14) Do you think that the Palestinians must renounce their right of home return, which Israel will never accept, in exchange for having an independent Palestinian state and the conclusion of a peace deal with Israel?There you have it. If Palestinian Arabs are not allowed to "return" to a country that the vast majority have never even lived in, they will overwhelmingly reject a peace deal - even if they know that Israel would never accept them.
Response Percentage 1. Yes, the Palestinians must do that 14.0 2. No, they shouldn’t do that even if the price would be the non- conclusion of a peace deal with Israel 81.7 3. I have no opinion 4.3
15) If the Palestinian leadership would waive the right of home return in exchange for a financial compensation, would you accept or refuse that?
Response Percentage 1. I would accept that 13.1 2. I would refuse that 81.8 3. Don’t know 5.1
The corollary is that even if Israel and the PA are browbeaten into accepting a US-brokered "peace treaty" that includes 100% of the West Bank and the eastern part of Jerusalem, the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs would not accept that agreement - and many of them would likely join or start new terror organizations dedicated to giving them the "right of return."
I posted yesterday the opinions of the late Shiite leader Mohammed Fadlallah concerning his hatred of Israel's very existence, and wrote that I believed that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs - and Arabs altogether - agree with him. The reason is simple - his beliefs are consistent with the lies that the Arabs have been fed for three generations.
The PA, on the other hand, is officially inconsistent. It still incites against Israel daily in its broadcasts and in its schoolbooks; it still celebrates terror, it still draws maps of "Palestine" from the river to the sea, it still chides Hamas for not being committed enough to jihad against the Zionists. Yet the PA officially recognizes Israel. This inconsistency is not lost on the Arabs, who feel deep down as Fadlallah does, that Israel is an alien presence on Arab (or holy Muslim) land and must be destroyed, sooner or later.
(Of course, the PA is not inconsistent with the desire to destroy Israel either - it is faithfully following Arafat's phased plan from 1974. That is a little too subtle for many Arabs, though, whose hatred of the PA stems from its even pretending to want peace with the hated Zionists.)
So even if the PA somehow signs a peace agreement, if the maximal demands of destroying Israel demographically are not included, it would not be accepted by the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs.
Which goes to show yet again that every agreement that Israel signs with Palestinian Arabs is simply one more step to its destruction, as the gains that the Arabs make will then become the floor for the next series of demands - or, more likely, the PA would then disappear and be replaced by a more overtly radical group that is more consistent with the incitement that three generations of PalArabs have been raised on, one that will happily rip up the worthless paper promises that the current quasi-government would make.
It is one thing to take risks for peace. It is an entirely different thing to negotiate your own destruction. This poll proves that peace is simply not an objective for Palestinian Arabs.
We know what that objective is.
(h/t Marty Peretz)