Antony Loewenstein

This is almost comical. One authoritarian state goes to an occupied people and asks them to come as tourists. Because Palestinians are dead keen to see another occupation?

The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau is to hold its first Tourism Road Show at Ramallah City in Palestine on Thursday.

This will be the first time a trade or tourism delegation from Sri Lanka will be visiting Palestine.

Officials of the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Board who will be in Ramallah for the Road Show will be accompanied by a group of dancers.

The Palestinian tourism sector will be represented by 36 members of the Palestinian Society for Tourism and Travel Agents. The Palestine Tourism and Antiquities Minister Dr. Khloud Daibes will be the Chief Guest at the show.

The Road Show is expected to exchange views regarding problems connected with trade and the method of increasing the flow of tourists between Palestine and Sri Lanka.

Apart from visiting the country as tourists, Palestinians now visit Sri Lanka for trade purposes as well.

In January this year a trade delegation visited Sri Lanka on the invitation of Sri Lanka Export Development Board.

Tea importers from Palestine now visit Sri Lanka to purchase their requirements direct and 90% of the tea consumed in Palestine comes from Sri Lanka.

Australian Tamils have spoken:

99.4 percent of those who cast votes in the Tamil referendum across Australia last weekend said “yes” to the formation of independent and sovereign Tamil Eelam in the contiguous north and east of the island of Sri Lanka. The results were announced Thursday at a press conference held at NSW State Parliament in front of state and national media. 8,272 out of the registered, numbering around 10,000, participated in the polls. The number of eligible Eezham Tamil voters in Australia is estimated to be around 15,000. The formation of Tamil Eelam was assented by 8,154. The negative votes were 51 and 67 were invalid.

My following article appears in today’s Crikey:

Australia’s Tamil community want an independent homeland in Sri Lanka. And they want respect from a Federal Government here that is now denying visa applications to their people.

Last weekend saw thousands of Australian Tamils vote on the Vaddukoddai Resolution in a show of support for an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. They’ve told Crikey they’re angered by Kevin Rudd’s statements on refugees; some are preparing to campaign against sitting members during the federal election.

Results show overwhelming support locally as elections in Norway, France, Canada, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Britain saw 99% of voting Tamils back the proposal. The vote has no real political consequence, though it proves the potency of the idea of independence for a traumatised people who simply don’t trust a majority Sinhalese-Buddhist elite to treat them with equality.

I was an election monitor on Sunday in the outer Sydney suburb of Oxley Park (and visited another polling booth in Homebush) and spoke to countless Tamils who expressed their growing anger at Labor’s refugee policies. Many said they would vote Greens for the first time in their lives.

Some live in marginal seats, such as Parramatta (Labor’s Julie Owens), Greenway (Liberal’s Louise Markus), Bennelong (Labor’s Maxine McKew) and Lowe (Labor’s John Murphy). Crikey understands some Tamils are seriously considering contributing to targeted campaigns in some seats against sitting Labor members.

Labor’s Holroyd City Council Councillor Tamil Vasee Rajadurai told Crikey he was “disappointed” with Rudd’s latest refugee shift. Although he called the Prime Minister a “compassionate” man who apologised to the Stolen Generations and would never sink to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s race-baiting level, he asked the Australian government to understand that Tamils were increasingly fleeing Sri Lanka for a reason.

The Councillor said that it would take years before viable Tamil politicians would emerge in Sri Lanka due to the level of intimidation by government forces in the north and east of the country.

Vyramuthu Vijayasivajie, who arrived in Australia 17 years ago, epitomised the sentiment I heard all day. He always voted Labor but said this year he would for the first time be voting Greens. His antipathy towards the Federal Government was palpable.

In the final stages of the war last year he told me the ALP “stayed silent; while in opposition, Kevin Rudd and the party were quite vocal about the situation in Sri Lanka.” During the crisis, he continued, the Greens spoke out against the atrocities and he was especially happy to hear leader Bob Brown condemn Colombo’s onslaught and the Rudd government’s silence.

Vijayasivajie, 56, met Labor MP Julie Owens last year and told her that if he had no family in Australia he would want to join the Tamils in their fight against the Sri Lankan forces. “She didn’t say much to that,” he said.

