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Rally Effect During Operation Protective Edge

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The ground operation sent citizens into a frenzy: the rally around the flag
effect during operation protective edge
Article in Global Security Health Science and Policy · January 2021
DOI: 10.1080/23779497.2021.1872402
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The ground operation sent citizens into a frenzy:
the rally around the flag effect during operation
protective edge
Shingo Hamanaka
To cite this article: Shingo Hamanaka (2020) The ground operation sent citizens into a frenzy: the
rally around the flag effect during operation protective edge, Global Security: Health, Science and
Policy, 5:1, 142-152, DOI: 10.1080/23779497.2021.1872402
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23779497.2021.1872402
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GLOBAL SECURITY: HEALTH, SCIENCE AND POLICY
2020, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 142–152
https://doi.org/10.1080/23779497.2021.1872402
The ground operation sent citizens into a frenzy: the rally around the flag effect
during operation protective edge
Shingo Hamanaka
Department of Law, Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
This study examines the rally round the flag effect during Operation Protective Edge, a war
between Israel and Palestinians. Research has demonstrated the mechanisms by which military
crises escalate, and the public perceives the threat, which in turn leads to support for government
leadership. Forming the basis of this theory is Social Identity Theory; however, in the context of
international relations, there seems to be little research that examines the mechanism from which
Social Identity Theory causes the rally to affect the minority group. This is probably because, in
inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts, there have been few opportunities to access research infor­
mation on situations where there is a part of a hostile nation or ethnic group within one state.
Public opinion polls were conducted repeatedly during Operation Protective Edge, and Arab
Israelis were included in the target population for this poll. Subsequently, the mechanisms that
determined the attitudes of Arab Israelis during this Israeli-Palestinian military conflict can be
determined. This study adjusted for covariates by using an Interrupted Time-Series analysis to infer
causality of the ground war rush on the rally effect.
Received 5 August 2020
Accepted 3 January 2021
Introduction
Coverage of the start of a battle or the outbreak of war
often inflames and inspires people to support their
government more strongly. This phenomenon, referred
to as the rally around the flag effect or rally effect, begs
the question of why the majority of a country’s citizens
support a government’s ‘seemingly irrational’ decisions
to start wars. Research on the effects of rallying around
the flag has accumulated primarily in the United States,
but in recent years, research from the United Kingdom,
(Feinstein, 2018; Lai & Reiter, 2005) Israel, (Hamanaka,
2018) and Japan (Kobayashi & Katagiri, 2018) has
emerged. This is unsurprising, as the rally around the
flag effect is not a phenomenon unique to the United
States – a country that occupies a unique position in
contemporary international politics – but is a universal
phenomenon.
This study examines the effects of the rally around
the flag during Operation Protective Edge – the war
between Israeli and Palestinian armed groups that lasted
for 50 days from July 8 to 26 August 2014. Since the
complete withdrawal of IDF forces from the Gaza Strip
(2005), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has often intensi­
fied, leading to large-scale conflicts such as Operation
Summer Rain (2006), Operation Cast Lead (2008–09),
and Operation Pillar of Defence (2012).
CONTACT Shingo Hamanaka
KEYWORDS
Arab-Israeli conflict; rally
effect; social identity theory;
interrupted time-series
analysis
Operation Protective Edge caused more deaths than
Operation Cast Lead, which was said to be the worst
conflict on the Palestinian side (AFP BB News, 2014).
According to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry
in the Gaza Strip, 2,145 Palestinians were killed during
Operation Protective Edge, including 578 children, 263
women, and 102 older people. The number of injured
people has reportedly exceeded 11,100, nearly a third of
whom are children. (International Middle East Media
Center, 2019) Conversely, on the Israeli side, 66 IDF
soldiers were killed (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
2019), and only six civilians were killed by rockets and
shells fired by Palestinian militants (United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA), 2015). Subsequently, this war has been
labelled as extremely asymmetric from looking at the
death toll on both sides (Dekel, 2014).
Additionally, public opinion polls have been con­
ducted repeatedly during this border defence operation.
