For the past twenty-five years, the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki has been his own best evidence for the promise of civil society in a Palestinian state. In 1993, he founded the nonprofit Center for Palestine Research and Studies, in Nablus—which, in 2000, became the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research—with funding mainly from the Ford Foundation and the European Union. As if Western democratic norms could be willed into being, he began polling public opinion on the new Palestinian Authority, which was created as a consequence of the Oslo Accords, and advocating for policies based on his findings. There were polls on the popularity of Palestinian parties and factions, on the P.A.’s performance, on American mediation, and on interim agreements. The findings were often implicitly critical of P.A. leadership, especially in recent years, as President Mahmoud Abbas, now eighty-two, has been thwarted by Israeli diplomacy and has come to be viewed as increasingly authoritarian. In 2015, a poll revealed that eighty per cent of Palestinians considered the P.A. corrupt; last year, another found that seventy per cent thought that Abbas should resign. Still, the fact that Shikaki could publish such results with apparent impunity seemed to offer reassurance that the P.A. was not despotic.

Nor, according to Shikaki’s polling, has the P.A.’s investment in the two-state track been futile, though you have to penetrate the numbers to see why. Since 2000, Shikaki has conducted joint polls with Israeli researchers that show that both sides have, over time, lost enthusiasm for a two-state solution, not because their majorities rejected the necessary compromises, in principle, but because they stopped believing in the good faith of the other side. Shikaki’s most recent poll, conducted last December, with Dahlia Scheindlin, a researcher affiliated with Tel Aviv University, found that less than half of Israelis and Palestinians now support two states, with the former growing more reconciled to annexation and the latter to armed struggle. Yet the research also found that mere symbols of of good faith can be unexpectedly decisive. “If Israelis would recognize the Naqba”—the “disaster,” when seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians went into exile as a result of the 1948 war—and “Palestinians would make clear that, with peace, Israelis could visit the Temple Mount—the Haram al-Sharif—then almost half of the Israeli Jews opposed to two states, and about forty per cent of the Palestinians, would change their minds,” Shikaki told me.

Making peace with such numbers can be risky. In 2003, during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Shikaki was attacked and the P.C.P.S.R. offices in Ramallah were ransacked by a mob after the center published findings, based on more than four thousand interviews, showing that only ten per cent of Palestinian refugees would choose to live in Israel, over other forms of compensation, if they were offered the “right of return.” The attackers thought that Shikaki was being cavalier about the right of return. He was really trying to reassure both sides that, precious as the right is to Palestinians, actualizing it would not mean the end of Israel; that, on both sides, a majority constituency for a two-state solution remained to be tapped. (The prospect of confederal relations produces a similar shift in opinion.) “The numbers prove the importance of incentives,” Shikaki said.

Nevertheless, after two decades of tolerating Shikaki’s work—and even, at times, consulting with him—Abbas and his inner circle seem to have had enough. In 2015, the P.A. issued regulations requiring that all Palestinian N.G.O.s, including the P.C.P.S.R., registered as nonprofit companies, report their intended activities and funding to the Cabinet and specifically ask its prior approval to receive funds transferred to Palestinian banks from both local and foreign sources. The P.C.P.S.R. did not initially comply with the regulations, and they were not widely enforced until late 2016, after an armed, underground cell clashed with P.A. police in the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus. “This left me in the impossible position of having to petition the leaders of the hundred or so members of Abbas’s élite—the very people whose popularity I am trying to research and whose actions I often criticize—for funds to maintain my center and research what ordinary people think about them,” Shikaki said. Meanwhile, in an even more brazen move against the judiciary, Abbas replaced the Chief Justice, without consulting the independent judges of the Supreme Judicial Council, and created a so-called Constitutional Court, which is almost certain to reject any of appeals of the regulation.

Since then, Shikaki has been quietly petitioning ministers, hoping that counter-pressure from within the P.A. might persuade the government to reverse the policy, but to no avail. It now seems that he has few avenues of support other than from the international journalists, diplomats, and policy experts (he has been a fellow at Brandeis University and the Brookings Institution) who have relied on his work. (I have known Shikaki since the P.C.P.S.R.’s founding, and have often cited his reports; he was interviewed for a New Yorker podcast a year ago.)

Shikaki’s place in that community was hard earned. He was born in 1953, in Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp, the son of farmers from a village near Rehovot, by then destroyed. He moved to Jerusalem in 1968, and enrolled at Bir Zeit University, in the West Bank, in 1971. He continued his studies at American University, in Beirut, staying in that city through the civil war, and earned a master's degree, in 1977. He first learned the value of survey methods in Kuwait, where he got a job in the marketing department of General Motors. In 1985, Shikaki earned a Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University, in New York, where he also received a Middle East Institute certificate and became a visiting scholar. His older brother Fathi, meanwhile, had taken a very different course, which shadowed Shikaki’s career. Fathi earned a medical degree in Egypt, where he fell in with the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1981, still in Egypt, he founded Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to fight the Occupation and impose a pietistic theocracy.

In 1991, when the younger Shikaki was teaching at the University of South Florida, he petitioned to return to the West Bank, but the Likud was still in power, and mere association with his brother precluded it. After the 1992 Madrid peace conference, however, Shikaki became engaged in second-track negotiations with Israel, and journalists—the late Anthony Lewis, of the Times, among them—and members of Congress from Florida who knew him began a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. The Israeli government finally relented, and he moved to the West Bank to teach and to set up his center. Another blow awaited him, however. In January of 1995, Islamic Jihad’s most horrific suicide bombing killed twenty-one soldiers and a civilian in Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly ordered the Mossad to assassinate Fathi; it did, in Malta, that October. “I cannot win a popularity contest,” Shikaki told me. “When it suited their purposes, Likud people linked me to Fathi, while some Palestinian activists hate me for working with the Israelis.”

Shikaki knows that, by coming out against the P.A.’s high-handedness, he is playing into the hands of the Netanyahu government, which has demeaned Abbas as an impossible negotiating partner. At the same time, Netanyahu’s settlement program, military curfews, and stonewalling on Jerusalem long ago pushed the Palestinian President into a corner. Shikaki also knows that the new P.A. regulations are “a barometer of Abbas’s evolving authoritarianism.” That shift is understandable, Shikaki said, but “understandable does not mean justified.”

“Abbas certainly had a crisis on his hands in 2007”—when Hamas threw Fatah leaders out of Gaza—“and moved with police power to destroy Hamas’s capacity to act in the West Bank.” Shikaki said. “This proved relatively easy: everyone could see that Hamas had wrongly resorted to violence and killed about four hundred Palestinians.” The problem, he added, was that Abbas also “suspended accountability from the political system, preventing the convening of the Palestinian Parliament.” Hamas held a majority there, but could enact nothing without a Presidential signature. Without the Parliament, “oversight became impossible.”