Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Palestinians Oppose Peace

Imagine you could survey many, many Arabic websites, chats, tweets, and the like concerning Palestinian attitudes toward the conflict with Israel and its perceived protector, the United States. You could determine the extent to which peace talks with Israel were or were not popular with the Palestinian people.

This article in The National Interest reports an effort to do exactly that. Six months ago the Foundation for Defense of Democracies engaged ConStrat to survey thousands of Arabic language posts in all manner of search engines, social media, YouTube, Twitter, social networks like Facebook, and RSS feeds. They did this for two months and here is what they found:
Our data showed that a majority of Palestinians do not support regional peace efforts. Palestinian internet users often derided diplomatic initiatives; discussion of peace talks was overwhelmingly negative.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of Israelis feel the same way. As we wrote a few weeks ago, the only reason peace talks are happening is because the U.S. wants them to happen.

Even the U.S. doesn't particularly want them to succeed, only to occur. I love the cynicism of engaging in a process one hopes will fail.