Conveniently for this study, the poll included questions
that would be useful in the study of the rally around the
flag effect. In addition, some Arabs with Israeli citizen­
ship were also the subjects of the opinion poll. This was
the motivation for this study, as the data are effective for
identifying the conditions necessary for the activation of
the rally effect.
oshiro@law.ryukoku.ac.jp
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which
permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
GLOBAL SECURITY: HEALTH, SCIENCE AND POLICY
Subsequently, the primary research question for
this study was what attitudes do Arab Israelis,
a minority in Israeli society, form towards the war­
time government of Israel and their Arab Israeli
community? This study does not deal with the nor­
mal rally effect but with an ‘inverse rally effect’ in
which Israeli-Arabs identify more with the
Palestinian society or are hostile to the government
of Israel. As discussed below, in the context of Israeli
politics, Arabs are more likely to be seen by Jews as
an ‘enemy group.’ In this context, through the
research question above, this study focused on how
the collective psychology of minorities behave
towardsthe government and their community in
a hostile situation involving the majority against the
minority.
To elucidate this question, the discussion will pro­
ceed in the following order. First, the following section
examines social identity theory, which is the foundation
theory of the rally effect, to derive a working hypothesis.
Section 3 introduces the dataset used in the analysis and
discusses the research design necessary for causal infer­
ence. Section 4 presents the analysis results, and, finally,
we discuss the implications of the estimated causal
effects.
Theory
Many international relations researchers have charac­
terised Mueller’s research (Mueller, 1971, 1973) as
a landmark in empirical studies of the public opinion
on war (Baum & Groeling, 2010; Berinsky, 2009;
Berinsky & Druckman, 2007; Brody, 1991; Gartner &
Segura, 1998; Gelpi et al., 2006, 2009). Mueller argued
that every conflict would lead to the increasing popu­
larity of leaders and a rallying around the flag effect,
85
proclaiming that wartime governments enjoy majority
public support at the start of wars. However, Baker and
O’Neal rejected a condition of the theory and argued
that all military crises do not always lead to the rally
effect (Baker & Oneal, 2016). According to a Haaretz
poll conducted on 9 July 2014, shortly after the begin­
ning of the Operation Protective Edge war, Prime
Minister Netanyahu’s approval rating was only 40%,
down four points from his approval rating a week earlier
(see Figure 1).
Much of the literature supports the mechanism by
which military crises escalate, and the public perceives
the threat, which, in turn, leads to public support of
government leaders. Theories in which threat percep­
tions are linked to leader support include Nation-State
chauvinism and Patriotism Perspective (Feinstein,
2018). According to studies by Lambert, who elucidates
the causal mechanism of the rally from the standpoint of
social psychology, social identity theory (SIT) forms the
basis of the rally effect (Lambert et al., 2010, 2011). SIT
is based on a minimal group experiment conducted by
Tajfel and Turner (Henry. & Turner, 1986). Even if
a group is artificially created in an experiment, people
assigned to the group demonstrate ‘in-group favoritism’
by offering favours to the group members. This beha­
viour is known to be highly reproducible, and the man­
ifestation of nationalism and chauvinistic behaviour is
believed to be based on ‘in-group favoritism.’ As the
rally round the flag effect is also a manifestation of this,
it is assumed to be based on SIT (Groeling & Baum,
2008).1
In the context of international relations, few previous
studies have examined the causal mechanism underly­
ing the SIT and the rally round the flag effect. This is
likely because, for inter-state and inter-ethnic conflicts,
there have been few opportunities to access information
82
80
74
73
75
70
65
62
60
63
57
55
50
50
44
45
40
40
7'03
7'09
Figure 1. Support rates of PM Netanyahu (%).
Source:Polls conducted by Israeli Media.
7'17
7'20
143
7'24
7'31
8'03
8'05
8'27
144
S. HAMANAKA
on situations involving part of a hostile state or ethnic
group within one state or ethnic group, that is, hostile
subgroups within a society. The presence of a perceived
hostile subgroup in society, such as Japanese Americans
living in the United States during World War II or Iraqis
living in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, is not uncom­
mon. However, there seems to be little empirical
research on whether, in the context of a national secur­
ity emergency such as war, enemy subgroups identify
with the nation in which they reside, or with enemy
countries and enemy groups that share their language
and culture.
