This piece at Foreign Affairs by Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins has an interesting snippet:
rab Barometer’s survey of the West Bank and Gaza, conducted in partnership with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, provides a snapshot of the views of ordinary citizens on the eve of the latest conflict. The longest-running and most comprehensive public opinion project in the region, Arab Barometer has run eight waves of surveys covering 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. All surveys are designed to be nationally representative, most of them (including the latest survey in the West Bank and Gaza) are conducted in face-to-face interviews in the respondents’ places of residence, and the collected data is made publicly available. In each country, survey questions aim to measure respondents’ attitudes and values about a variety of economic, political, and international issues.
Our most recent interviews were carried out between September 28 and October 8, surveying 790 respondents in the West Bank and 399 in Gaza. (Interviews in Gaza were completed on October 6.) The survey’s findings reveal that Gazans had very little confidence in their Hamas-led government. Asked to identify the amount of trust they had in the Hamas authorities, a plurality of respondents (44 percent) said they had no trust at all; “not a lot of trust†was the second most common response, at 23 percent. Only 29 percent of Gazans expressed either “a great deal†or “quite a lot†of trust in their government. Furthermore, 72 percent said there was a large (34 percent) or medium (38 percent) amount of corruption in government institutions, and a minority thought the government was taking meaningful steps to address the problem.
and
In terms of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, support for the two-state solution in the West Bank was slightly lower than in Gaza (49 percent versus 54 percent), and opposition to Arab-Israeli normalization was slightly higher.
I don’t know how to reconcile those findings with the other poll I’ve cited here taken in May which found, well, pretty much the opposite. I also don’t know how to reconcile the reported findings with the finding in the Arab Barometer poll that more Gazans supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined than supported Fatah. I doubt that opinions have changed that much since May (but before Hamas’s attack on Israel). One or both of the polls could be flawed or erroneous. I simply don’t know but I wanted to report this polling result anyway.
