Palestinians Aren’t Ready to Make Peace with Israel. That Doesn’t Rule Out a Peace Deal.

In his Mosaic essay, “Do Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution?” Daniel Polisar concludes that the Palestinian public does not, in fact, want such a solution. Instead, by large and consistent majorities, Palestinians support the maximalist solution of a Palestinian state “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” (Whether Israelis want a two-state solution, and if so under what conditions, is of course a separate matter.)

If we accept Polisar’s conclusion, what are the policy implications for those who still hope to reach a two-state solution? First: is achieving that goal dependent, as Polisar indicates, on “policies that seek to reduce decisively popular Palestinian support for a maximalist state,” or can the goal be achieved despite negative public views? Second, if the latter is the case, would a strictly transactional peace deal between the parties suffice, or should any such deal provide for the transformation of existing public perceptions?

In what follows, I mean to address these questions one by one. Before proceeding, however, let me stipulate that Polisar’s essay is convincingly argued and is steeped in thorough, meticulously examined polling data from a wide array of credible pollsters. To offer a critique of it in those terms would require someone equally conversant in the art and science of survey research. (For a partial example, see David Pollock’s response to Polisar’s previous essay in Mosaic, “What Do Palestinians Want?”) Here I mean to advance a different general point—namely, that public opinion and political behavior are not identical.