@article{ref1,
title="Entity-elimination or threat management? Explaining Israel's shifting policies towards terrorist semi-states",
journal="Terrorism and political violence",
year="2020",
author="Honig, Or and Yahel, Ido",
volume="32",
number="5",
pages="901-920",
abstract="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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0954-6553",
doi="10.1080/09546553.2017.1415890",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1415890"
}