Politics of God or Politics of Man? The Role of Religion and Deprivation in Predicting Support for Political Violence in Israel

Abstract

This study examines the associations between religious affiliation and religiosity and support for political violence through a nationwide sample of Israeli Jews and Muslims. Based on structural equation modeling, the findings show that by and large Muslims are more supportive of political violence than Jews and more religious persons are less supportive of political violence. Deprivation, however, was found to mediate these relations, showing that the more deprived -whether Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious persons -are more supportive of political violence. The explanatory strength of religion and deprivation combined in this manner was found to be stronger than any of these variables on their own. The findings cast doubt on negative stereotypes both of Islam and of religiosity as promoting political violence. They suggest that governments which want peace at home, in Israel as elsewhere, would do well to ensure that ethnic and religious differences are not translated into, and compounded by, wide socio-economic gaps.For many years scholars have been searching for explanations of political violence. The abundant factors examined to date range from biological to psychological, cultural, social and political issues. Favored explanations have varied in accordance with both research findings and social and political trends. Still, the view that religion leads to political violence resurfaced in the 1980s, and gained prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s. This claim has been tendered with respect to several different, though related and non-exclusive, forms of political violence: localized violence driven by religious-based intolerance (Beatty and Walter, 1984; The view that religion is a major source of political violence is underpinned by the many historical occasions on which political violence was explicitly carried out in the name of religion or religious values, from the Muslim conquests and Christian Crusades in the Middle Ages; the Spanish Inquisition and Europe's many religious wars from the Renaissance to the seventeenth century; to the more recent sectarian conflicts in Ireland and the Indian sub-continent and international terrorism explicitly carried out in the name of Islam.

Who supports secession? The determinants of secessionist attitudes among Turkey's Kurds

“…As for the religiosity approach, our findings differ from Hayes and McAllister (), who find that church attendance tends to depress support for paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland. Our results also contrasts with those of Zaidise et al (), who draw attention to the similar depressing impact of religiosity in the case of Israel. This result implies that promoting religious ideas such as the ‘Islamic brotherhood' and ‘Muslim unity' among Kurds as an antidote to Kurdish ethnonationalism or secessionism is not really a realistic strategy (see also Gurses ; Sarigil and Fazlioglu , ).…”

Much ado about religion

“…Although mediation can be estimated with the use of OLS regression models, cases with multiple mediators and/or latent variables are often better handled by SEM (Iacobucci, Saldanha & Deng, 2007). SEM have been successfully employed by political scientists studying a diverse range of phenomena, including (but not limited to): political violence (Zaidise, Canetti-Nisim & Pedahzur, 2007), religion and democratic values (Canetti-Nisim, 2004); tolerance (Marquart-Pyatt & Paxton, 2007), political attitudes and voting behavior (Halperin, Canetti-Nisim & Pedahzur, 2007; Mughan & Paxton, 2006; Paxton & Mughan, 2006; Paxton & Kunovich, 2003), social capital (Brehm & Rahn, 1997), and political participation and efficacy (Finkel, 1985). …”

Islamic Radicalisation among North Africans in Britain

“…Deprivation, whether economic, social or in terms of perceptions of alienation and exclusion has also been proposed as a cause for Islamic political violence (Gurr 1970, 13; Zadise et al. 2007, 503).…”