There is a number in the latest Palestinian public-opinion poll that sounds wonderfully encouraging: 56%.

That is the share of Palestinians who, according to one increasingly common reading, support a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.

Wonderful. Someone alert the Nobel Committee.

There is only one small problem: that is not actually what the poll says.

The August 2026 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) is an unusually valuable window into Palestinian opinion after the Gaza war. Taken as a whole, it tells a fascinating story. Palestinians have changed their minds substantially about how to pursue their national goals. What is far less clear is whether they have changed their minds about what those goals ultimately are.

Start with those two states.

PSR first asks the straightforward question: Do you support or oppose the two-state solution? No details, no embellishment.

The result: 44% support it and 50% oppose it.

Then PSR asks a different question. Respondents are presented with three possible arrangements: “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders,” “a confederation between the two states,” and “a single state with equal rights for both sides.”

Given those three choices, 56% prefer the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, compared with 14% for a confederation and 10% for a single state with equal rights. Another 20% choose none of them.

That is an interesting result.

It just is not the same result.

If I ask whether you want chicken for dinner and you say no, and then ask whether you would prefer chicken, sardines, or boiled cabbage, your selection of chicken does not retroactively become an enthusiastic endorsement of chicken.

More importantly, neither question asks what Israelis actually need to know:

Would Palestinians accept two states as the permanent end of the conflict?

That is where things get more complicated.

Means and ends

The most dramatic development in the August poll has little to do with two states.

It is the collapse in Palestinian confidence in armed struggle.

In September 2023, just weeks before October 7, 53% of Palestinians said armed struggle was the most effective way to end the Israeli occupation and establish a Palestinian state. Only 20% chose negotiations.

Today the numbers have almost reversed. Forty-four percent choose negotiations and only 27% armed struggle.

That is a remarkable transformation.

But there is a problem with interpreting it as evidence that Palestinians have embraced peace.

Negotiations are a method. So is armed struggle.

Neither tells us what the negotiator or the fighter hopes to achieve.

And on that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)