Both sides retaliate in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Abstract

Ending violent international conflicts requires understanding the causal factors that perpetuate them. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israelis and Palestinians each tend to see themselves as victims, engaging in violence only in response to attacks initiated by a fundamentally and implacably violent foe bent on their destruction. Econometric techniques allow us to empirically test the degree to which violence on each side occurs in response to aggression by the other side. Prior studies using these methods have argued that Israel reacts strongly to attacks by Palestinians, whereas Palestinian violence is random (i.e., not predicted by prior Israeli attacks). Here we replicate prior findings that Israeli killings of Palestinians increase after Palestinian killings of Israelis, but crucially show further that when nonlethal forms of violence are considered, and when a larger dataset is used, Palestinian violence also reveals a pattern of retaliation: (i) the firing of Palestinian rockets increases sharply after Israelis kill Palestinians, and (ii) the probability (although not the number) of killings of Israelis by Palestinians increases after killings of Palestinians by Israel. These findings suggest that Israeli military actions against Palestinians lead to escalation rather than incapacitation. Further, they refute the view that Palestinians are uncontingently violent, showing instead that a significant proportion of Palestinian violence occurs in response to Israeli behavior. Well-established cognitive biases may lead participants on each side of the conflict to underappreciate the degree to which the other side's violence is retaliatory, and hence to systematically underestimate their own role in perpetuating the conflict.

Point process modelling of the Afghan War Diary

“…μ Q ðsÞ ¼ ϕðsÞ T ϑ; [6] k I ðs; rÞ ¼ ϕðsÞ T Σ I ϕðrÞ; [7] k Q ðs; rÞ ¼ ϕðsÞ T Σ Q ϕðrÞ; [8] where ϕðsÞ ∈ R n is the vector of basis functions, x k ∈ R n and ϑ ∈ R n are weights which reconstruct the spatiotemporal field and the disturbance mean respectively and where Σ I ∈ R n×n and Σ Q ∈ R n×n reconstruct the kernel covariance function and the disturbance covariance function respectively.…”

“…We show that the temporal and spatial dependencies (6,7) as well as diffusion and advection effects (8,9) inherent in conflict data make it suitable for the use of a broad class of models, widely employed in ecology and epidemiology, in order to describe the dynamics of disaggregated data. We then develop tools based on ideas from point process statistics (10) to constrain the models.…”

Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections

“…While Pape (2003) suggests that terrorism, and in particular suicide bombings, are effective against democratic voters who pressure their governments to provide concessions to terrorists, Abrahms (2006Abrahms ( , 2012 questions the overall effectiveness of terrorism as a political strategy. Many papers assert that terrorism and counterterrorism lead to cycles of violence (Haushofer, Biletzki and Kanwisher, 2010;Jaeger and Paserman, 2008). However, others provide evidence that some forms of counterterrorism might be effective in reducing further insurgent violence (Lyall, 2009), or in curbing future terrorist attacks (Benmelech, Berrebi and Klor, 2010a).…”

Motive attribution asymmetry for love vs. hate drives intractable conflict

“…In other words, the perception of conflict intractability may be an independent cause of a stalemate. Here, we identify a fundamental cognitive bias that contributes to the belief in conflict intractability, and may therefore contribute to conflict spirals (4)(5)(6).…”