He was “angry” with Rudd’s hardening of refugee policy and was scared of “another Tampa”. He personally knew of Tamil women raped by Sri Lankan armed gangs in the country’s north, roaming at night in the areas where Tamils are released after enforced detention.

During last week’s Community Cabinet Meeting in Sydney, Immigration Minister Chris Evans was asked by two Tamils to justify the Rudd government’s suspension of refugee claims from Sri Lanka. Evans claimed the security situation in Sri Lanka had “improved” and two “democratic” elections had been held since the end of the conflict in May 2009. The minister believed in “positive engagement” with Colombo “to provide more security for the Tamil people” — “shouting from the sidelines” was futile.

NSW Greens MP Lee Rhiannon — running for a Senate seat in this year’s federal election — told Crikey that her party is currently crafting its election strategy but she is hearing a great deal of frustration with ALP policy on Tamil and Afghan refugees.

There is “considerable disquiet in inner-city seats [such as Lindsay Tanner’s seat of Melbourne] where people are outraged that Rudd, who was elected with great promise and hope, had not ended the inhumanity that the Howard government had displayed towards refugees.”

But the ALP may also have troubles in outer Sydney seats such as Reid, Rhiannon argued, because the Greens had “carved much territory” after the 2001 Tampa affair. The party saw a mass influx of new members.

A number of Tamils told me, and this is confirmed by Rhiannon, that Rudd’s asylum seeker stance is denying Tamils and Afghanis due process, a position arguably harsher than under Howard. This is because their claims aren’t even being considered; they are being denied a rightful hearing. It may be “worse than temporary protection visas”, Rhiannon says.

Councillor Rajadurai told me the “President of Sri Lanka has the opportunity in his hands to begin reconciliation [with Tamils] now. It’s the best time to do this now but the signs are not there.”

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

Because we haven’t forgotten about the Islamic Republic’s barbarism:

Bahareh Hedayat belongs to another group of Iranians that has been among the most active in the protests, most brave in its defiance, and most repressed by the state’s basij militia and other official thugs: she is a student leader, arrested (as she had been in 2007 and after the June election) on 31 December 2009 and held since in Tehran’s Evin prison. Bahareh is not alone and I write of her merely as an example of many other conscientious activists who have endured staggering hardship in these epic months.

Bahareh is an elected representative of the traditionally male-dominated Tahkim Vahdat, the national student union formed after a decree issued by Ayatollah Khomeini at the dawn of the 1979 revolution. It gradually acquired legitimacy by conducting free elections in which Iran’s entire student population voted; it thus evolved into an independent, pro-democracy organisation and one of the state’s most vocal critics.

Bahareh’s interrogation, which had kept her in isolation from her fellow-prisoners, ended in March 2010. But as further punishment she was transferred from Evin’s section 209 (for “political” detainees) to section 350 (a women’s unit); a high-security section which houses those convicted of drug-trafficking  and murder among other tough crimes.

Iranian prisoners in certain categories qualify for the right to make one three-minute telephone-call per week. For Bahareh, the natural day to make contact with the outside world was 6 April: both her 29th birthday and her wedding anniversary. Her husband Ahmad Aminian, her family and friends and a group of her student-union colleagues gathered in her small flat to wait for the call. Bahareh did call that evening – and was able to talk for as long as she wanted, for her hardened fellow-inmates had turned over to her their own precious allocation.

A moral Jewish voice, Tony Judt, hs long refused to be bound by Zionist tribalism. Human rights matter more than blindly following Israel.

But he’s fiercely proud of being Jewish. I agree:

I reject the authority of the rabbis—all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don’t make a point of socializing with Jews in particular—and for the most part I haven’t married them. I am not a “lapsed” Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don’t “love Israel” (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don’t care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise.

What’s this? A senior Western politician questioning American and Israeli criminality? No wonder the political and media elites don’t like him and the public do. He speaks unspoken truths:

Nick Clegg, the party leader dominating the British election campaign, has refused to rule out a push to be foreign secretary in a coalition government.

And in unusually strong language for a prominent British politician, the Liberal Democrat leader also urged greater independence from US foreign policy and a more demanding European attitude towards Israel yesterday.

Mr Clegg said Britain should no longer be “joined at the hip with our American friends”, arguing that Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invasion “was a war about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown doing America’s bidding”.

