WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A survey shows that 67 percent of Palestinians want the resignation of President Mahmoud Abbas and 75 percent remain skeptical of the role the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump plays in resolving the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.
The result of the survey, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research among 1,270 Palestinians, was published Tuesday. It showed that only 33 percent of Palestinians wanted Abbas to remain in office. Three quarters believed the Trump administration was not serious about a peace deal.
The poll showed 52 percent of Palestinians still supported a two-state solution, but 57 percent said it was no longer feasible because of the regime’s settlement expansion.
The Survey Research poll had an error margin of three percentage points.
The latest survey comes a day ahead of a meeting between Abbas and Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
President Trump, who has not publicly supported establishing a Palestinian state or offered another path forward, said this week that his administration was "working very hard" toward a deal.
The Trump administration has been by and large vague about the potential establishment of a Palestinian state. Earlier this year, Washington suggested that it would no longer insist on the so-called two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which envisages the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
In 1948, Zionist troops seized vast expanses of Palestinian territories in Western-backed military operations and forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland.
Abbas’s popularity has been sinking in the absence of strong diplomacy against the regime, a stagnating West Bank economy and the resurgence of forms of corruption that had been significantly reduced under former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
Abbas, 82, is suddenly surrounded by a series of political challenges that amount to jockeying for succession.
Last month, Abbas threatened to gradually cut financial support to the impoverished strip of Gaza "by 100 percent” until Palestinian resistance movement Hamas agreed to reconcile with Fatah.
Hamas has shunned contacts with the occupying regime, while the Palestinian Authority maintains security coordination with Tel Aviv.