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.

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Comparative Political Studies
2024, Vol. 57(9) 1506–1551
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231194066
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Bloody Pasts and Current
Politics: The Political
Legacies of Violent
Resettlement
Amiad Haran Diman
1
and Dan Miodownik
2

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.
1
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
2
Departments of Political Science and International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Israel
Corresponding Author:
Amiad Haran Diman, Department of Politics and International Relations, University ofOxford,
Social Science Building, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 2JD, UK.
Email: amiad.harandiman@politics.ox.ac.uk
Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Introduction
In 1949, heated debate plagued the elite of the newly created state of Israel.
Controversial construction work began on the lands of the displaced Pales-
tinian village of Deir Yassin to build a Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of
Jerusalem. A group of intellectuals had written to Israel’s prime minister,
David Ben Gurion, asking for the settlement to be cancelled because failing to
do so would appear to endorse the infamous events in the villages a year
earlier. Ben Gurion did not respond and eventually claimed that he was too
busy to read their letters (Ellis, 1999, p. 32). The scholars were referring to the
displacement of Deir Yassin, a pivotal moment in the 1947–1949 war that
included the killing of at least a hundred civilians by extreme Jewish
militias—possibly sparking the decision of many Palestinians across the land
to leave (Morris, 2004,p.79).
This anecdote is important because it is rare. It is an extreme example; the
massacre involved more violence than most wartime displacements, which
made it stand out. The protest against the settlement on the village lands was
also an exception—hundreds of displaced Palestinian villages were resettled
by Jewish communities without opposition. This pattern raises questions that
are of scholarly importance regarding the relationship of communities to their
politically sensitive past. Can engagement with a violent history have per-
sistent political consequences? What is the relationship between residing on
taken land and right-wing voting? Following on the work of Charnysh (2015),
Charnysh and Finkel (2017), and Homola et al. (2020b), we aim to answer this
question using data from a new case study to show that the effects are
heterogeneous and conditional. We provide possible answers using a large,
original, geolocated data set that captures information about the histories of all
Jewish non-urban localities in Israel, including wartime events, post-war
construction, and vote share in over 20 subsequent elections.
We argue that living on taken lands increases right-wing voting, following
an intuition that emphasizes psychological motives, particularly when the
response to guilt is cognitive dissonance. Based on prior studies that relied on
cognitive dissonance theory (e.g., Acharya et al., 2018), we posit that the
political consequences of taking others’property are far-reaching and can be
pronounced in a number of ways. Our framework suggests that this effect is
varied and interacts with other social institutions and processes, such as
economic structures, types of violence, exposure to historical remains,
temporal contexts, and contact with the minority group. In particular, we argue
that this pattern becomes stronger as violence increases, if there is evidence of
the violent past, or if there is close contact with the group that has been
harmed. In sum, we develop a framework to explore the heterogeneous
legacies of residing on others’property, showing that the long-term effect is
conditioned on a subtle and often-overlooked variation in the salience of past
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1507