He said Israel had used disproportionate force in Gaza and kept Palestinians in poverty so Europe should use its “economic muscle”, including arms embargoes, to change the Israeli government’s policies.

“I think, as a European, as a British politician, we can’t only leave it to the US to exert influence in the Middle East,” he said.

Mr Clegg’s tough comments on foreign policy will receive unprecedented attention because of his strong performance in last week’s first-ever British televised leadership debate, which led to the greatest turnaround recorded by polls in the middle of a British election campaign.

The Liberal Democrats soared to the top of opinion polls, producing the exact reverse of the last general election result – with the Lib Dems first, the Conservatives second, followed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party.

The polls suggest Labour could still win with the largest number of MPs on May 6 but the Lib Dems would hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

A common feature of coalition governments across Europe has been the appointment of the leader of the second-largest party as foreign minister. Mr Clegg was non-committal when asked whether he would demand that job as one of the prices of Liberal Democrat support for a coalition.

“That really is putting carts spectacularly before horses,” said Mr Clegg, who speaks five languages and began his career as a European Union trade negotiator.

All parties are anxious to see whether Mr Clegg can maintain his momentum in tomorrow’s second televised debate, in which the main topic will be foreign policy.

While reserving some of his strongest criticisms yesterday for George W. Bush’s administration, Mr Clegg had a slap at Moscow, saying Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had “ruthlessly” used Russia’s gas wealth to divide Europe.

He said the conventional wisdom in Britain had long been that “the linchpin around which all the British foreign policy should be organised is the Atlantic relationship between the UK and the US”.

That made sense during the Cold War “but those days are past” and it was no longer smart “to unambiguously be joined at the hip with our American friends”, he said.

“There is nothing wrong with just acknowledging that there are . . . in recent years very profound differences between ourselves and US administrations, particularly at the height of the George Bush-Dick Cheney orchestrated war on terror.”

He added: “I think it is almost sometimes embarrassing the way in which Conservative and Labour politicians talk in this kind of slavish way about `the special relationship’ (with the US).

“If you speak to hard-nosed folk in Washington they say, `Yeah, it is a good relationship but it is not the special relationship’.”

“So if they are moving on, why on earth don’t we?”

Mr Clegg called for united sanctions against Iran but denied military action would stop its nuclear ambitions.

“The great risk of sabre-rattling about the possibility of military action in Iran, of course, is that you strengthen the very forces in Iran that we want to weaken, (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad and the other hardline leadership in Iran.”

Mr Clegg described the EU as an “economic giant and a political pygmy in the Middle East”.

“On Israel, my view has always been that whilst the ideology of Israel’s enemies in Hamas . . . is odious, and the use of terror . . . unacceptable, I also feel that it is simply not in Israel’s long-term interests to have 1.5-1.8 million people in a state of wretched grinding poverty in a tiny, tiny sliver of land in Gaza seething with ever greater radicalism, extremism and hatred right on your doorstep and that the military methods used in Operation Cast Lead were disproportionate,” he said.

Encouragingly, a number of Rabbis have publicly come out and backed Richard Goldstone:

Dear Judge Goldstone,

As rabbis from diverse traditions and locations, we want to extend our warmest mazel tov to you as an elder in our community upon the bar mitzvah of your grandson. Bar and Bat Mitzvah is a call to conscience, a call to be responsible for the welfare of others, a call to fulfill the covenant of peace and justice articulated in our tradition.

As rabbis, we note the religious implications of the report you authored. We are reminded of Shimon Ben Gamliel’s quote, “The world stands on three things: justice, truth, and peace as it says ‘Execute the judgment of truth, and justice and peace will be established in your gates’ (Zekharya 8:16).” We affirm the truth of the report that bears your name.

We are deeply saddened by the controversy that has grown up around the issuing of the report. We affirm your findings and believe you set up an impeccable standard that provides strong evidence that Israel engaged in war crimes during the assault on Gaza that reveal a pattern of continuous and systematic assault against Palestinian people and land that has very little to do with Israel’s claim of security. Your report made clear the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructures such as hospitals, schools, agricultural properties, water and sewage treatment centers and civilians themselves with deadly weapons that are illegal when used in civilian
centers.

This is the ugly truth that is so hard for many Jewish people to face. Anyone who spends a day in Palestinian territories sees this truth immediately.

