RT Article
T1 Entity-elimination or threat management?: Explaining Israel’s shifting policies towards terrorist semi-states
JF Terrorism and political violence
VO 32
IS 5
SP 901
OP 920
A1 Honig, Or Arthur
A2 Yahel, Ido
LA English
YR 2020
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/183180221X
AB Israel’s policy towards both terrorist semi-states (TSS)—Fatahland and Hamas-controlled Gaza—shows a puzzling variation over time between threat-management (i.e., deterrence and/or brute force capacity-reduction) and entity-elimination. We hold that a military-based cost-benefit analysis cannot fully account for this variation. This explanation predicts that Israel would avoid the costly and risky TSS-elimination as long as Israel can effectively manage the military danger through the much cheaper deterrence/periodical capacity reduction or when there is a high risk of not getting a much better option partly due to the danger of creating a power-vacuum into which other terrorists may reenter. Yet, some Israeli Prime Ministers pursued TSS-elimination notwithstanding the vacuum consideration and deterrence working. By adding a non-military variable—the extent to which Israel’s policy-makers believe that the TSS harms their ideologically-preferred foreign policy goals—we can better reconstruct changes in threat perception and hence better explain policy variation. The TSSs became an intolerable danger only when non-military threats were involved. Israel was willing to tolerate TSSs when the Prime Minister believed they did not pose a political/ideological threat but sought to eliminate them when he thought they did, if there seemed to be a feasible alternative.
NO Gesehen am 23.01.2023
NO Published online: 05 Feb 2018
K1 Counterterrorism
K1 threat perception
K1 Hamas
K1 Isreal
K1 PLO
DO 10.1080/09546553.2017.1415890