Israel, the Palestinian Factions, and the Cycle of Violence (original) (raw)
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Political Economic Perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Defence and Peace Economics, 2020
Political economic perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1. Introduction The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the world’s most protracted contemporary conflict and one which has gained international prominence throughout the years. As a result of the Six Days War in 1967, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under Israeli control. The conflict has evolved through ebbs and flows of violence including two Palestinian uprising against Israeli control (the First and Second Intifada). These have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian and thousands of Israeli victims. While the last decade and a half has seen a relatively lower level of violence, the conflict has affected and continues to affect various aspects of the lives of millions of Palestinians and Israelis. Such effects range from employment and labour market opportunities (Cali and Miaari, 2018; Amodio et al., 2020, Amodio and Di Maio, 2018), academic performance and opportunities (Brück et al., 2019; Shany, 2018), and health outcomes (e.g. Mansour and Rees, 2012). A key feature of this conflict is the system of mobility restrictions, such as checkpoints, imposed by the IDF within the Occupied Palestinian territories. Another feature is the violence inflicted by both Palestinian and the IDF. In spite of the various attempts to broker a peace agreement, the most prominent of which was the Oslo Accords of 1993, the conflict continues to seem intractable. Scholars and policymakers have tried to find possible ways to resolve the conflict. To that end fields such as political sciences, international relations and legal studies have devoted efforts to understand the nature of the conflict, the power balance between the parties and the international legal issues associated to it. In contrast, the economics discipline has been comparatively less active in this area. Economics research on this conflict has primarily focused on the economic and social impacts of the conflict. This special issue of Defence and Peace Economics tries to help fill this gap by bringing together new articles that provide new insights into the nature and the causes of this conflict. It also expands the evidence on the impact of the conflict. The hope is that the novel insights contained in this special issue could help scholars and policy-makers alike to find new angles to contain the harm of the conflict and eventually resolve it. Importantly, The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the subject of a number of papers published in this journal such as (Syare, 2010, Azam and Ferrero, 2019; Miaari, 2020; Ghanem, 2020) 2. Moving the knowledge frontier on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict There is a growing theoretical and empirical literature analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this review, we discuss a selected number of studies that are most closely related to the topics covered by the articles in this special issue. 2.1. The incentives underlying the conflict A key open question underlying the dynamics of the conflict is around the incentives of the parties involved. A better understanding of these incentives could help find ways to change the behavior of the conflict’s parties. In this special issue, Abrahams (2020) and Konyukhovsky and Grigoriadis (2020) help to shed light on these incentives. The framework used by these authors in these articles draws on an established literature in political science that uses the monopolization of power and the concept of a proxy war to understand the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abrahams (2020) applies the concept of the monopoly of violence or the use of physical force - a concept dating back to Hobbes (1651) and Weber (1919) - to explain the current stalemate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The article argues that the conflict consists in fact of two inter-related ones which the Palestinians find themselves entangled in: an external one with the state of Israel, and an internal one with the leadership of the Palestinian national movement. The argument is that the monopoly of violence in each of these conflicts leads to the current impasse whereby Israel can ignore the peace process and renege on political concessions as long as Palestinians lack a credible militant threat. The increased security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel has helped neutralize such threat over the past decade. While it is largely unpopular among Palestinians, this cooperation can be maintained thanks to the PA’s territorial monopoly on violence in the West Bank, which render it unaccountable to its constituents. The article argues that Hamas concomitantly maintains the monopoly of violence in Gaza, which allows it to largely restain the violence from the strip with very limited damages inflicted to Israel. As a result the article argues that reintroducing a credible, latent threat of political-militant competitors to the PA (and to Hamas) would enable the Palestinians to regain bargaining leverage over their own leadership, restore conditionality to their security cooperation with Israel, and put the peace process back on course. Konyukhovsky and Grigoriadis (2019) take a different angle and argue that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be modeled using the framework of a proxy war. Scholars have suggested that proxy wars often replace direct military confrontations in the past decade, as demonstrated by the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War and Afghanistan. Mumford (2013) discusses how proxy wars can be identified and which indicators