As mentioned above, studies on the rally effect are
not limited to the United States, and there have been
several studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as
a case study (Canetti et al., 2017, 2018; Gvirsman et al.,
2016; Halperin et al., 2013; Hamanaka, 2018; Zipris
et al., 2019). However, most of these studies were
based on laboratory surveys or survey experiments and
did not include analysed polling data conducted during
the ongoing war. The primary interest of these prior
studies is also the long-term effects of the rally round the
flag effect, such as whether the experience of conflict
perpetuates support for war and the military.
Among the previous research, Feinstein is an outlier
as he uses experimental data conducted during an
ongoing war. Similar to our study, his study uses
Operation Protective Edge as a case study to elucidate
the causal mechanisms by which Jewish citizens, faced
with security threats, are attracted to a collective iden­
tity, and how these heightened identities stimulate ingroup bias, which leads to patriotism. In other words,
Feinstein’s study is also distinctive and epochal in that it
directly examines the effects of SIT. By contrast, our
study differs as it uses data from Arab citizens as well
as Jewish citizens and examines what perceptions both
Jewish and Arab citizens have of each other. In other
words, do Jewish citizens see Arab citizens, who are also
citizens of Israel, as an in-group, or do they see them as
an out-group that secretly communicates with the
enemy? Or do they come to see them as a definite outgroup under the stimulus of war? Do Arab citizens
consider Israeli Jews to be an in-group or an outgroup? Subsequently, the additional originality of this
study is the analysis of these causal relationships.
Past opinion polls have demonstrated that Arab citi­
zens in Israel identified as Arab or Palestinian, and not
as Israelis; the surveys conducted in 2000 by Eliezer
Ben-Rafael and Yochanan Peres revealed that about
half of Arab respondents answered that their collective
identity was Arab, and almost a quarter of them said
their collective identity was Palestinian. Only slightly
more than a quarter answered that they were Israeli
citizens (Ben-Rafael & Peres, 2005, p. 170). The 2010
Brookings poll for Arab Israelis indicated 44% of
respondents identified as Palestinian compared to 33%
who said they were Israeli citizens (Radai et al., 2015).
Rafael Israeli, a researcher at Hebrew University, cited
the Institute for the Study of Peace survey results and
reported the level of Israeli Arab identification with
the second intifada skyrocketed (Israeli, 2008, p. 79).
When witnessing the Israeli-Palestinian military con­
flict, people evaluate political leaders through political
parties.2 Prior research has demonstrated that Jewish
Israelis support the Israeli government for carrying out
war. In response, we can theoretically expect Arab
Israelis to react in the following ways. If the identity of
Arab Israelis is determined by their citizenship, they will
be likely to support the Israeli government during the
war. However, if the identity of Arab Israelis is deter­
mined by their own ethnicity, they will not be likely to
support the government leading the war. Therefore, the
operational hypotheses to be examined in this study are
as follows:
H1a: Arab Israelis hold Israeli governments that carry
out war in the same high regard as Jewish Israelis
(Citizenship Identity Hypothesis).
H1b: Arab Israelis, unlike Jewish Israelis, have a low
opinion of Israeli governments that carry out war
(Ethnic Identity Hypothesis).
The logic of H1a is that even though a citizen is of
Arab origin, if they have Israeli citizenship, they will
identify with Israeli society and support the government
against the threat of war. This is a simple hypothesis that
links threat perception and the rally round the flag effect
(Hamanaka, 2019a).3 The logic of H1b, however, is that
if a citizen is Arab in origin, then their ethnic identity is
linked to the Palestinian community, even if they have
Israeli citizenship. Subsequently, they will not support
the governments against the threat of war. In this
hypothesis, the SIT links Arab Israelis and Palestinian
society in the occupied territories as a unitary group,
and the Israeli government is regarded as the comman­
der of the out-group by Arab Israelis.