Judge Goldstone, we want to offer you our deepest thanks for upholding the principles of justice, compassion and truth that are the heart of Jewish religion and without which our claims to Jewishness are empty of meaning. We regret that your findings have led to controversy and caused you not to feel welcome at your own grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. We believe your report is a clarion call to Israel and the Jewish people to awaken from the slumber of denial and return to the path of peace.

Rabbi Everett Gendler
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Rabbi Brant Rosen
Rabbi Brian Walt
Rabbi Haim Beliak
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Rabbi Michael Feinberg
Rabbi Shai Gluskin
Rabbi David Shneyer
Rabbi David Mivassair
Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman
Rabbi Douglas Krantz
Rabbi Margaret Holub
Rabbi Rebecca Alpert
Rabbi Mordecai Liebling
Rabbi Phyllis Berman
Rabbi Zev-Hayyim Feyer
Rabbi Eyal Levinson
Rabbi Doron Isaacs

More names added:

Rabbi Gershon Steinberg-Caudill
Rabbi Erin Hirsh
Rabbi Michael Rothbaum
Rabbi Benjamin Barnett
Rabbi Julie Greenberg
Rabbi Linda Holtzman
Rabbi Ayelet S.Cohen
Rabbi Jeffrey Marker
Rabbi Nina H.Mandel
Rabbi Victor Reinstein

That’s the good, humane Jews.

Then you have the parochial, clueless Jews who still view Israel as some promised land that just emerged from the Holocaust. It’s over, guys. Over to you, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:

I was horrified to hear that there were South African Jews objecting to Judge Richard Goldstone attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Blocking a fellow Jew, let alone a grandfather, from a family’s religious celebration because of his opinions on Israel is disgraceful. I recall once that the Lubavitcher Rebbe said that any Synagogue that bars a fellow Jew from entry ought to be shut down.  We’re not Hamas, Hezbollah, or Fatah. We don’t summarily execute compatriots accused of collaborating with the enemy, as these terrorist organizations do to innocent Palestinians. We don’t character assassinate them either or banish them from our communities. Rather, where fellow Jews, like Goldstone, are harsh critics of Israel, we show them respect and deference and then destroy not them but their arguments in the cold light of fact and reason.

The Goldstone Report is a modern-day blood libel against the Jewish state and has been torn to shreds by expert international jurists, including Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard and Prof. Richard Landes, Director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. Among the many compelling arguments against Goldstone is the fact that his report failed to focus on Hamas initiating the war by firing thousands or terror rockets against Israeli cities, intentionally using women and children as human shields in order to draw Israeli attacks and then accuse them of killing civilians, and how Goldstone granted near-complete credulity to all Hamas claims while cynically deriding those of Israel. As Dershowitz expressed it, the Goldstone Report is ‘to any fair reader, a shoddy piece of work, unworthy of serious consideration by people of good will committed to the truth.’

But that does not make Goldstone an enemy of his people. Rather, I believe, Goldstone, like so many others, reactively chooses the side of the Palestinians not because he is a self-hating Jew but because he boorishly assumes that the weaker party in any conflict is necessarily the aggrieved party. During Israel’s invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas’ murderous rockets it was easy to look at Israel’s tanks and helicopters and view the Palestinians terrorists as helpless victims. By the same logic, however, the awesome military invasion of a million soldiers on the beaches of Normandy made the Nazis into peace-loving innocents, and American shock-and awe over Baghdad made Saddam into a blameless target.

Goldstone is a foolish ignoramus rather than a traitor to his people. We have to stop believing that anyone who is anti-Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. That misguided notion is what led Israel to have such abysmal PR in the first place, assuming as it did that since these critics have an innate hatred of Israel there was no reason to rebut their arguments. The toxic result is that Israel has tragically failed to promote the justice of its cause in a well-organized PR offensive and the Arabs, in the greatest PR coup in history, have somehow convinced the world that six million vulnerable Jews are oppressing five hundred million oil-rich Arabs.

Upon my last visit to South Africa on a book tour I was warmly embraced by the South African media who told me that ‘a Rabbi as open-minded and universal’ as me ought to be bold enough to criticize Israel’s ‘apartheid’ policies toward the Palestinians. Many black South Africans view Israel like the Boer and British Europenan colonizers who oppressed the indigenous population prior to Mandella’s presidency in 1994. I could have easily dismissed them as anti-Semites. But I knew in my heart they were decent, G-d-fearing people who had never heard a robust defense of Israel and I seized the opportunity on TV and radio to make Israel’s case.

