‘Pay for It Heavily’: Does U.S. Support for Israel Lead to Anti-American Terrorism?

Daniel Meierrieks and Thomas Gries

Defence and Peace Economics, 2020, vol. 31, issue 2, 160-176

Abstract: After the 9/11 attacks in particular, there has been a controversial discussion in the academic and public arena on whether the United States’ close relationship with Israel has made it a likelier target of transnational terrorism. Indeed, foreign terrorist organizations with various ideological profiles have repeatedly justified attacks against U.S. interests as punishment for the (purported) special relationship between the United States and Israel. We analyze the effect of various measures of U.S. support for Israel (e.g. U.S. military assistance to Israel) on anti-American terrorism for the period 1970–2014. Using both time-series and panel approaches, we do not find that more U.S. support for Israel systematically translates into more anti-American terrorism. Rather, other systemic (e.g. U.S. dominance in the international system) and local conditions (e.g. local state failure) are found to predict the patterns of anti-American terrorism. However, as a qualification to these general findings, we also provide some (preliminary) evidence that for terrorism originating from the Middle East and Northern Africa a favorable U.S. policy stance towards Israel may indeed contribute to more anti-American terrorism.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2018.1560558 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:defpea:v:31:y:2020:i:2:p:160-176

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GDPE20

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2018.1560558

Access Statistics for this article

Defence and Peace Economics is currently edited by Professor Keith Hartley

More articles in Defence and Peace Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().