Bloody Pasts and Current Politics: The Political Legacies of Violent Resettlement

Abstract

How does living on property taken from others affect voting behavior? Recent studies have argued that benefiting from historical violence leads to support for the far right. We extend this fledgling literature with new theoretical insights and original data from Israel, using case-specific variation in the nature of displacement to uncover heterogeneous treatment effects. Exploiting the coercion during the settlement of Jewish migrants on rural lands following the 1948 war, we show that living on lands taken from Palestinians consistently led to hawkish right-wing voting—even 70 years after the violence occurred and despite the widespread rejection of guilt over that violence. We also show that exposure to the ruins of the displaced villages increased right-wing voting and that the impact of intergroup contact is divergent: it decreased intolerant voting in most villages but increased it among Jewish communities that reside on violently taken land. Our results are robust when matching is used to account for several controls and spatiotemporal dependencies.