The Jews are very similar to black South Africans, I told them. Long ago we too lived peacefully in our land, in Israel. The Holy Land, as the New Testament makes clear, had Jews and no Arabs. Then the Romans, a brutal, European occupier destroyed our Temple and took us as slaves to Europe where we lived under brutal oppression for millennia while praying thrice daily for a return to our ancient homeland. In the Arab countries where many migrated, Sephardic Jews lived under Arab governments where they were further treated like black South Africans, second-class citizens, denied basic human rights and required to pay jizyah, the Koran-obligated poll tax. My father who grew up in Iran, remembers the humiliation of having Islamic shopkeepers refuse to take money directly from his impure Jewish hands. Likewise, Ashkenazi Jews, like their black South African counterparts who were stuffed into townships, were placed into ghettos in Europe and forced to live apart. Finally, the flowering of modern nationalist movements enabled the Jews to begin leaving these lands en masse and returning to their indigenous, ancestral homeland.

But even amid the Jewish dispersion after Rome’s conquest, a minority Jewish population retained an uninterrupted presence is Israel for more than three thousand years. We did not colonize the land but were always a part of it. And when the waves of European Jews began returning to the land in modern times, the land was virtually desolate. The Zionist pioneers did the laborious work of draining the swamps and making the desert bloom.

Far from being a white, colonial settlement, the establishment of Israel is analogous to American blacks who had been forcibly removed from Africa and returned to create the nation of Liberia. The obscene comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa also ignores the fact that Israel is the first country in history to airlift tens of thousands of black men, women, and children from Ethiopia to become free and full citizens within its borders.

Finally, I told my listeners, black South Africans who inspired the world with their capacity for peaceful coexistence could not be more different to the Palestinians who have tragically embraced hatred and terrorism. Nelson Mandela rose to become the foremost statesman in the world with his message of forgiveness and reconciliation. Yasser Arafat fathered international terrorism and stole millions of dollars from his poverty-stricken people.

In stupidly shunning people like Judge Goldstone we in the Jewish community are alienating those who need the light of Jewish values most.

Sorry to disappoint the ideologues, but the US President is an old fashioned capitalist:

Statements that President Obama is a “socialist” don’t fly with the Socialist Party, USA. Billy Wharton, the Socialist Party’s co-chair, says Obama is far from being a socialist, and that labeling Obama a socialist “clearly means that people don’t understand what socialism is.” Most socialists believe that consumers and workers affected by economic institutions should either own or control those institutions, but Democratic socialists are more interested in protecting ordinary people from unregulated capitalism through progressive taxation and regulation. Many institutions in the U.S. are already socialistic under that definition: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, public education and Pell grants for college students all have socialistic origins. Card-carrying Socialists scoff at the idea that the newly-passed health care reform is “socialized medicine.” They wanted national single-payer health insurance with a government option, but new law doesn’t have any of those features. Instead, it just strengthens private health insurance companies by delivering 32 million new customers while giving them no incentive to change, Wharton points out. Some point to the Wall Street bailout, actually started under the Bush administration, as socialist, but government failed to nationalize the troubled banks, instead just giving them money with few or no strings attached. And what about the bailout of the Detroit auto industry? Just having a stake in it doesn’t make it socialist, according to Frank Llewellyn, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, “If that was true, you would say that we have a socialist army. The government owns the army.” Obama is “trying to save capitalism from itself,” not trying to change into a new system, Llewellyn says.

Back in February I co-founded an Australian initiative for Jews to reject their right of return to Israel.

I’m encouraged that more Jews are coming on-board. America, welcome:

The Obama administration is little different to the previous Bush regime:

The government is failing in more and more cases to produce evidence that the men it has imprisoned at Guantanamo belong there, according to ProPublica’s latest look at the lawsuits [1] that some 100 captives have filed in federal court to seek their freedom. But the Obama administration continues to challenge the courts’ authority to make it release the prisoners.

