2024-06-17

Polling Pales

Middle East news: both sides are trying to avoid giving a definitive answer to those nice USAnian's peace proposal, and are hoping they can blame the other side for rejecting it. Cue endless vacillation and death.

Meanwhile, there's a poll by the Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH; see here; h/t RH. It makes grim reading for anyone hoping for peace.

Before going on, it's worth noting the finding that A majority of 58% expected Hamas and Israel to reach a ceasefire in the next few days while 39% did not expect it. That's 58% delusional or reporting their hopes rather than actual expectations1, which you should factor into your reading of all the other answers and my notes.

Most interesting to me is the figure below2.

Poll: Humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip

Yes that's right: slightly fewer people have been injured; and the number killed has increased by less than a percent. We could excuse this by sampling difficulties, perhaps, but the lack of increase of dead is weird. Of course it isn't the number of dead, it is the proportion of "families" with at least one dead, but still the lack of increase over the last three months suggests to me that these numbers just aren't reliable. Bizarrely, the report itself makes absolutely no comment on this oddity.

Support for Hamas's attack remains high, at 73% (fig 1), perhaps partly because only 3% think Hamas committed atrocities (fig 4) and 67% expects Hamas to "win" the current war. They carefully avoid explaining what "win" might be. 61% would prefer Hamas to control Gaza (fig 7); though if you prefer a slightly different perspective, Most Palestinians Don't Want Hamas Rule, Poll Shows3.

But what should be done? We have: When asked about its support and opposition to specific policy measures to break the stalemate: 66% supported joining more international organizations; 49% supported resort to unarmed popular resistance; 63% supported a return to confrontations and armed intifada; 62% supported dissolving the PA; and 22% supported abandoning” the two-state solution and demanding one state for Palestinians and Israelis. Three months /’, 55% supported a return to confrontations and armed intifada; 45% supported resort to unarmed popular resistance; 58% supported the dissolution of the PA; and 24% supported abandoning the twostate solution in favor of one state. Unfortunately they weren't offered the option of "surrender; stop fighting" which is my suggestion, but I doubt that would have been popular. Fig 22 provides another view on this, with 54% up for armed struggle 25% for negotiations; and 16% for popular non-violent resistance. "66% supported joining more international organizations" is amost sweet in its delusion; but more likely it indicates despair of other ideas.

It does seem that these people are motivated by hatred: The poll found significant opposition of three quarters to Saudi-Israeli normalization, even if it is conditional on Israel accepting a Palestinian state and taking concrete and irreversible steps toward that goal.

Somewhat more speculatively, I notice that the Palestinians invariably refer to their dead - all and any of their dead - as martyrs. That doesn't seem healthy. Whereas the Israelis usually call theirs murdered.


Notes


1. Speaking as a SWeng or mathematician, when people ask me a question I tend to answer it, and become unhappy when I can tell that my answer to their question, given literally, will mislead them; or when their question is so badly posed that no accurate answer is possible. But most people, I observe, treat a question more as an invitation to say whatever they like on a given topic. So I have no faith at all that survey reports are literally accurate.

2. I don't know why they've labelled that as "Jun 24"; the text says surveys between May 26 and June 1, 2024.

3. There's some wishful thinking going on there. Another way of sayig it is Among those intending to vote, support for Hamas stands at 46%, Fatah 25%, third parties 6%, and the undecided at 25%.


Refs


Reporting of yer conflict

2024-06-14

The morality of not meddling in other people's business

PXL_20240608_120158084 Welcome to ye merie monthe of jun. Which is always a busy month of rowing - Mays is in swing as I speak - so perhaps that excuses my shameful lack of posting.

We're back to the olde feldes with Supreme Court preserves access to abortion pill at which all right-thinking people shout hurrah! Although one senses that the Graun isn't fully comfortable, or even cognisant, of what happened. The issue is one of Standing: just because you happen to care deeply and passionately about a given issue doesn't give you a right to stick you twitchy nose and grimy fingers into the legal pie. Which I link to my previous advice to care less.

This is a legal principle. But elevated - carefully - to a constitutional provision in some suitable fashion I would tout it as a solution to the Great War: in the sense that the govt really has no cause to be making laws about things that are best left to individuals. I've said this before to the inevitable great acclaim.


Refs


Church and State.

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Supreme Court Inches Towards Liberty - Richard Hanania.