Assuming that Israeli society is made up of commu­
nities divided into Jewish and Arab communities, in the
event of war, individuals may highly value the behaviour
of individuals belonging to communities that they view
as in-groups, while those belonging to communities that
they view as out-groups may lowly value the behaviour
of individuals belonging to communities that they view
as out-groups. In other words, this involves the psycho­
logical dynamics of empathy and cohesion for the inner
GLOBAL SECURITY: HEALTH, SCIENCE AND POLICY
group and dislike and alienation for the outer group. In
the form of a hypothesis, it would be as follows:
H2a: During war, Jewish Israelis evaluate the Jewish
population highly and the Arab population lowly
(Ethnic Identity Hypothesis).
H2b: During war, Arab Israelis hold Arabs in high
regard and Jews in low regard (Ethnic Identity
Hypothesis).
Although H2a and H2b have an inverted structure
of subject and object, it is not necessarily self-evident
that majority and minority ethnic groups react in the
same manner. Just because an individual belonging
to the majority in a society can express a critical
attitude towards the minority community, this does
not mean that an individual belonging to the minor­
ity can criticise the majority community. This is
where asymmetries or power dynamics between
communities may emerge.
Figure 1 illustrates the changes in the Prime
Minister’s approval rating from July 3 to
27 August 2014; Operation Protective Edge was
issued on July 8, but as mentioned earlier, the
approval rating on July 9 was 40%, slightly lower
than the previous week (44%). It was not until the
early hours of July 17 that the ground war broke out,
Figure 2. Achievements and damages of operation protective edge.
Source: Haaretz, 29 July 2014.
145
and when the Prime Minister’s approval rating
increased significantly. On that day, his approval
rating rose to 57%, while in the July 20 and July 24
surveys, his approval rating rose to 73% and 82%,
respectively, indicating a significant surge. In other
words, the results of the ground battles were
reported and led to the rally effect around the
prime minister. The fighting from the start of the
war to the beginning of the ground war was domi­
nated by airstrikes, during which the Palestinian
militants cannot be neutralised as they can hide in
bunkers. The failure of the airstrikes to neutralise the
militants is indicated in the bottom panel of Figure
2, which illustrates the persistence of rocket attacks
from the Gaza Strip. It is presumed that the public’s
expectation that the conflict would end in a way that
suppressed the armed organisations once ground
warfare with direct troops was launched caused the
rally effect. These, together with the previous
assumptions, lead to the following hypotheses:
H3a: Jewish Israelis raise their assessment of the Israeli
government from decisions to execute ground opera­
tions (Rally Effect).
H3b: Arab Israelis lower their assessment of the Israeli
government from decisions to execute ground opera­
tions (Inverse Rally).
146
S. HAMANAKA
Table 1. Variables and wording of questions.
Variables
Wordings of Questions
Rally round
the flag
Evaluation
What grade would you give to the functioning the
about the
government in running Operation Protective Edge so
government
far?
[1 = Very Poor . . . 10 = Very Good]
Evaluation
What grade would you give to the Jewish population in
about Jews
Israel for its behaviour since the operation began?
[1 = Very Poor . . . 10 = Very Good]
Evaluation
What grade would you give to the Arab population in Israel
about Arabs
for its behaviour since the operation began?
[1 = Very Poor . . . 10 = Very Good]
Source:The Peace Index Survey B and C
Table 1 illustrates the wording of the questions to
measure Jewish and Arab evaluations of the government
as the outcomes of the rally effect.
Data sets and research design
Data sets
The direct impetus for the implementation of Operation
Protective Edge was the Israeli retaliation for the kid­
napping and murder of three Jewish settler boys in
June 2014 (Berti, 2014). However, there is a view that
the war was waged by Hamas, which effectively controls
the Gaza Strip, in an attempt to break the deadlock
(Kyodo News, 2014). The same Muslim Brotherhoodaffiliated Free and Fair Party government was over­
thrown in a July 2013 coup d’état, resulting in the loss
of good relations between Hamas and Egypt. After the
coup d’état, the Sisi regime destroyed the underground
smuggling tunnels on the border between the Gaza Strip
and Egypt, leaving Gaza’s economy in dire straits.4
The Israeli government described the purpose of the
ground operations as the destruction of underground
tunnels used in terrorist attacks. Civilian deaths in the
Gaza Strip skyrocketed as ground troops rushed into the
Gaza Strip. The Tokyo Shimbun, quoting an AFP
report, said that the number of Palestinian casualties
exceeded 500 from the start of Operation Protective
Edge on July 8 until 20 July 2014 (morning edition,
22 July 2014). According to the New York Times, 247
Palestinians were killed between the start of the ground
war on July 17 and the early hours of July 20, bringing
the number of deaths in four days to the same number
as in the nine days before the ground war (Yourish &
Keller, 2014).
