Each month, we will be conducting a review of a recent book that deals with issues relating to Palestine and/or the Israel/Palestine conflict. Books that are chosen for review can be academic or non-academic, historical or fictional. Next month we will be reviewing The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa by Sasha Polakow-Suransky. If you would like to suggest a book for review, please contact the Palestine Center.
"Palestinian and Israeli Public Opinion: The Public Imperative in the Second Intifada" written by Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki
Hardcover:224 pages, Indiana University Press (March 25, 2010)
Palestine Center Book Review No. 5 (19 May 2010)
By Yousef Munayyer
Courtesy Of "The Jerusalem Fund"
What do Israelis and Palestinians think about the core issues in the conflict? How does Palestinian and Israeli public opinion influence the decision making of their respective leadership? These are the questions that Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki set out to answer in their new book, Palestinian and Israeli Public Opinion: The Public Imperative in the Second Intifada.
Following a theoretical premise founded in rational choice game-theory, the authors make a persuasive argument for the role of public opinion in international bargaining. Public opinion, for Shamir and Shikaki, is a critical force that is involved in a two-layer game where leaders are conscious of their own public's opinion and the public opinion of their counterpart at the bargaining table.
A leader's understanding of public opinion allows for the creation of leverage at the bargaining table and a clear understanding of the opposing sides "red lines."
The authors explain the "domestic tables" of both Israelis and Palestinians. The players identified are interest groups or "cleavages" which must be taken into account at the international bargaining table. On the Israeli side, they identify three key players: First, the "settlers", which "have been the most influential factor in shaping Israeli's policy on peace and the territories over the last three decades;" second, the Israeli military and security establishment, which plays a "major role in most of the important decisions with regard to the conflict;" and third, economic interest groups, which have "long been pushing the Israeli political leadership toward more accommodating positions." On this point it is unclear why the authors discount the role of economic interest groups which have vested interests in the furtherance of occupation. No discussion of these forces exists despite the fact that they clearly exist and play a significant role.
On the Palestinian side the authors identify three more domestic considerations. First, the division between Hamas and Fateh; second the divisions within both parties,(in Hamas they identify a division between the internal and external leadership and in Fateh they point to a division between the old and young guard); and third, they identify refugees as a critical component of the Palestinian domestic table. "More than half the Palestinians," the authors note, "are refugees who lost their homes and property following the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel".
Shamir and Shikaki identify two underlying assumptions of a theoretical framework that argues that public opinion matters for the behavior of political leaders. First, that the leaders are "office seekers" and second, that the leaders may accrue "audience costs". This means that for leaders to take public opinion seriously, they must be able to understand the negative consequences of not doing so. For democratically elected leaders, the consequences of betraying public opinion on core issues could mean losing the next election. For autocrats whose policies are not put before the public for referendum in the form of free and fair elections, like Anwar Sadat as the authors point out, the cost may be the leader's life.
The authors go on to make a persuasive argument regarding the role of public opinion in three major events over the course of the period that they analyze (2000-2006). Public opinion, they posit, played a critical role in the outcome of the Camp David talks in 2000, the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the outcome of the Palestinian elections in 2006, which was a watershed moment in Palestinian politics because it brought an opposition party to power for the first time.
Shamir and Shikaki buttress their claims with ample data amassed by the two pollsters over years of querying Israelis and Palestinians. The book is certainly not short on empirical evidence and the charts and graphs used are well-placed, illustrative tools for the argument.
Some critical questions abound for the informed reader throughout the course of this book which challenge the methodology, and none are sufficiently addressed by the authors. To start, one has to wonder how the Palestinian polity can be analyzed in the same way as the Israeli polity. In the Israeli case, you have a government which is elected through a democratic system (for its Jewish citizens at least). The Palestinian case is a completely different entity. The leadership is layered between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The former has something resembling a functioning parliamentary system (albeit in a predominantly one-party system in the period the authors analyze), whereas the latter is far from a democratic institution. Still, it is the PLO that negotiates on behalf of Palestinians even though it is in the PA where leaders are office-seekers facing public election. What complicates this further is that the PLO is, in theory, supposed to be representative of the Palestinian public wherever they may be. The PA is tied to an electorate in the West Bank and Gaza. This division should have been explored and its implications on the validity of the argument addressed in this book.
Also, another significant difference between the Israeli and Palestinian case is in the leadership's reliance on the public. In the Israeli case, the leadership is empowered by the electorate to run the state. In the Palestinian case, the empowerment of the leadership is far more complicated and involves external actors. Can public opinion be as important in a political system that relies heavily on external forces for sustenance, as it would be in a political system that is independent of these outside forces? In the case of the Palestinian Authority, a majority of its annual budget currently comes from donor dollars,whereas in Israel, the vast majority of government revenue is domestically collected. Surely such an obvious contrast should raise questions about the leadership's ability to weigh the cost of betraying public opinion. The authors fail to address this point.
Finally, the scope of the study seems tailored to include cases which would support the framework adopted by the authors. The idea that public opinion is necessary for creating legitimacy for the government, particularly in the Palestinian case, was thrown into flux after the elections in 2006. A series of events on the Palestinian domestic scene made it clear that the ballot box played second fiddle to the barrel of a gun, and the opinion of the public was secondary to the desire for power among the ruling elite. This is evidenced by Shikaki's own polling in recent months about the public perception of the legitimacy of the governments:
"28% believe that Haniyeh's government is the legitimate one and only 26% say that Abu Mazin's and Fayyad's government is the legitimate one, and 31% say both governments are illegitimate. Moreover, 53% say PA president Abbas has lost his legitimacy when his term ended and 41% disagree with that. Similarly, 53% say the Palestinian Legislative Council has lost its legitimacy after its term ended and 39% disagree with that."1
Overall, this book is the best and most comprehensive work on Palestinian and Israeli public opinion to date. There is a wealth of important information between its pages which showcases a critical understanding of the issues and players that were central in the second intifada period. Holding some of the obvious methodological questions aside, there is much to learn from this study, and Shamir and Shikaki should be commended for the years of analysis that went into this book.
1http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2010/p35e.pdf
Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This book review may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.
The views in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.
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