West Bank Arabs prefer to build Jewish settlements

Evelyn Gordon at Contentions notices a new poll of Palestinian Arabs, and one of the results is most revealing.

The PA has announced its desire to stop Palestinian Arabs from working in settlements within the next year. According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, only 34% of West Bank Arabs support such a ban and over 60% of all PalArabs (including those in Gaza) oppose it.

This means that the majority of West Bank Arabs prefer that their brethren continue to work in the settlements.

And most of settlement jobs for PalArabs are in construction.

As Gordon notes,

[M]ost Palestinians’ actual prime concern is supporting their families (something that really shouldn’t surprise those liberals who believe all people want the same things), and the settlements are a major employer. It will be years before the Palestinian economy is capable of providing an alternative. Thus by demanding a freeze on settlement construction now, Barack Obama and his European counterparts are merely generating massive Palestinian unemployment. It turns out that Palestinians would rather they didn’t.

Once again we see a disconnect between how Palestinian Arab leaders want to force their people to act, and what the people really want. This is just an extension of the types of declarations that Mahmoud Abbas has made saying that he is against Lebanese Palestinians gaining equal rights, including citizenship, in Lebanon, when in fact most of them would jump at the opportunity to move out of their camps and become full citizens.

Palestinian Arab leaders have continuously and consistently made decisions to limit the freedom and choice of their people, all in the name of non-existent "Palestinian unity." Their decisions usually result in increasing the misery of those they pretend to lead. And they have no compunction about representing these decisions are being what the Palestinian Arabs want - when in fact they often want the opposite.