Haaretz posted a graph (top panel of Figure 2) illus­
trating the change in the number of deaths in the Gaza
Strip (Haaretz, 2014). Figure 2 indicates that the death
toll, which did not exceed 50 per day at the time of the
airstrikes, rose to more than 50 each day after the
ground war broke out. Simultaneously, the number of
rockets fired from the Gaza Strip gradually diminished
after the ground battle on August 5, when the IDF
destroyed 32 offensive tunnels and withdrew ground
troops from the Gaza Strip completely (Lappin, 2014).
After that, Israel and Hamas engaged in a ceasefire and
minor engagements until August 26 (Cohen et al.,
2017).
As mentioned at the outset, surveys have been con­
ducted multiple times during the operation and were
conducted by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace
Research, a research institute of Tel Aviv University,5
and a joint polling project of the Guttman Center for
Public Opinion and Policy Research of the Israel
Democracy Institute. Four wartime surveys were con­
ducted on July 14 (hereinafter survey A), from July 16 to
17 (survey B), from August 23 to 24 (survey C), and
from August 11 to 12 (survey D). From these surveys, it
is possible to compare the evaluation of operational
behaviour by air and artillery bombing and ground
warfare, respectively. While survey B measured public
opinion just before the start of ground warfare, survey
C measured public opinion six or seven days before the
start of ground warfare. Survey A includes only a sample
of Jewish citizens, but surveys B, C, and D also include
a sample of Arab citizens, making it possible to analyse
political attitudes by ethnicity.6
Thus, the dataset allows us to examine the relation­
ship between the rally effect and social identity, as well
as changes in the rally around the flag effect as the
intensity of war increases. It is well known that exposure
to information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
causes Jews to form aggressive attitudes towards their
opponents by viewing Palestinians and Palestinians as
‘out-groups attacking their own communities’
(Feinstein, 2018; Gvirsman et al., 2016). Subsequently,
what attitudes do Arabs with Israeli citizenship – Arab
Israelis – form? Does the feature of the attitudes of Arab
Israelis become clear when Jewish Israelis are taken as
the reference group?
Interrupted time-series design
The multiple polls conducted repeatedly makes it pos­
sible to analyse the rally effect associated with the entry
into the ground war after 17 July 2014, through an
Interrupted Time-Series analysis (ITS), a quasiexperimental design that captures the impact of an
intervention by taking the passage of time on the hor­
izontal axis and observing the data before and after the
intervention at a given time. In the context of Operation
Protective Edge, the ground war is an intervention, and
GLOBAL SECURITY: HEALTH, SCIENCE AND POLICY
the data to be observed is the Israeli government’s
assessment. As the Peace Index project measures public
opinion in survey B (conducted on July 16–17) just
before the start of the ground war and survey
C (August 23–24) was a week after the start,
a comparison of the two surveys captures the impact
of the ground war on the government’s assessment.
The overall trend must be considered to demon­
strate that this study is not just a pre-test-post-test
design. The government evaluations in survey A,
survey B, and survey C were to determine the
changes in outcomes over time, and these are illu­
strated in Figure 3. The horizontal axis is when the
telephone survey was attempted, and the vertical axis
represents the government evaluation. The left side
of the trisection is the outcome distribution of survey
A, the centre is survey B, and the right side is survey
C. In addition, in Figure 3, the left-hand (survey A)
distributed on July 14 (mean 7.8, standard deviation
2.15, n = 244) is similar to the right-hand (survey C)
distributed from July 23–24 (mean 8.01, standard
deviation 2.02, n = 210 [Jewish sample only]) after
the intervention. In other words, the relatively high
ratings of the 14 days on the left side of the sample
declined (mean 6.36, standard deviation 2.58,
n = 181 [Jewish sample only]) during the 16–17day period in the middle. Therefore, considering
the counterfactual that the ground war did not
break out and airstrike and artillery fire continued
on July 23–24, it can be assumed from the trends in
surveys A and B that the government’s assessment
would have stayed at the level of July 16–17-day
period, or else it would have fallen.
