The Effect of Domestic and Foreign Pressure on Israeli Decisions To Use Limited Military Force

Abstract

The influence of domestic politics on international relations is a very popular theme in US foreign policy analysis. Numerous studies have demonstrated that presidents sometimes tried to improve their public ratings by adopting populist militant foreign policies. The question is whether such behavior is characteristic of democracies in general, or limited to the United States. While there is no reason to assume that in other democracies, or even non-democratic regimes, aggressive actions against a foreign threat willlikewise receive popular support, other states that lack superpower capabilities do not have as much freedom of action as the United States. Smaller states must be more cautious in their behavior, since they are more susceptible to foreign pressure than the United States. This argument is illustrated by analyzing patterns of Israeli limited military actions against its neighbors between 1950 and 1982, which reveals that despite popular demands within the Israeli parliament to pursue more militant policies, the government tended to restrain its actions when faced with foreign pressure from the United States, Great Britain, and the United Nations Security Council.

The “Rally ’round the Flag” Effect in Territorial Disputes: Experimental Evidence From Japan–china Relations

“…More specifically, social psychological studies have demonstrated that the key mediator of the rally effect is anger, and that public support for the leader will be enhanced if they are provoked regardless of their partisanship and ideology. The rally effect has also been a focal point for the study of nationalistic responses to external threats in international relations, ranging from economic sanctions to interstate conflict (Allen 2008;Drezner 1999Drezner , 2001Galtung 1967;Gibler 2010;Kuperman 2003;Lai and Reiter 2005;Marinov 2005;Mastanduno 1999).…”

Strategies of Asymmetric Warfare and Their Implementation in the South Lebanese Conflict

“…In order to overcome these problems, Kuperman (2001b, 2003) adopted a multidimensional event history approach. This method, which is a derivation of a discrete‐time event history analysis (Allison 1982), is simply a logistic regression analysis predicting the probability of an event on a particular day as a function of various types of previous events and the amount of time that passes from each event type.…”

“…Although this could be resolved by measuring the association between the number of military initiatives and a temporal lag in time of the independent variables (Sprecher and DeRouen 2002), immediate responses within time periods that are shorter than the standard time units are excluded. This is especially relevant in the case of Israeli military initiatives, as there has always been a tendency to respond to Arab attacks as quickly as possible, within days or hours (Goldstein et al 2001; Kuperman 2001b, 2003:14–15).…”

“…Despite Israel's apparent success in deterring the Palestinians and possibly even the armies of Israel's Arab neighbors, these reprisal attacks have also been very costly for Israel. According to Sprecher and DeRouen (2002), whenever Israel increased the intensity of its attacks against its neighbors the probability of political protests in Israel increased, while according to Kuperman (2003) severe reprisals also provoked foreign pressure. If the attacks against Israel did not decrease, then the Israeli government was usually willing to bear the domestic and foreign costs associated with its more belligerent policies.…”