The strategic calculus of terrorism: Substitution and competition in the Israel—Palestine conflict

Previous work on the dynamics of conflicts where we see terrorism has tended to focus on whether we see shifts in attack mode following government countermeasures. We contend that many factors other than counterinsurgency can influence whether groups resort to terrorism, including competition between groups, as well as their relationship to public opinion and other political events. Hence, understanding terrorist tactics in prolonged conflicts with multiple actors requires us to consider a more general framework of innovation, imitation, competition and dependence between actors. We use disaggregated data on terrorist attacks, counterterrorism and public opinion in the Israel—Palestine conflict to jointly evaluate predictions derived from several conventional theories of strategic behaviour. We find that the strategic calculus of Palestinian groups is complex and cannot be treated as time invariant. Our results suggest that factors such as the degree of public support, inter-group competition, the anticipation of countermeasures and non-trivial non-violent payoffs have an observable effect on the strategic behaviour of the Palestinian groups, and that structural relationships are often far from constant over time. </jats:p

Economic aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the collapse of the Oslo Accord

Since October 2000 Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have become entangled in a bloody confrontation. This paper focuses on the economic relationship between the Israeli economy and the Palestinian economy of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the ways in which this has contributed to the collapse of the Oslo Accord. The paper finds that Israeli policies have distorted and weakened the Palestinian economy, particularly in the areas of trade (dependence upon one major trade partner), taxation (loss of revenues to finance development spending) as well as in the labour market (controls on labour flows) and in Palestinian access to land (including land confiscation). As a result, besides income compression, poverty and unemployment have risen in the Palestinian territories. Two central issues of the conflict need to be addressed: the Palestinian right to sovereignty over their land and their right to free their economy from colonial dependency on Israel. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.