Therefore, this study considers the outcome of survey
B conducted on July 16–17 as a counterfactual case in
which no ground war was fought and adopts a design
that compares this to the outcome of survey C after the
start of the ground war and evaluates its impact.7 This
research design will allow us to adjust for the effects of
the covariates and elucidate the relationship between
social identity elicited by the ground war rush and the
attitudes developed from the rally round the flag effect.
Control variables and multiple assignments
The econometric analysis model in this study is a simple
ordinary least squares method. Excluding the indepen­
dent variables for outcomes – Jewish/Arab differences8
and variables representing before and after the entry of
the ground war9 – variables that could be confounding
are gender, age, income, education level, and ideology.
Socioeconomic variables ranging from gender to educa­
tion level represent social stratification in macroscopic
terms. It is shared knowledge in quantitative social
science that the distribution of political opinions and
attitudes is skewed by social strata, and Israel is no
exception. The left-right ideology or ideological leftright axis is a concept that is frequently used in everyday
and academic discussions of Israeli politics. This policy
positioning is well-known to the population because it is
useful for political actors such as politicians, parties, and
voters to indicate their policy standing in the political
0
2
Rally round the Flag
4
6
8
10
ITS Design: Operation Protective Edge
0
147
200
400
Time
Figure 3. Distribution of approval of the government and timing of polls.
600
148
S. HAMANAKA
discourse space (Caverley, 2014, p. 222; Hamanaka,
2019b).
In addition, when we performed the ordinary least
squares method on the original data that combined
surveys B and C in the preliminary analysis, we found
a significant decrease in the sample. If listwise deletion is
used on the missing values in the dataset, we cannot rule
out the possibility that they have some effect on the
relationship between the outcome and the independent
variables. Recent quantitative studies have required us
to be concerned with imputation methods of missing
observations and the biases they introduce (Takai et al.,
2016). Therefore, in this study, to ensure the robustness
of the analysis, the missing values are imputed using
Table 2. Results of OLS estimation.
Jews-Arabs
(1)
Model-1
(2)
Model-2a
(3)
Model-2b
(4)
Model-3a
(5)
Model-3b
Government
−4.5426***
(0.4198)
Jews
−2.4810***
(0.3452)
Arabs
1.4257***
(0.4362)
Government
Government
1.4055***
(0.2419)
0.5446**
(0.2313)
−0.0891
(0.1149)
0.0208***
(0.0063)
0.0544
(0.0963)
−0.2440***
(0.0908)
6.3809***
(0.5541)
401
0.2243
(0.7527)
0.0281
(0.7897)
−0.8258**
(0.3979)
0.0106
(0.0267)
0.5250
(0.3128)
−0.1591
(0.2423)
4.6179*
(2.3879)
58
Ground Operation
Gender
Ideology (Right-Left)
Age
Income
Education Level
Constant
Observations
0.5314**
(0.2307)
−0.1817
(0.1153)
0.0247***
(0.0064)
0.2509***
(0.0930)
−0.2545***
(0.0878)
6.6783***
(0.5595)
459
Standard-errors-in-parentheses
*** p < 0.01, ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.1
Figure 4. Estimation results of OLS model.
0.1280
(0.1943)
−0.7725***
(0.0987)
0.0229***
(0.0053)
0.1470*
(0.0781)
−0.1923***
(0.0733)
9.5435***
(0.4636)
459
0.1137
(0.2496)
0.5404***
(0.1268)
0.0049
(0.0067)
0.1855*
(0.0982)
−0.0508
(0.0919)
1.4608**
(0.6045)
459
GLOBAL SECURITY: HEALTH, SCIENCE AND POLICY
multiple imputations. The applied method is the tradi­
tional algorithm, data augmentation.