are the most suitable to categorize types of violence into direct and proxy wars. Sanders (2016) suggests that in the context of wars where social or legal norms are challenged, norm challengers finance networks or localities of agents who contest human rights norms, usually in a transnational context. Biddle (2017) argues that security force assistance, which is often provided by US administrations to allies that have weak state capacity, involves a principal-agent game where the higher the aid commitment on the part of the principal (usually the aiding party), the higher the degree of moral hazard that ensues. Konyukhovsky and Grigoriadis (2019) conceptualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one where the Soviet Union was (until the end of the Cold War) the representative (principal) for Palestine (agent) and the United States was (and continues to be) the representative for Israel. Through this model, the authors demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely to remain irresolvable as long as Palestinians do not have a principal that is willing to provide continuous and positive levels of conflict involvement. The insights of this framework are particularly useful in light of shifting policies adopted by major political players such as the US towards the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Both the concepts of the monopolization of power and a proxy war can help us understand the persistence, intensity, and methods of conflict. Powell (2012) argues that the persistence of violence depends on how quickly power is distributed: the more slowly power is distributed between parties, the shorter conflict lasts for; the more quickly power shifts across parties, the more attractive engagement in conflict becomes. Baik and Kim (1997) and Schoonbeek (2007) argue that when there is moral hazard between the principal and agent, the intensity of conflict is lower with delegation. Wárneryd (2000) suggests that when moral hazard arises, there is a role for delegation in facilitating cooperation that is separate from pre-commitment. Dunning (2011) argues that the distribution of popular support predicts the occurrence and type of armed conflict. It also affects how actors decide to invest in institutional mechanisms, which may resolve commitment problems and facilitate peace. 2.2. The political economy of the conflict Another key aspect of any conflict-resolution process is the political attitudes within the dominant party in the conflict, in this case Israel. The literature has studied these attitudes primarily by focusing on the impact of acts of violence on victims’ and perpetrators’ attitudes towards conflict-resolution strategies. For example Berrebi and Klor (2006 and 2008) find that suicide attacks lead to an increase in support for Israeli right-wing parties as Jewish Israelis become less accommodating with regards to Palestinian demands and support a stricter stance on national security. Gould and Klor (2010) on the other hand find that Israeli Jewish support for concession towards the Palestinian increases in the short term in response to Palestinian suicide attacks. Eventually as the attacks grow in number, they result into increased Jewish Israeli support for harsher policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians. In this special issue, Kapshuk (2020) focuses on more structural determinants of the attitudes vis-à-vis the conflict in the Israeli Jewish society. He argues that the different attitudes across the main Jewish communities (Ashkenazim and Mizrahim) can be traced back largely to the diverging impacts of the global integration and economic liberalization on each community. The main beneficiary group – the primarily Ashkenazi economic elite - pushed for an Israeli retreat from the 1967 occupied territories and supported the Oslo Accords, as peace with the Palestinians would have enabled the normalization of Israeli relations with the rest of the world. The lower socio-economic group in Israel, most of whom was Mizrahim, held the opposite view given the perceived negative impact of global integration through the import of goods and cheap labor and the role of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as a source of cheap housing for this group. 2.3. The impact of the conflict on women Women’s labour market, marital, and fertility choices are important determinants of individual welfare and aggregate national outco...
The Outbreak of “Individual Terrorism” in the Palestinian Arena
Faced with the ongoing reality of stabbings, vehicle attacks, and shootings, many in Israel are demanding that much more be done to deal with the situation. In this context, they repeatedly invoke the old, familiar toolbox that was effective during the second intifada, when Israel faced organized terrorism. However, the current outbreak does not resemble the second intifada. In recent years, Israel has failed to outfit a new toolbox suited to the spirit of the times focused on economic, infrastructural, social, educational, and public relations efforts, to be used also in the new media. The reality of the last few years has suppressed the development of a legitimate local Palestinian leadership that is attentive to the population’s problems, and represents an outlet for dialogue with Israel and a means to rein in violence. Lacking an appropriate solution to a strategic problem, there is a return to the old tool box; some in Israel are pushing to recycle operational plans formulated as a response to a radically different situation. This could well prove to be a bad mistake. The pressure on the political echelon and the security establishment to act is liable to impair the political echelon’s rational considerations, undermine the restrained and responsible reaction taken to date, and lead to it adopt a rationale of action that is unsuited to the current type of terrorism.