A recent survey conducted by leading international pollster, Stan Greenberg, finds that support for Palestinians among European "opinion elites" has fallen drastically. In fact, the drop in Palestinian support was so extensive that Greenberg actually "redid" some of the polls to protect against error; his initial findings were corroborated.

Greenberg, who was a key pollster for President Clinton as well as Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, has yet to release the full details of his findings as they are still being finalized. However, during his interview with the Jerusalem Post, Greenberg singled out France as having experienced the greatest change in sentiments toward the Palestinians:

Three years ago, 60 percent of French respondents said they took a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of that 60%, four out of five backed the Palestinians. Today, by contrast, 60% of French respondents did not take a side in the conflict, and support for the Palestinians had dropped by half among those who did express a preference. . . . [S]hifts such as these, he (Greenberg) said, represented "an incredible pace of change," with significant consequences.

Despite Greenberg’s refusal to offer an explanation for his findings, one can easily determine the source of the changed attitudes among Europeans by appealing to the global developments of the past three years. Most important among those developments vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are terrorism and the Hamas takeover of the Palestinian parliament.

For many years, terrorism was viewed as limited to the confines of the Middle East, with only occasional appearances in the Western world. Today, terrorism is viewed as a global threat, as successful attacks have been carried out against Britain, Spain, Australia, and several other countries since 9/11; the West no longer feels safe.

The unfortunate and unfair reality is that uninvolved people like the Palestinians are, to a certain extent, viewed as partially to blame. Westerners look at the Palestinian territories and cannot help but notice the similar radicalizing process that it is undergoing. The same goes for much of the Islamist countries in the Middle East, from which the majority of radical elements hail.