In 34 out of the 47 cases that have been decided so far — over 70 percent — detainees have won judgments that the United States is subjecting them to indefinite detention as al-Qaida or Taliban enemies without proof, and that they must be released. Federal judges have been reviewing classified intelligence and interrogation reports since June 2008, when the Supreme Court recognized the detainees’ right to sue. The remaining prisoners have been held seven years or longer.

The Tablet on what’s at stake:

In the event of a Hezbollah attack, all that is certain is that Israel will level Lebanon. “People believe there is a confrontation in Lebanon between the bad guys, Hezbollah, and the good guys, the government of Lebanon,” Giora Eiland says. “But the only real strategic decisions are made by Hezbollah. So, if there is real violence from Lebanon, Israel policy will be very different than it was during the 2006 war. We will hold the government of Lebanon responsible, and the immediate consequence will be the total destruction of Lebanon.”

When this happens, it’s hard to see Hamas becoming more popular:

Gaza’s Hamas rulers have burned more than 1 million pills of a pain killer many Gazans take because they say it relaxes them.

Hamas Health Minister Basim Naim said Tuesday that the drug, Tramadol, was confiscated from smugglers who sneak it through tunnels under the Gaza-Egyptian border. At Gaza’s largest hospital, workers tossed sacks of the drug into an incinerator.

Naim said many in Gaza are addicted to Tramadol, which is supposed to be available only by prescription. The drug is a mild opioid and experts say regular use can cause flulike withdrawal symptoms.

Hamas has also banned smoking in government offices and recently seized cigarettes from shops across Gaza to collect taxes on them.

Kill-joys.

So these latest poll results are especially interesting, especially the growing support for a bi-national state:

The results of the public opinion poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre show that there is a rise in the level of satisfaction towards how Mahmoud Abbas assumes his role as President of the Palestinian National Authority from 39.4% in October 2009 to 48.2% in April 2010. Along the same lines, this latest poll, conducted over the period of 10-15 April 2010 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, shows a rise in the percentage of Palestinians who believe that the performance of Fayyad’s government is better than the performance of Haniyeh’s government from 26.9% in January 2009 to 42.9% this month.

The poll, which included a random sample of 1,198 respondents with a margin of error reaching +/- 3, showed a significant increase in the percentage of those who believe that the economic situation has improved under Fayyad’s government from 23.7% in April 2009 to 41.7% this month. On the other hand, assessment of the security performance of Fayyad’s government remained stable: 43.7% of the respondents said security and safety improved under Fayyad’s government while 31.7% of the respondents said they did not notice any change, and 19.6% said security and safety has deteriorated.

The same applies to the assessment of the respondents regarding the security performance of Haniyeh’s government when comparing the results of this poll and the results of the poll conducted in October 2009. The percentage of those who believe that the security performance of Haniyeh’s government has improved remained stable at around 32.4%, compared with 32.6% who said the performance deteriorated. The same applies to those who believe that economic performance improved under Haniyeh’s government.

Despite the belief that there is corruption inside the PNA, the percentage of those who believe there is corruption in general declined from 87.3% in March 2007 to 73.1% this month. Moreover, the percentage of those who believe that there is a high degree of corruption declined from 56.0% in March 2007 to 48.9% in April 2010.

Political forces and figures

Concerning the balance of power between religious and political parties and figures, the percentage of Palestinians who would vote for the Hamas movement decreased from 18.7% in October 2009 to 14.4% this April, while Fatah movement maintained its level of support at 39.7% in this poll which is very close to the percentage of support it received in October (40.0%).

When asked which public figures they would vote for if presidential elections were to be held this year, respondents chose President Mahmoud Abbas first, with 19.1% of respondents choosing him as compared with 16.8% of respondents in October. Marwan Barghouthi came in second place with 14.5% of respondents, followed by Ismail Haniyeh with 11.2% compared with 16.0% in October. Salam Fayyad came in fourth place with 6.7% of respondents expressing support compared with 4.2% in October. Mustafa Barghouthi came in fifth place with 4.7% of respondents compared with 6.8% in October. The percentage of Palestinians who do not want to vote increased from 23.8% in October to 27% this month.

The poll results also showed a notable increase in the level of support for the establishment of a bi-national state in all of Palestine from 20.6% in June 2009, to 33.8% this month while the percentage of Palestinians who support the two-state solution declined from 55.2% last June to 43.9% in April 2010.