Palestinians used to be considered the best educated and most cultivated-and secular-of all the Arabs, before the gore-spattered Arafat and his bloody-handed cronies returned from Tunis in the mid-90s to murder their opposition, immiserate their brethren, and destroy the Palestinian civil-society NGOs that had flowered after 1967, and before inroads by radical Islam commenced to turn Gaza into the Wahhabi Outpost of Hamastan (about which more below). Even now, despite the depredations of Arafat and his weak and corrupt Fatah successors, and notwithstanding their ostensible victimhood, the Palestinian literacy rate, at 91 percent, is still one of the highest in the Arab world. What this tells us about the “occupation” may be argued ad infinitum by the Ahmadinejad/Walt/Klein cabal, but here is something that even our Israel-allergic president and his amen corner on the anti-Semitic left will have to contend with: According to a poll released the other day by the International Peace Institute, Obama is not beloved of Palestinians, and settlement growth matters very little to them:

Only seven percent of all Palestinians polled-and a mere four percent of those living in the place where there actually are settlements, Judea and Samaria-care at all about settlement growth, one of the two great bugbears of the Middle East peace fantasy harbored by U.S. policymakers (the other being putative Israeli war crimes allegedly committed during operation Cast Lead, about which see this from Jen Rubin). Noteworthy, too, is that even with respect to the expulsion of Israelis from established settlements and the evacuation of outpost dwellers, those “much more interested” number an impressively small 28 percent. What do Palestinians want? It appears they want to get rid of Hamas, and apparently in high numbers (“Palestinian Authority President Abbas has a 55% job approval rating, while his likely challenger, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, languishes at 32%”.) With Gaza coming increasingly to resemble Saudi Arabia, as this amazing report in the Jerusalem Post details, that is no wonder. A sampling of statutes imposed upon the benighted citizens of that hell-hole by the “Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” security force: