Threat Perceptions and Feelings as Predictors of Jewish-Israeli Support for Compromise with Palestinians
| Author | Ifat Maoz,Clark Mccauley |
| Published date | 01 July 2009 |
| Date | 01 July 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343309334613 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
525
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vol. 46, no. 4, 2009, pp. 525 –539
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343309334613
Threat Perceptions and Feelings as Predictors
of Jewish-Israeli Support for Compromise
with Palestinians*
IFAT MAOZ
Department of Communication, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
CLARK MCCAULEY
Department of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College
A representative sample of Israeli Jews (N = 504) completed a survey assessing attitudes towards
compromise in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Support for compromise was well predicted (R = .63)
by a combination of four scales: perception of collective threat from Palestinians, perception of zero-
sum relations between Palestinians and Israelis, personal fear of Palestinians, and sympathy towards
Palestinians. Feelings of hostility towards Palestinians did not make an independent contribution to this
prediction. As hypothesized, respondents who perceived high collective threat and zero-sum relations
were much less supportive of making concessions to Palestinians. However, respondents who indicated
feeling personal fear were in regression analysis slightly more supportive of compromise. Sympathy
toward Palestinians was associated with more support for compromise. Additionally, religiosity was
strongly associated with decreased support for compromise. However, entering threat perceptions and
sympathy into the equation substantially reduced the predictive value of religiosity, indicating that
psychological mechanisms underlie, at least in part, the tendency of more religious respondents to show
less support for making concessions to Palestinians.
Israeli–Palestinian conflict that has continued
for over a century with alternations between
periods of extreme violence and periods of
relative peace (Kelman, 1999). Though many
believe that compromise, and specifically a
two-state compromise, may be a reasonable
way to resolve this longstanding conflict and
attain stable peace, significant factions of the
public on each side object to compromise and
no agreement has been reached.
Students of government policymaking
recognize public opinion as a significant
factor constraining policy choices. Par-
ticularly in democratic states, attitudes
and beliefs of citizens are described as an
Introduction
The post-Cold War world has seen an escala-
tion and expansion of protracted violent ethno -
political conflicts in different areas of the
world. Here we focus on one such conflict, the
* This research was supported by the United States
Department of Homeland Security through the National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses
to Terrorism (START), grant number N00140510629.
However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or rec-
ommendations in this document are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect views of the US Department
of Homeland Security. Please address correspondence
regarding this article to Ifat Maoz, msifat@mscc.huji.ac.il.
The dataset, including coding categories and the ‘to do’
file for the empirical analysis in this article, can be found at
http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets.
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