Obama's Ridiculous Mid-East Summit By ALEXANDER COCKBURN The tenor of Israeli politics today is one of fanatic rejectionism of any halt to settlements, any serious concession on borders, beyond a Palestinian "state" in small chunks, hemmed in by Israel's highways and fences, with water diverted and communication between the various fragments of Palestinian territory under rigorous Israeli control and constant harassment. East Jerusalem as the proposed capital of a Palestinisan state is under incessant invasion of new Jewish housing projects. . . . For his part, Abbas is no longer president of the Palestinian Authority, which has no democratic mandate among the vast majority of Palestinians. They voted for Hamas and regard Abbas as a quisling, who exists solely by the favor of US money, Pentagon security advisors and Israeli support. Hamas expressed its opinion of the meeting by killing four Israeli settlers. (Half a million illegal Jewish settlers have been the most conspicuous consequence of the "peace process.") . . .
The tenor of Israeli politics today is one of fanatic rejectionism of any halt to settlements, any serious concession on borders, beyond a Palestinian "state" in small chunks, hemmed in by Israel's highways and fences, with water diverted and communication between the various fragments of Palestinian territory under rigorous Israeli control and constant harassment. East Jerusalem as the proposed capital of a Palestinisan state is under incessant invasion of new Jewish housing projects. . . .
For his part, Abbas is no longer president of the Palestinian Authority, which has no democratic mandate among the vast majority of Palestinians. They voted for Hamas and regard Abbas as a quisling, who exists solely by the favor of US money, Pentagon security advisors and Israeli support. Hamas expressed its opinion of the meeting by killing four Israeli settlers. (Half a million illegal Jewish settlers have been the most conspicuous consequence of the "peace process.") . . .
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn09032010.html fairleft
Ignoring Hamas is certainly an Israeli strategy and one that is meaningful: there is no place for a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank in Israel's plans.
"PSR published the results of the exit poll after the closing of the election centers. Our results gave the advantage to Fateh (42% compared to 35% for Hamas). The actual results showed Hamas gaining the advantage with 44% versus Fateh's 41%. In a previous statement, PSR expressed the believe that the error in the prediction was the result of the large number of rejections on the day of elections. A total of 3560, or 17%, of the voters in the sample, refused to be interviewed on the day of election. The rejection, PSR believes was the result of deliberate incitement against pollsters . In order to overcome the problem, we have re-weighted the data to reflect the actual outcome of the elections for the lists in the districts and at the national level. The following results and analysis are based on the re-weighted data which reflect the actual outcome of the elections with the advantage going to Hamas rather than Fateh."
http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2006/exitplcfulljan06e.html
It is possible that the high numbers of "rejections" were from people who didn't want to admit they switched votes for Hamas. The survey I am referring to I don't believe had that problem. I don't have the time to hunt it up, however.
