| Summary: Poll Among Youths
Discrepancy over attacks between West Bank and Gaza
No high confidence in factions
Conservatives, Facebookers and anti-normalizers
Support perpetuation of the PNA and are pessimistic about negotiations
The Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre conducted an opinion poll among Palestinian youths in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on various political and social issues, which showed a discrepancy in positions between youth in the West Bank and those in Gaza.
The poll showed that while 47.4% of youths in the West Bank opposed knife attacks, 78.6% of youths in the Gaza Strip supported their continuation. Furthermore, 21.1% of respondents from Gaza opposed knife attacks while 46.4% of youths polled in the West Bank support them.
As for the current uprising/unrest, 40.9% of youths polled in the West Bank and 66.6% of those in Gaza believe it serves the Palestinian cause, while 23.3% in the West Bank and 17.8% in Gaza said it harmed the Palestinian cause.
29.3% of youths polled believe in general that the uprising will end when its goals are reached while 29.2% believe it will end without achieving its goals. Furthermore, 35.3% said it would develop into a fully-fledged uprising. Meanwhile, youths were split over military operations, while 43.2% supported them, 43.9% opposed them.
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Negotiations and the two-state solution
A greater percentage (42.8%) of youths polled said they support the two-state solution while 19.1% said they preferred a bi-national state. Furthermore, the majority, or 67%, believe that negotiations will not succeed in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in comparison to 23.5% who said that negotiations could succeed in reaching a solution.
Meanwhile, the majority of polled youths, or 64.3%, opposed the idea of working with like-minded Israeli youths to find a solution to the conflict, while 27.1% supported this.
In terms of the negotiations with Israel in general, the majority of respondents, or 52.9%, supported a possible resumption of negotiations in comparison to 43% who opposed.
In response to the question on what is the best way for Palestinian youth to instigate positive political change, the majority of respondents, or 40.4%, said this could be achieved through being good citizens (studying and working hard), while 20.6% said the best way would be through regularly participating in demonstrations. 16.3% said this could be achieved through joining civil society/grassroots organizations and 12% said this could be achieved through carrying out lone wolf attacks.
Dissolution of the PNA
The majority of the youths polled (67.7%) said the PNA should be maintained and perpetuated, while a minority of respondents, or 24.6%, said it needed to be dissolved. As for the PNA in general, 60.3% said its performance was good or very good as opposed to 39.5% who said it was bad or very bad.
Elections and parties
If presidential elections were held with only President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Isma’el Haniyeh as candidates, 37.9% of respondents said they would vote for Abbas, while 23.9% chose Haniyeh. However, if these elections were held and President Abbas did not run, then 15.8% of respondents said they would vote for Marwan Barghouthi, 14.4% would vote for Haniyeh and 5.5% said they would vote for Dahlan, most of those who said they would vote for the latter were from the Gaza Strip.
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The poll showed that the greater percentage of youths polled, or 33.8%, trust Fatah more, while 19.1% said they trusted Hamas more, followed by 3.4% who trust the PFLP and 32.5% of youths who said they don’t trust any faction.
The greater percentage of youth polled, or 16%, said they trusted President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) more while 13% said they trusted Isma’el Haniyeh more, 8.7% said they trusted Marwan Barghouthi more, 4% said Mohammed Dahlan, 3.2% said Khaled Meshal and 32.7% said they didn’t trust anyone.
ISIS Danger
The poll showed that the majority of respondents (83.6%) had negative opinions of ISIS in comparison to 5% who said they had a positive opinion. Furthermore, the majority (50.1%) said ISIS is harmful to the Palestinian cause, while 37.9% said it has no impact on the Palestinian cause; 2.2% said they believed that ISIS could serve the cause.
Facebookers
The poll showed that the majority of youths, or 60.5% said their first source of news was from social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter) and from internet websites, while 28.1% said their first source of news was television, 4.6% from radio and 0.9% from newspapers.
Identity: Palestinian
When the youth were asked to define themselves in one word, the majority, or 50.3% said the word Palestinian, while 10.8% said Muslim, 5.6% said Fatah-affiliated, 5.3% said Arab and 5.1% said nationalist.
Conservatives
The majority of those polled (65.3%) said they do not shake hands with the other sex. The majority, or 81% of these respondents said this was for religious reasons. In comparison, 34.3% said they shook hands with the other sex.
Furthermore, the polled youths were split in regards to coeducation, whereby 49.8% said they opposed it while 48.1% said they supported it.
As for the question about multiple wives, the majority of respondents, or 69.1% said they opposed while a minority of 27.2% said they supported it.
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