The Arab World Research and Development group (AWRAD) just released a surprising poll of Palestinian arabs that shows that when Hamas and Fatah fought over how to handle the Goldstone Report, they both lost support.
Some findings:
Only 21% are closely following the Goldstone report arguments between Fatah and Hamas, and only 3.5% say they are familiar with the actual contents of the report.
They were fairly evenly split over whether the report was "fair" (presumably to them.)
The surprising part, considering the huge amount of vitriol directed at Mahmoud abbas over the past couple of weeks, is that more PalArabs (33%) feel that the PA is handling the report issue well than the 22% who feel that Hamas is handling it well politically. The majority were very turned off by how Hamas and al-Jazeera were slamming Abbas and the PA over the report.
As a result of the public spat between the two, support for Fatah has decreased from 45% to 39%, while support for Hamas went down from 17.5% to 13.5%.
Even Palestinian Arabs are getting sick of their leaders.