Results
The Hypotheses 1a to 3b derived in Section 2 were
statistically tested, and the results are presented in
Table 2 and Figure 4. As the coefficient for the term
distinguishing Jewish/Arab (Jews-Arabs) in (1) of
Table 2 is negative, this result negates H1a and sup­
ports H1b (Model-1). The value of the constant term
indicates that the average government rating by 18year-old Jewish Israelis is 6.68 points, which is favour­
able. For 18-year-old Arab-Israelis, the government’s
rating for carrying out Operation Protective Edge is
2.14 points, which is negative. To understand this
intuitively, the upper left panel of Figure 4 illustrates
the relationship between age and government ratings
when controlling for the other conditions. The control
variables are statistically significant for all socioeco­
nomic variables – gender, age, income, and education
level – and even after controlling for these, we can see
that the differences between the Jewish and the Arabs
have a significant impact on the outcomes.
In Table 2, (2) and (3) are the results of the analyses
of Model-2a and Model-2b, which were set up to test
H2a and H2b. The outcomes are Jewish and Arab rat­
ings, respectively, and the coefficients of the Jews-Arabs
term are negative in Model-2a and positive in Model-2b,
respectively, indicating that both H2a and H2b are sup­
ported. An intuitive way to understand this is to focus
on the Jewish/Arab differences between the changes in
the Jewish ratings illustrated in the upper right panel of
Figure 4 and the Arab ratings illustrated in the lower-left
panel. The control variables were ideology, age, and
education level in Model-2a, and ideology in Model2b, respectively, which are statistically significant.
Columns (4) and (5) of Table 2 illustrate the results of
testing H3a and H3b, that is, the analyses of Model-3a
and Model-3b. In (4), we ran an ordinary least squares
estimation containing only the sample of Jewish Israelis
and (5) that of Arab Israelis; the Ground Operation is
a dummy variable that represents the pre- and postground war entry and is statistically significant only in
(4). In other words, H3a, ‘Jewish Israelis raise their
assessment of the Israeli government from the decision
to execute ground operations,’ was statistically sup­
ported, while H3b, ‘Arab Israelis lower their assessment
of the Israeli government from the decision to execute
ground operations,’ was not. The results presented in (4)
of Table 2 are illustrated in the lower right panel of
Figure 4, from which we can read that the ground war
raised Jewish Israelis’ assessment of the government by
149
1.4 points, or the ground operation sent citizens into
a frenzy.
However, as the Ground Operation term is not sig­
nificant in (5) of Table 2, it means that Arab Israelis’
evaluation of the government remained low, to begin
with, and did not change when they entered the ground
war. However, the possibility remains that the sample
size of Arab Israelis was small, n = 58, and therefore
insufficient to make statistical inferences.
Discussion
Let us return to the question at the beginning of this
article: What attitudes do Arab Israelis, a minority in
Israeli society, form towards the wartime government of
Israel and their own community? According to social
psychologists attempting to elucidate the causal
mechanism of the rally effect, social identity theory
forms the basis of the rally around the flag phenom­
enon. To highlight the political attitudes of Arabs as
a minority, an analysis of the attitudes of Jewish
Israelis as a majority was also conducted.
Three hypotheses were derived from social identity
theory, and the ordinary least squares estimation by the
interrupted time series design yielded the following
results. First, Arab Israelis, unlike Jewish Israelis, evalu­
ate governments carrying out war lowly. Next, Arab and
Jewish Israelis tend to rate citizens of the same ethnicity
highly and citizens of different ethnicities lowly. Finally,
only Jewish Israelis produce the rally phenomenon after
the start of the ground war, and Arab Israeli evaluations
of the government were not affected by the start of the
ground war.
Possible confounding factors are addressed by the
interruptive time-series design in the analysis. The
author believes that the same research design also
addresses bias due to missing variables. That said, our
study does not tackle the probable process by which
Arab media consumption and the claims of Palestinian
opinion leaders led to the ‘inverse rally.’ The failure to
examine this process may be a limitation of this study.
Therefore, a different approach to media information
path other than SIT, such as that found in Groeling and
Baum (Groeling & Baum, 2008), is a topic for future
research.
