JERUSALEM: US President Donald Trump’s controversial recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital led to a spike in Palestinian support for “armed struggle,” a poll suggested Thursday.
Nearly twice as many Palestinians said they supported “armed struggle” against Israel compared with an identical survey six months previously, while there was also a fall in support for the two-state solution, the joint Israeli and Palestinian poll found.
The poll of 1,270 Palestinians across east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza was conducted in the days after Trump’s December 6 declaration that he would move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital.
Palestinians see at least the east of the city as the capital of their future state, and the announcement set off street protests and diplomatic fury.
Given four options for their preference for the next step for Palestinian-Israeli relations, 38.4 percent of Palestinians favored waging an armed struggle, the most popular single answer and compared with only 26.2 percent who called for reaching a peace agreement.
The same poll in June found 21 percent support for armed struggle, while 45 percent backed a peace agreement.
Khalil Shikaki, from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and one of the report’s authors, said there had also been significant declines in Palestinian support for a peace process and compromise as well as in the popularity of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the Trump statement was the fundamental cause.”
Dahlia Scheindlin from the Tami Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University, another report author, said that she expected the support for militancy could fall in the coming months if tension subsides.
Trump’s Jerusalem move boosts Palestinian support for ‘armed struggle’: Poll
Trump’s Jerusalem move boosts Palestinian support for ‘armed struggle’: Poll
Syrian leader to meet Putin, Russia seeks deal on military bases
- Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue
MOSCOW: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa will meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, as the Kremlin seeks to secure the future of its military bases in the country.
Putin and Sharaa struck a conciliatory tone at their previous meeting in October, their first since Sharaa’s rebel forces toppled Moscow-ally Bashar Assad in 2024.
But Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue. Sharaa has repeatedly pushed Russia for their extradition.
Sharaa, meanwhile, has embraced US President Donald Trump, who on Tuesday praised the Syrian leader as “highly respected” and said things were “working out very well.”
Putin, whose influence in the Middle East has waned since Assad’s ouster, is seeking to maintain Russia’s military footprint in the region.
Russia withdrew its forces from the Qamishli airport in Kurdish-held northeast Syria earlier this week, leaving it with only the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast — its only military outposts outside the former Soviet Union.
“A discussion is planned on the status of bilateral relations and prospects for developing them in various fields, as well as the current situation in the Middle East,” the Kremlin said of the upcoming meeting in a statement on Tuesday.
Russia was a key ally of Assad during the bloody 14-year Syrian civil war, launching air strikes on rebel-held areas of Syria controlled by Sharaa’s Islamist forces.
The toppling of Assad dealt a major blow to Russia’s influence in the region and laid bare the limits of Moscow’s military reach amid the Ukraine war.
The United States, which cheered Assad’s demise, has fostered ever-warmer ties with Sharaa — even as Damascus launched a recent offensive against Kurdish forces long backed by the West.
Despite Trump’s public praise, both the United States and Europe have expressed concern that the offensive in Syria’s northeast could precipitate the return of Islamic State forces held in Kurdish-held jails.
