It has severely limited the growth of Palestinian neighborhoods, leading to overcrowding and the unauthorized construction of thousands of homes that are at risk of demolition. The increased tensions have come amid a power vacuum in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
On the other side, Palestinians were due to hold their first elections in more than 15 years this month, but they were postponed by President Mahmoud Abbas , whose Fatah party controls much of the West Bank.
He blamed Israel for refusing to allow voting in east Jerusalem, but many Palestinian voters decried it as an excuse to avoid the elections, which Abbas looked set to lose.
Hamas, which is regarded as a terrorist organization by the U. Since then, it has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt, leaving the economy in tatters. Human rights groups say residents are forced to live with scarce food, medicine and electricity. But Hamas was nonetheless expected to do well in elections.
The U. But decades of peace talks, sometimes mediated by the U. Trump made the conflict a centerpiece of his foreign policy, proposing a peace plan early last year that he said would create a conditional path to statehood for Palestinians while recognizing Israeli sovereignty over a significant portion of the West Bank.
With a new administration in office, President Joe Biden has so far signaled little interest in reviving the peace process. But the most recent escalation, and pressure from within his own party , could force it higher on his agenda. David B. Green Dec. Get email notification for articles from David B. Green Follow. Open gallery view.
A Jewish and Arab woman talking on cellphones in Jerusalem, June Some , of the city's , residents are Arab. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi. Credit: Emil Salman. A man walking past trash at the entrance to the Shoafat refugee camp. Although Israel annexed the camp after the Six-Day War in , it is now on the "wrong side" of the West Bank separation barrier. Credit: Tali Mayer. Click the alert icon to follow topics: Jerusalem Palestinians Donald Trump. David Pollock is the Bernstein Fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on regional political dynamics and related issues.
Those who support permanent peace with Israel are in the minority even among the younger generation, but Washington should still prepare for the future by working around the economic edges. Does the current state of Palestinian opinion reflect just the recent escalation?
To see whether this is the case, we must take a closer look at public opinion over recent years. The results are unexpected, bearing good and bad news.
First, while the current U. Less than 40 percent of the Palestinian public—in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—supports it over one-state alternatives.
Support for a two-state solution has declined steadily since Further, most Palestinians believe that a two-state solution is unlikely to emerge from the conflict. Instead, a majority of them say they prefer to reclaim all of historic Palestine, including the pre Israel.
A one-state solution with Arabs and Jews holding equal rights comes in second. Similarly, recent polling from PCPSR finds support among Palestinians and Israeli Jews for a two-state solution has dropped to 43 percent and 42 percent, respectively. This changed political reality poses threats to U.
But do the trends also reveal areas of opportunity, in which U. Polling is not an iron-clad process, and it is not a science. Responses by the same populations can and do change significantly between one year and the next or after a slight rewording of a question.
But the professionals conducting these particular polls made concerted efforts to ensure accuracy, interviewing face-to-face rather than by phone or internet and assuring participants of strict confidentiality, especially when questions dealt with controversial or taboo topics.
Over the six years of these polling data, views on a number of salient issues have shifted, sometimes dramatically.
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