey professionals of a representative, geographic probability sample of 504 East Jerusalem Palestinians and comparable samples in the West Bank and Gaza, with a statistical margin of error of approximately 4.5% in each area.
In the earlier polls, East Jerusalem respondents mostly cited practical reasons for this preference: better jobs, income, health care and other social benefits, freedom of travel, and the like. Their Israeli residence permits (“blue identity cards”) already provide such advantages over West Bank residents, and they increasingly want to retain those advantages as the Israeli economy prospers while the West Bank stagnates. Similarly, in the current poll, around half (47%) say they would take a good job inside Israel. But since such benefits are available to them today even without Israeli citizenship, social taboos and the great practical difficulties of applying for that citizenship mean that only a very small proportion have actually acquired that full formal status to date.
Their everyday access to Israel has probably also made Jerusalem’s Palestinians more sanguine about that country’s long-term future. A majority (62%) think Israel will still exist, as either a Jewish or a bi-national state, in 30 or 40 years — compared with just 47% of West Bankers and 42% of Gazans who think so. They are also somewhat more aware of the city’s history, if perhaps not so much as might be expected. Thirty percent of East Jerusalem’s Palestinians, as against a mere 18% of West Bankers, say that there were Jewish kingdoms and temples in Jerusalem in ancient times.
In some other respects, too, East Jerusalem Palestinians have acquired relatively moderate attitudes toward Israel. A stunning 70% say they would accept the formula of “two states for two peoples — the Palestinian people and the Jewish people.” In the West Bank, the comparable figure is 56%; in Gaza, 44%. An equally noteworthy 40% in East Jerusalem say that “Jews have some rights to the land along with the Palestinians” — as against just 13% in the West Bank or 11% in Gaza. And concerning Jerusalem itself, only 23% of its Palestinian residents insist on Palestinian sovereignty over the entire city — just half the percentage with that view in either the West Bank or Gaza.
This does not mean that Jerusalem’s Palestinians are moderate in every respect. For example, 55% say that even after a two-state solution, they would still want to “liberate all of historic Palestine,” though not necessarily to expel or disenfranchise Israeli Jews. Combined with their comparatively widespread preference for Israeli citizenship, this may indicate a drift among East Jerusalem Palestinians toward a “one-state solution.” Meanwhile, however, a majority (61%) also offer at least verbal support for “armed struggle and car attacks against the occupation.” This figure is somewhat lower than among West Bankers or Gazans, but not by much.
Most surprising of all in this connection are the findings about partisan affinity. Fully 39% of East Jerusalem Palestinians say that Hamas “most closely represents your political affiliation.” Possibly this is in part because they are relatively religious; 37% pick “being a good Muslim” as their first or second personal priority, from a list of ten diverse options. But even more East Jerusalemites (47%) say they are politically “independent.” These numbers may also be somewhat skewed by the reality that Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are not allowed to operate officially in Jerusalem.
Interestingly, declared support for Hamas is only half as high in Gaza, whose residents have had to live under actual Hamas rule since 2007. And in the West Bank, where the PA rules and sometimes arrests Hamas activists, a mere 11% openly affiliate with that party. A plurality of 44% identify as “independent.” Beyond the intrinsic interest of these surprising survey findings, there may be several broader political lessons here. First, the findings suggest that benefits from practical coexistence may produce a more moderate mindset. Second, partisan affiliation may not be a good guide to underlying attitudes. And third, most important, those who care about both democracy and peace would do well to pay more attention to the desires of the Palestinians who actually live in Jerusalem, not just of those who claim to speak on their behalf from outside the city.
**David Pollock is the Kaufman Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of Fikra Forum.
What Abbas’s PLO Resignation Means
Ghaith al-Omari/Washington Institute/August 25, 2015
The president’s sudden departure from the PLO executive committee was likely a maneuver to consolidate power, but it nonetheless exposes broader uncertainties in Palestinian politics.
On August 22, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas resigned from his position as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee, along with nine other committee members. While initially interpreted by commentators as the implementation of Abbas’s repeated threats to resign as leader of the key Palestinian institutions, developments so far indicate that, rather than signaling Abbas’s departure from Palestinian political life, this step is intended to consolidate his power within the PLO by removing some of his critics and appointing loyalists to the committee.
Background
The executive committee, the PLO’s highest decisionmaking body, is composed of eighteen members elected by the Palestinian National Council (PNC). The current committee, which was elected in 2009, includes representatives of all the PLO’s constituent factions as well as a number of independents.
