The world is a strange place. Something captured my imagination. Being a pollster in Gaza and the West Bank. This, apparently, is a real thing.

I found out this morning that people did polls in Gaza and the West Bank after October 7th, when Israel started Israeling after Hamas Hamassed¹.

There were pollsters running around after October 7th² in Gaza and the West Bank (the West Bank has it’s own troubles). That seems a very brave thing to do, wandering around while things are exploding and asking people their opinions.

Being a pollster there sounds like a pretty exciting job in that area – a job for young people, hopefully with health benefits. Dental would be good too, though it seems that hospitals are at a premium at this time. Do you get to march in front of the line and say, “I’m a pollster, I have a headache” in front of the line of people with missing limbs? I doubt it. Health insurance rates must be high, too.

What do you do when you’re not polling? What do you do if you’re wounded? Do you find a pigeon, scribble a note with the appropriate findings and say defiantly with your last breath, “The poll must be completed!”

Gaza and the West Bank have been very scary places for some time. This does not mean that random exploding things falling on parts of Israel makes for Israel to be ‘safe’, but it’s more reasonably safe than the occupied territories because there, you get both the IDF and Hamas 24/7. No election since 2007. Only the people who shouldn’t have guns have them.

How would it be to be born in an occupied territory? To have no rights that can’t be taken away? To see in the distance, above a wall, a modern nation funded by another modern nation? I *might* think that it wasn’t fair. Maybe a friend gets killed by that modern nation’s people. Maybe a family. Maybe I feel injustice with no outlet, no real representation. Or maybe I just don’t care, wandering around and eeking out a living, but it seems that I would care. Would you? I’d probably feel a little angry, honestly.

I might kick a can really hard, then get detained for littering. Things probably would not go well for me, for I have been spoiled by a better illusion of freedom.

I joke a bit in this post, but that belies what I’m trying to do: Add context to a world that screams should the wi-fi get sketchy. We are all just staring out of our caves through our flat screens, not understanding the starvation being twistedly enforced in unforgettable ways, ways that the world has now seen in imagery that cannot be forgotten.

It seems that during all of this, the somewhat simple task of simply doing a poll – something that we take for granted in much of the world – is so very different there, in a war zone, but there are people there doing it because they clearly think it’s very important, more important than the two lizard argument being presented to US voters.

Anyway, if someone applies for a position at your company who has been a pollster in a war zone, I’d say that you’d want to hire them. Actually, anyone who has found a way to survive there should be advanced to the top of the stack of those applications just based on resilience.

1. We have two new terms to use. I remember when going postal was new, and we humans have made it so we have new ways to express groups of individuals going postal in the same direction. We need a word that combines the two, the dance of complex history. Until then, we’re stuck with the cumbersome phrase, “Gaza War”. ↩︎
2. The poll can be found here, on the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research website. ↩︎