Khalil Shikaki faces mob for probing "right of return."

Angus Reid
Vancouver Sun

If there were a Nobel Prize for pollsters, one of the leading candidates would surely be Palestinian political scientist and survey specialist Khalil Shikaki. Despite being attacked by mobs in his Ramallah office in the West Bank, pursued by United States Customs agents in Virginia and smeared by the U.S. neo-conservative organ The Weekly Standard, Shikaki's polls are playing an increasingly influential role in defining the markers on the road map for peace in the Middle East.

His most recent survey on the sensitive issue of Palestinian refugees "right of return" to Israel stands as one of the most courageous and important polls ever conducted. It could help break a critical logjam in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It could also invite a sniper's bullet with his name on it because Shikaki has dared to ask Palestinian refugees a simple question: If there was a right of return, would they actually settle in Israel?

The issue of Palestinian refugees' right of return has been second only to control of Jerusalem as the most important and intractable condition for any peace plan between the Palestinians and the Israelis. At its heart is the fate of the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 war. Today, almost 4 million Palestinians and their descendants are classed as refugees.

The Israelis have long opposed any peace settlement allowing a wholesale return of these refugees, claiming such a move would effectively end the ethnic and religious character of Israel, now made up of some 5 million Jews and 1 million Arabs.

Successive Palestinian leaders have been equally assertive about their right to return to Israel. Last year, Sari Nusseibeh, president of eastern Jerusalem's Al Quds University and a senior adviser to the Palestinian Authority, received death threats for suggesting that some compromise might be necessary for the right of return issue.

Shikaki's contribution to this debate has come in the form of a carefully crafted poll of 4,500 refugee families living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Jordan. Consistent with the long-held position of the Palestinian leadership, more than 95 per cent of those surveyed believe the right of return must be recognized by Israel. No surprise.

But like any good pollster, his questioning pried beneath this outer layer of refugee opinion. And it's here that he discovered a nugget that has shocked observers on all sides.

Shikaki's researchers presented the refugees and their descendants with five options that had been negotiated but never formally endorsed at the ill-fated 2001 Camp David negotiating round sponsored by U.S. president Bill Clinton in the dying days of his final term. These options included financial compensation, relocation to the West Bank or Gaza, remaining in their host country or going to another country.

One of the options—relocation to Israel—was chosen by only about 10 per cent of the respondents. Of these, according to Shikaki, only one in 10—just one per cent of everyone interviewed—said they wanted Israeli passports or citizenship.

As Shikaki told National Public Radio host Robert Siegel earlier this week, "The beauty of the result ... is that it is a win-win situation for everybody ... Israeli fears that a large number of refugees would be knocking at the doors once the Israelis recognize the right of return are unfounded."

Ironically, anger over Shikaki's poll has come, not from Israel, but from Ramallah where about 200 rioters stormed the offices of his Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Desks and computers were overturned and Shikaki himself was pelted with eggs. A news conference scheduled to release the results of his survey was abruptly cancelled. A campaign to discredit the poll is already under way, with the usual cast of self-appointed custodians of Palestinian opinion claiming the results were fabricated as part of a U.S. plot.

This isn't the first time Shikaki has presented controversial and myth-exploding findings that have helped bridge the gap in the search for peace in the Middle East. His Center has conducted more than 60 polls on the Palestinians' views—six of which have been collaborative efforts with the Institute for Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The surveys have painted a portrait of both the Palestinian street and Israeli opinion considerably different from what's been presented by the hotheads and fundamentalists on both sides of the Middle East conflict.

In a recent joint release with his Israeli counterparts, the huge gap between "actual" versus "advertised" public opinion on the mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine was drawn into sharp relief.

On this key element of the current "roadmap," most Palestinians believe that mutual recognition is opposed in their region. A majority of Israelis also believe that Palestinians won't accept this measure. But, in fact, the same poll shows that a majority of Palestinians actually agree with it.

Shikaki himself is a refugee. His estranged brother was head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad until his assassination—reportedly at the hands of Israeli agents—in 1995. But Shikaki chose a different path. Since completing his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University in 1992, he has been a prominent advocate of non-violence, committing his professional career to lifting the veil of Palestinian public opinion.

In doing so, he's been forced to confront obstacles on all sides of the Middle East divide. In the early 1990s, Israeli officials attempted to block his return to the West Bank. A year ago, the U.S. customs service added his name to a federal warrant as part of an investigation into the funding of terrorist groups—a move that was decried by Gideon Rose, managing editor of the influential magazine Foreign Affairs, as the "flip side" of the same kind of federal bureaucracy that gave visas to terrorists six months after they died.

Jo-Ann Mort, national secretary of Peace Now, one of the leading organization that seeks to promote peace in the Middle East, called Shikaki "one of the most respected political scientists in the Palestinian world" in a letter released last year. It confronted the conservative Weekly Standard for attempting to discredit him solely on the basis of his late brother's involvement with Islamic Jihad.

Shikaki's courage and professionalism in the emotionally charged and often violent environment that has become his laboratory are exemplary. At a time when cynicism about the prospects for peace and reconciliation threatens to overwhelm every attempt at compromise, Shikaki's work has injected a thin, albeit unpopular, ray of hope.

Archive Search

Search the Angus Reid Global Monitor Politics In Depth archive.