According to the self-styled advocates for their rights in the West, Palestinians’ greatest concerns are preventing the construction of housing for Jews in the West Bank, an end to the Israeli presence in territory acquired during the Six-Day War, and obtaining national independence—an impression confirmed implicitly by most reporting on the region. But a recent survey by a highly regarded Ramallah-based polling center suggests different priorities altogether. Hussain Abdul-Hussain writes:

Better living standards top the priorities of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose majority cares little about democracy or human rights and supports conflict with Israel. . . . Twenty-nine percent of Palestinians said that their top priority was “the unification of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Second came “the improvement of economic conditions” at 25 percent. Combating corruption [among Hamas and Fatah authorities] was third, with 15 percent, while 14 percent answered that their priority was the “lifting of the siege and blockade over the Gaza Strip.”

Only nine percent said that “strengthening the resistance to occupation” was their priority, showing that anything connected to “occupation,” the obsession of Palestinian-Americans and their progressive American sympathizers, does not even get 10 percent of Palestinian interest.

[T]the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip do not think it is Israel that is violating their human rights. According to the . . . survey, 71 percent of West Bankers said that people in their area cannot criticize the Palestinian Authority (PA) without fear. In the Gaza Strip, inaccessible to Israel, 62 percent of Palestinians said that people in the strip “cannot criticize Hamas’s authority without fear.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.