For its part, the PNC is often described as the PLO’s “legislative body.” It officially consists of 800 members, but only about 700 of these remained the last time the PNC met for a special session in 2009. Most PNC members reside outside the West Bank and Gaza, and many of the diaspora members oppose the principles of the Oslo Accords and President Abbas’s policies.
According to PLO regulations, if fewer than a third of the committee’s seats become vacant, the vacancies are filled during the next regular PNC session. (Even as a special session was held in 2009, the last regular PNC session hasn’t occurred since 1996.) If more than a third become vacant, then the vacancies are filled in a special session to be held within thirty days. For both regular and special PNC sessions, two-thirds of members constitute a quorum. In cases of force majeure, vacancies are filled in an emergency session by “the Executive Committee, the PNC leadership and any PNC members who are able to attend” without the need for a quorum.
The resignation of President Abbas and his nine committee colleagues is intended to create the vacancies needed to trigger new committee elections. Since most of the diaspora and Gaza-based PNC members will be unable to attend if the meeting is held in Ramallah, an emergency session will likely be attended predominantly by West Bank members and some from Jordan.
This move comes in the wake of various recent measures against critics of President Abbas, including the July removal of Yasser Abed Rabbo from his position as the committee’s secretary-general, the closing of the Palestinian Peace Coalition, an NGO chaired by Abed Rabbo, the targeting of former prime minister Salam Fayyad’s NGO, Future for Palestine, and ongoing measures against former Fatah official and Abbas rival Mohammad Dahlan. It also coincides with recent expressions of disquiet within the Fatah movement.
Although Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are not members of the PLO, according to the 2012 Cairo agreement on Palestinian national unity, a committee will be created to reform the PLO, including reforming the PNC to include Hamas and PIJ members. This committee, however, has been inactive.
Implications
If President Abbas’s strategy comes to fruition, then a new executive committee is likely to be elected that would include some current members, among them Abbas himself and some of those who resigned, but exclude the president’s critics. This move is already generating controversy, with Abbas and the move’s supporters claiming it is intended to “invigorate the committee” and opponents asserting it is an “arbitrary move…meant for asserting control over it.” Opposition is likely to come from two main quarters: within the PLO and Hamas.
A number of the committee’s members have refused to resign, and thereby comply with Abbas’s plan, most notably representatives of left-leaning factions and some independents. Senior members of these factions have publicly criticized the gesture. While leftist factions enjoy only a limited public following, their opposition is significant in that it breaks the PLO’s tradition of reaching decisions by consensus.
In addition to political opposition, the move’s opponents are preparing to challenge it on a key point of procedure. They assert that PLO regulations authorize a PNC emergency session only to fill vacancies; thus, those members who refused to resign cannot be replaced. Ultimately, the decision on this point belongs to PNC president Salim Zanoun, who was the PNC’s vice president beginning in 1969 and has been its president since 1994. While he is a member of Abbas’s Fatah movement, he has in the past acted unpredictably and broken ranks with both the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and President Abbas.
Hamas has rejected the move, describing it as a breach of the Cairo unity agreement. This reaction, however, is only preliminary and is consistent with the organization’s continuing rhetoric against Abbas and the PA. The organization’s final decision is yet to come and will be dictated by a number of considerations. For Hamas, this development comes at an interesting time, when the movement is attempting to assert itself as an independent actor in the regional and international arena and amid reports of efforts to reach a long-term ceasefire understanding with Israel. If Hamas feels that its efforts are gaining sufficient momentum, it may deem it in its interest to use this development to justify formally annulling the unity agreement with the PLO. If not, then it will content itself with having yet another rhetorical tool against Abbas.
Conclusion
Reports of President Abbas’s political demise may be premature. His and his colleagues’ recent resignations from the PLO executive committee are likely internal political maneuvers aimed at consolidating power. However, given the fluidity of the domestic and regional political scene, unexpected consequences cannot be discounted.
Whatever the outcome, these developments have once again exposed the many uncertainties that plague Palestinian politics as it relates to Abbas’s succession, the competition over domestic and international legitimacy between the PLO and Hamas, and transparency and procedural and political predictability of decisionmaking within Palestinian institutions. Unless these uncertainties are addressed through comprehensive political and institutional reforms, the Palestinian political system will remain vulnerable to crises that hold the risk of creating destabilizing power or institutional vacuums.
*Ghaith al-Omari is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute.
