Citation

Saleh B. Eur. J. Soc. Sci. 2009; 7(4): 17-29.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, EuroJournals)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The paper provides evidence that Palestinian economic conditions are related to the level of attacks against Israelis. Also, the paper makes an attempt to analyze attack patterns by the various Palestinian militant groups. Using an original dataset from 1990-2002, the author finds that Palestinian groups that are founded as religious organizations tend to use more suicide attack tactics compared to their secular counterparts. As for the causal link between political violence and deprivation theory, the negative binomial regression shows that Palestinian economic conditions are linked to political violence. Precisely, an increase in the Palestinian income per capita can reduce Palestinian attacks against Israelis. Likewise, the statistical model predicts that a reduction in the unemployment rate would reduce the incentive for Palestinians to participate in political violence. Finally the paper addresses the issue of Palestinian grievances as a source of attacks. The analysis will show that shooting attacks against Israelis will rise with the number of Palestinians killed while suicide attacks are not correlated with the number of Palestinians killed. Israel's violent repression of Palestinians is proved to increase rather than suppress attacks.

Language: en

Keywords

Unemployment; Suicide attacks; Palestinian economic conditions; Poisson regression model; Political violence