BOB GARFIELD: Palestinian journalists also find themselves in political cross hairs. Earlier this month 200 of them staged a sit-in at the Palestinian Legislative Council Building in Gaza City to protest a string of attacks. Those crimes remain not only unsolved, but, apparently un-investigated by Yasser Arafat's security forces. Slate.com's Eric Umansky recently reported in the Columbia Journalism Review on the state of press freedom in the Palestinian territories. He says one of the most mysterious attacks occurred last July when a pollster was terrorized by an oddly orderly mob. They came in buses as he prepared to release the results of a controversial poll.

ERIC UMANSKY: His name's Kaleel Shikaki. He operates out of Ramallah, which is effectively the Palestinian capital. His office is right down the block from Yasser Arafat's now mostly-ruined compound, and he's a very highly-respected figure, both within the Palestinian territories and abroad. His polls are considered very straightforward and very trustworthy.

BOB GARFIELD: Tell me about the poll and what issue it explored.

ERIC UMANSKY:The poll went over the issue of what's called "the right of return." For Palestinians that means what they consider their right to return to their original homeland, that is, the pre-1967 borders of Israel. For them, it's a non-negotiable thing. They basically say we want to be allowed to do this. And for Israel, that's a sort of untenable scenario, because they say well, there are millions of Palestinians, and if some large portion of them want to return to Israel and are allowed to return to Israel, then Israelis, most Jews, won't be a majority any more in Israel, and that's not tenable to them.

BOB GARFIELD:And that's been a historical sticking point. If it's non-negotiable on the Palestinian side, and the Israelis can't allow for it, that means that any peace agreement's a non-starter.

ERIC UMANSKY: That's right.

BOB GARFIELD: But it if turns out that most Palestinians are willing to trade in their right of return, that changes the entire political situation.

ERIC UMANSKY: That's right. And Kaleel Shikaki did a poll that basically found out, well, what would Palestinians do if they were offered financial compensation, and the answer, according to his poll, is that indeed, most would take the money and wouldn't want to return.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, clearly it upsets the political apple cart, but Shikaki didn't himself float this idea. He was simply reporting the results of a poll on the question. Why would that make him a target?

ERIC UMANSKY: His poll basically found that this proposal, the notion of financial compensation with a few other permutations, was in fact realistic, and that's a hell of a hot potato.

BOB GARFIELD:But a clear case of ransacking the office of the messenger. How did the Palestinian authorities, particularly Arafat's security forces, respond to the attack?

ERIC UMANSKY: Well, they didn't -- that's how they responded. As I think I've mentioned earlier, Arafat's offices are just down the block from Shikaki's offices, and as Shikaki described it to me, and according to news accounts, he was planning to hold a press conference for his poll, and as he was preparing to do that, these busloads of -- I don't know what you want to call them - protesters - organized mob - folk - showed up, and they came equipped with their own press release, which by the way, the press release was on a Palestinian Authority letterhead. And they then essentially ransacked the office. Shikaki barricaded himself in one room. And then they went down the street to Yasser Arafat's compound, and Arafat welcomed these folks into his office, and it's not clear whether or not Arafat knew what these people had just done or whether he was just sort of welcoming some visitors into the office.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, Shikaki is by no means alone in feeling unprotected by Palestinian officials. Recently journalists occupied the Palestinian Legislative Building in Gaza City to protest attacks against their colleagues. Why the spate of attacks, and why is the Palestinian Authority not doing more to get to the bottom of them?

ERIC UMANSKY: I think it has a lot to do with essentially a breakdown in law in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, and that, in turn, has a lot to do with when Israel re-occupied much of the territories in March, I believe, of 2002. They basically destroyed most of the Palestinian Authority. And in doing so, as sort of the law of unintended consequences, there's a certain lawlessness that's taken over, there are a lot of sort of mysterious, shadowy gangs going around, some of whom are thought to be connected to members of the security services. You basically have a lot of kind of thuggishness going on, a lot of competition for power that exacerbates the issue.

BOB GARFIELD:There is, nonetheless, an official infrastructure that remains. Is there any evidence that either Chairman Arafat or anyone in his Fatah organization is interested in seeing these attacks on journalists abated?

ERIC UMANSKY: Well, you know, Arafat's people did make some noise about, you know, this is unacceptable and we believe very strongly in press freedoms and so forth. The real question is, are they going to do anything about it, and the, the evidence so far has been no, that they aren't going to do anything about it.

BOB GARFIELD:Your piece mentions a history of some degree of self-censorship in the Palestinian media. Do you think that's going to get more pronounced?

ERIC UMANSKY: Palestinian journalism and society in general, frankly, has historically been more open than most other Arab societies, but there is this degree of self-censorship. Shikaki, for instance, was talking about after his poll came out, he basically said they ignored it, and I mean to the degree, by the way, that he would try to put an ad in one of the papers, and they simply didn't even run it.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Eric, thanks so much.

ERIC UMANSKY: Thanks for having me.

BOB GARFIELD:Eric Umansky writes the "Today's Papers" column for Slate. His article, Why A Mob Attacked the Most Rational Man in the Middle East appeared in the January edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, the rhetorical quirks of candidates, trailblazing movie trailers, and Howard Stern gets stoppered.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.

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