Abstract
ABSTRACTAfter 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.
Highlights
A popular claim about transnational terrorism1 directed against the United States, especially with respect to the 9/11 attacks, is that it is rooted in U.S support for the state of Israel
We find no evidence that more military-financial or diplomatic support by the United States for Israel – regardless of how this support is operationalized – translates into more anti-American terrorism at the system-level
We can transform the regression coefficient associated with military assistance in model (1) of Table 2 into an incidencerate ratio (IRR) of IRR = 0.998, implying that a one-percent increase in U.S military aid to Israel results in a reduction in the global count of anti-American terrorist attacks by only 0.2 percent
Summary
A popular claim about transnational terrorism directed against the United States, especially with respect to the 9/11 attacks, is that it is rooted in U.S support for the state of Israel. As discussed in LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw (2009), there was more anti-American terrorist activity during the Cold War era (1970–1990) when the United States were prominently attacked by leftwing terrorist groups hailing from Latin America (e.g. the Peruvian Shining Path) and Western Europe (e.g. the Italian Red Brigades) Many of these groups lost popular and external support after the end of the Cold War, explaining the relative decline in anti-American terrorism after 1990. Terror refers to the global number of anti-American terrorist incidents in a given year t, while support refers to the q-th indicator of U.S support for Israel (share of U.S military aid to Israel or diplomatic patronage at the UNGA). Time-Series Data Anti-American Terrorism U.S Military Aid to Israel (%) U.S Diplomatic Patronage of Israel U.S Dominance Power Balance Cold War U.S Involvement in International Crises Republican President U.S Military Aid to Israel (logged) U.S UNGA Voting with Israel. We expect a greater involvement in crises to predict anti-American terrorism, e.g. as anti-American terrorism is used by crisis actors hostile to the United States
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