Drawing on recent surveys of Palestinian public opinion in both Gaza and the West Bank, David Pollock notes the gap between the opinions generally attributed to Palestinians and what they actually tell pollsters:

[W]hile some [observers] attribute Palestinian rejection of President Trump’s [peace] plan to its new limits on the traditional two-state paradigm, most Palestinian respondents now reject that [paradigm]. Asked to choose “the top Palestinian national priority during the coming five years,” two-thirds of West Bankers [picked] “regaining all of historical Palestine for the Palestinians”; a mere 14 percent chose “ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to achieve a two-state solution.” Gazan respondents, surprisingly, are a bit more moderate: 56 percent want all of Palestine, while 31 percent opt for the two-state solution.

These maximalist long-term aspirations are also reflected in responses to other survey questions. For example, when asked about next steps “if the Palestinian leadership is able to negotiate a two-state solution,” just 26 percent of West Bank respondents say that it “should end the conflict with Israel.” In Gaza, that figure climbs to 40 percent. Around 60 percent in both areas say “the conflict should not end, and resistance should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated.”

At the same time, contrary to common misconception, the idea of a binational state . . . does not seem to be gaining much popular Palestinian support.

Nonetheless, few West Bank Palestinians want a new intifada, or even want the Palestinian Authority to continue paying terrorists and their families:

Regarding Palestinian Authority bonuses to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons, West Bank respondents are strikingly at odds with their political leaders. Two-thirds now agree at least “somewhat” with this proposition: “The PA should stop special payments to prisoners, and give their families normal social benefits like everybody else—not extra payments based on their sentences or armed operations.” This figure represents a marked increase over the previous three years. Similarly, West Bank respondents . . . reject the official PA policy against “normalization” with Israelis.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.