The empirical analysis above demonstrates that
minorities, as ‘hostile subgroups,’ form critical attitudes
towards the government and the majority community in
a situation when the majority’s assessment of the gov­
ernment follows the rally round the flag effect. As Arab
Israelis are likely to identify with the Palestinian com­
munity inhabiting the Gaza Strip rather than the state to
which they belong, they will probably form a political
150
S. HAMANAKA
attitude that takes the side of the ‘enemy’ that will be
attacked by the Israel state in times of war. This rein­
forces the division of Israeli society. Arab Israelis make
up 21% of the population (Galnoor & Blander, 2018,
p. 632), and even though they are a minority, they
cannot be ignored as part of Israeli society.
This study only examined one localised, short-lived
war: Operation Protective Edge. Therefore, our findings
may not be appropriate in a prolonged war that lasts
months or years, and in a large-scale war involving
several actors. From the viewpoint of understanding
Operation Protective Edge as a phase of the protracted
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is also a case of collective
consciousness being caused by armed conflict. Hence,
the causal effects obtained by the analysis in this study
might be acknowledged widely for ‘hostile subgroups’ in
societies with multiple ethnicities in a state of prolonged
conflict. National security emergencies such as war do
not involve minority groups by rallying the majority
ethnicity under the national flag. Wartime zealotry can
repel minorities and exacerbate dividing fissures in
society. Thus, the phenomenon of rallying around the
flag is similar to a bone stuck in the throat of liberal
democracies that contain an ‘enemy subgroup.’
C are used, partly because Survey D does not carry over
some of the questions common to Surveys A to C,
making it difficult to use it for comparative analysis.
7. This is a conservative or under-biased approach to
evaluating the intervention.
8. A dummy variable (Jews-Arabs) that distinguishes
between Jews (=0) and Arabs (=1).
9. A dummy variable (Ground Operation) that distin­
guishes between pre entry (=0) and post entry (=1)
ground operations.
Acknowledgments
This article was originally presented at the 2019 meetings of
the Japan Association of International Relations held in
Niigata city. The author wishes to thank Yuichi Kubota,
Keigo Ohmura, Kazuhiro Obayashi, Gaku Ito, Akira Sato,
and Shoko Kohama.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion
of Science (JSPS KAKENHI) [Grants-in-Aid for Scientific
Research] [grant number 19KK0033].
Notes
1. SIT is an important theoretical approach of how the
rally effect works. An alternative is the approach
focused on the interaction between opposition elites
and mass media. Broadcasting positive comments by
the opposition party members tend to increase presi­
dential approval rates and negative comments tend to
decrease the approval rates (Groeling & Baum, 2008).
However, my approach depends on the theoretical base
of SIT, not of the interaction between the opposition
and media.
2. Hamanaka (2018, pp. 53–55) shows the correlation
between support for coalition government and party
identification, as a control variable, even in the time of
crisis.
3. Hamanaka discusses the struggle between civic and
ethnic identities in a slightly different context than
citizenship, using the case of Israeli society.
4. If this report is true, it would mean that the 2014 war
was a conflict underpinned by the Diversionary Theory
by the Hamas, but unfortunately there is currently no
way to verify this.
5. The Peace Index site (http://www.peaceindex.org/
DefaultEng.aspx) on Tel Aviv University’s server is
not available for viewing (as of 14 April 2020). The
link is on the Israeli Institute for Democracy’s server
(https://en.idi.org.il/centers/1159/1520) and the data
can be downloaded from Data Israel (https://datais
rael.idi.org.il/).
6. In this study, which focuses on the effects of rallies
during ground combat, only data from Surveys A to
Notes on contributor
Shingo Hamanaka is a Professor of Middle East Politics at
Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. His research focuses on
the strength of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East,
public opinion and foreign policy issues in Israel, and
Muslim migration from Arab countries. His publications
include ‘Demographic Change and its Social and Political
Implications in the Middle East’ in the Asian Journal of
Comparative Politics (2017), ‘Sensitivity to Casualties in the
Battlefield: The Case of Israel’ in the Asian Journal of
Comparative Politics (2018), and ‘The role of digital media
in the 2011 Egyptian revolution’ in Democratization (2020).
ORCID
Shingo Hamanaka
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7901-2391
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