Abstract
International territorial conflicts are frequently characterized by political recourse to narratives of nationalist entitlement, stifling conflict resolution by raising domestic audience costs and discursively limiting bargaining flexibility. Conflict incentivizes elite employment of such claims precisely because security threats and fear of violence heighten popular resonance of adversarial collective identity frames. This article argues, however, that consensus mobilization behind nationalist territorial claims is highly dependent upon the particular narratives elites select to justify them. Employing controlled individual-level experiments administered to diverse populations in Israel, it demonstrates how exposure to competing narratives of homeland, security, economic prosperity, and settlement impacts support for control of East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. Although indivisible claims to ‘United Jerusalem’, the Golan, and West Bank settlement blocs and strategic highlands are generally considered popular consensus issues in Israel, only particular narratives trigger consensus mobilization behind each. Some narratives even encourage conciliatory policy attitudes against such appeals. As a democracy embroiled in multiple enduring territorial disputes, analysis of the Israeli case contributes to understanding of the limits and political consequences of elite rhetoric. Demonstrating the affinity between narrative frames and popular policy preferences, this article also lends insight into the intersubjective beliefs that drive mass support for nationalist territorial claims.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 492-507 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Journal of Peace Research |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 16 Jul 2015 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.
Funding
The Stata dataset, codebook, and do-files for empirical analysis in this article, along with the online appendix, can be found at http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets . Funding Funding was received from Northwestern University, Grant/Award Number: Dispute Resolution Research Center Grant, Kellogg School of Management. 1 Indivisibility here is understood as a discursive claim, circumventing disciplinary debates over whether the condition of territorial indivisibility is instrumentally or socially structured or the contingent outcome of failed bargaining processes. See Goddard (2010 : 7–17). 2 ‘Peace Index’ polling in June 2011 and December 2012 indicates that 70.2%, 58.1%, and 85.4% of Jewish Israelis oppose full withdrawals from the West Bank, Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, respectively, even under comprehensive peace treaties and 45.1% oppose partition of the West Bank excluding major settlement blocs ( Hermann & Ya’ar, 2014 ). 3 It is often counseled that parametric non-linear models are more appropriate when measuring ordinal dependent variables. Angrist & Pischke, however, demonstrate that simple regression methods frequently provide more robust estimators of causal effects where maximum-likelihood methods are traditionally employed. Coupled with the practical reality that regression coefficients are relatively simple to calculate and interpret, they advise, ‘[T]he added complexity and extra work required to interpret the results from latent-index models [such as Probit, Logit, and Tobit] may not be worth the trouble’ ( Angrist & Pischke, 2009 : 197).
Keywords
- Golan Heights
- Israel
- Jerusalem
- West Bank
- framing
- indivisibility
- narrative
- territory
