Palestinian polls, etc.
As part of the research for the big piece I'm writing this week on Palestine, I've found a couple of good portals to Palestinian polling and other info. This is a portal from Hanan Ashrawi's Miftah Center, that strives to aggregate data from all the Palestinian polling centers. It doesn't totally succeed, because it doesn't (yet?) include this poll, conducted March 9-11 by the An-Najah National University Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies, which has some interesting data...
Of course, the Palestinian pollsters all came in for huge criticism recently for not having forecast the Hamas victory in the January elections. Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Beit Sahour-based PCPO tried to address this issue in this early-February report. I didn't find totally convincing his claim there that the range of degrees of support that the opinion pollsters had found for Hamasshortly before the election, which were between 29% and 35%, "which lies ... on the tolerated edge of the margin of error." Hamas's final tally was 44% (of the national vote.) H'mmm.
But still, it was brave and honest of Kukali to try to reflect publicly on the problem, which is more than I've seen any of the others do.
I have addressed what I call the "person with the clipboard problem" in doing any opinion surveying, e.g. here, before. In addition, I believe cold-call-type, individualized opinion surveying has many more pitfalls than its practicioners generally admit. (For example, I nearly always refuse to participate, as a matter of principle and personal privacy, in any telephone-based opinion surveys. Call me ornery if you want. But if there's another chunk of people out there like me in this respect, as I'm sure there is, what does this do to the "validity" of such polls?) So I think we'd all do well to take such polls with more than a few grains of salt... What one can perhaps discern from them is trends, at best. (Even if the trend in question is merely one of resistance to poll-answering?)
But I digress.
Another interesting site I found in the course of this small research is Zajel, a useful looking news aggregator produced by the An-Najah University public relations department. Given the fact that, as Jonathan has told us, in the new Hamas-dominated cabinet, "At least four of the 24 ministers are drawn from the Najah faculty," the contents of this site-- which looks to be well maintained-- could give us a window into what is on the minds of people within Najah's general milieu.
An experienced polling firm can get a reasonably accurate snapshot of a view at the time, with sufficient sample size and all the other statistical tools and caveats that they are used to.
Interestingly, the most accurate poll in the U.S. during the last election, Rassmussen, did automated telephone polls. A lot of more experienced pollsters derided the method as unreliable. But somehow it worked. Go figure.
I've been checking out the refugee project oral history portion of the site. Interesting quote from one of the refugees.
"Everybody left the village. Every family was gone. The Arab leaders lied to us. We were told that the Arab Armies were coming and that we’d be back to our villages a week or so later. We had been listening to their propaganda on the British radio; Near East Radio Station."
That's interesting, because Benny Morris and some of Israel's other "new historians" insisted that there was no evidence of any such broadcasts.
Joshua, if there were such broadcasts would that excuse the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1948? The only reason people have spent decades squabbling about those real or alleged broadcasts is because they've been used as an excuse to deny Israel's guilt for forcing Palestinians from their homes. But that never made sense, unless one tries to claim that all the Palestinians fled for this reason and none were forced out. But suppose the broadcasts did occur--would the fact that some Palestinians fled because they were told to flee mean that they didn't have the right to return to their own homes?
As for whether the broadcasts occurred, my vague recollection is that Morris found there was some evidence that some Arabs did order evacuations. I don't know if that occurred over the radio. Contemporary documentation (preferably radio archives, if such things were kept) would be the most convincing evidence. People's memories aren't terribly reliable decades later--I've read that quite independent of this particular controversy.
Erskine Childers and Walid Khalidi exhaustively searched BBC and other radio archives over 40 years ago and exploded this myth, long before the New Historians. Cf http://zpedia.org/Beyond_Chutzpah:_Introduction or Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question ed. by Said & Hitchens. Note the quote does not say that broadcasts told villagers to flee, which is the myth. It is up to those who claim such broadcasts were made to back it up, say where and when. So far no one has, and as Donald points out, so what even if they did happen? Morris did find evacuation orders, but this is hardly surprising, that people were at times told to leave war zones. There were Jewish evacuation orders too for indefensible, outlying settlements, I believe.
Not that anyone else is likely to be reading this or be interested, but I'm eccentric. And not that I have ever read or seen the second book, but as Christopher Sykes comments in his classic Crossroads to Israel, neither of the two scholars above seem to have read Rony Gabbay's even earlier A Political Study of the Arab-Jewish Conflict: The Arab Refugee Problem, a Case Study, (1959), apparently a relevant and outstandingly objective account coming to the same conclusion. So Khalidi and Finkelstein's later comments that the topic only was finally settled when an Israeli scholar, Benny Morris, researched and exploded the myth much later seem to be not entirely just.