violence and the context in which it occurred. We thus expand upon prior
studies by introducing a set of moderators and by looking at the effect over
time, both of which further our understanding of this relationship.
The study promotes the resurgent literature on the legacies of violence
(notable examples include but are not limited to Balcells, 2011;Besley &
Reynal-Querol, 2014;Charnysh, 2015,2019;Costalli & Ruggeri, 2015;
Canetti et al., 2018;Dinas & Fouka, 2018;Walden & Zhukov, 2021)by
identifying the long-term effects of violence on the group that benefited from it
and examining shifts in those effects. It adds nuance to it and extends the
theoretical exploration of possible heterogeneous effects in the literature.
Additionally, our findings can help illustrate one possible source of motivation
for right-wing voting and the salience of debates on historical narratives in
societies with violent pasts, contributing to work on historical memory in
conflict (Checkel, 2017;Podeh, 2000). It also contributes to our understanding
of political behavior by testing some of the predictions stemming from the
cognitive dissonance approach. We argue that obstacles to the repression of
guilt stemming from variation in the nature of the displacement will lead to
different effects; thus, while we cannot show that this psychological mech-
anism is what generated our findings, we do show that its predictions are
supported by the data—continuing a long line of research that used insight
from psychology to explain behavior in conflicts (Bar-Tal, 2000;Canetti et al.,
2009;Bauer et al., 2014).
We adopt an empirical strategy that uses the unique forms of coercion in the
settlement of lands in Israel to address concerns of self-selection as a possible
driver of the results. We also use matching to improve inference and look at
spatial variation to explain the heterogeneity of the results. We examine how
the effect changes over time and what that could indicate for different
mechanisms, showing that the findings are in line with what could be expected
from the cognitive dissonance mechanism, albeit without directly testing any
specific possible mechanism. Our results suggest a nuanced answer to the
question of the relationship between taking others’property and right-wing
voting, showing that the effect is conditional and heterogeneous since it
heavily depends on variation in the nature of the displacement and its af-
termath. Finally, we show that the main results survive extensive different
robustness tests and are in line with preliminary survey evidence on the
individual processes that our group-level proxies represent.
We believe that our results may have important implications for attempts to
reach peace and reconciliation in post-conflict settings, suggesting that the
possibility of transitional justice, which is often used as a key tool for healing
anger over past wrongdoings, could be a key deterrent that induces individuals
to oppose the peace process. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the
bloodiest and most intractable conflicts in the world, and it holds a central
place in global politics. Two main reasons that attempt to resolve it have failed
1508 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

are the electoral power of the right-wing in Israel and the difficulty in resolving
the refugee issue. We explain why these are so salient and why individuals will
oppose reconciliation even if they have nothing to lose from territorial
compromise, due to the symbolic guilt that acknowledging wrongdoing can
cause (following, but not definitely confirming, the intuition of the cognitive
dissonance approach). As we explain below, this has important implications
for our understanding of the intractability of territorial conflicts and processes
of foreign policy attitude formation. We thus continue previous work that links
micro-level resettlement to macro-level conflict (McNamee, 2018;McNamee
& Zhang, 2019;Schutte, 2019).
We proceed with a discussion of the puzzle we worked on in the context of
contemporary scholarship. We then explain our theoretical basis and ex-
pectations. In the empirical section of the paper, we introduce the necessary
historical background of our case study and the reasons for its selection, detail
how we gathered our data, and explains our analysis and findings. Finally, we
conclude with support for our findings in robustness tests and survey evidence
and a discussion of these results and their importance.
The Literature on Violent History and
Electoral Behavior
What is the long-term impact of residing on land taken from others? Previous
studies mentioned above have argued that profiteering from violence in
various ways leads to an increase in hawkish and intolerant voting. We argue
that these legacies are heterogeneous, varying based on micro-level differ-
ences in the setting of the historic violent event. These differences create
various lasting variations in economic structures, contact with victims, the
salience of the past, and perception of it. These subtle differences interact with
how voters approach memory and determine the nature of the legacy, leading
the effect of residing on taken land to vary, even within the same case study.
As we detail below, many Jewish migrants to the newly formed State of Israel
were settled on rural lands, some of which had been taken from Palestinians
through violence during the 1947–1949 war. Does this exogenous settlement
process have persistent political legacies? The difference between villages that are
or are not settled on taken lands is subtle and often repressed, but the conse-
quences of guilt over past violent actions can be powerful. To answer this
question, we turned to the literature on the legacies of violence to explain how
these communities will behave differently. We then relied on cognitive disso-
nance theory to develop certain hypotheses and supported them with a quan-
titative analysis of voting patterns in Israel, which we explain next.
An emerging and growing field has created vigorous interest in the inter-
generational political legacies of historical mass violence (Walden & Zhukov,
2021). A distinct stream in the body of research focuses on the legacies of
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1509

violent property transfers on the perpetrators and profiteers in the short
and long term. Their results show that profiteering from political violence
increases hostility, intolerance, and hawkishness toward the damaged
out-group (Acharya et al., 2016,p.629;Charnysh, 2020;Charnysh &
Finkel, 2017,p.809;Homola et al., 2020a,p.581;Nyhan & Zeitoff,
2018). The main argument is that the victimization of the out-group
induces vilificationbyprofiteers, who do so because of feelings of guilt
and the clash between their beliefs about themselves and their actual
behavior (Acharya et al., 2018, p. 406). The first series of studies, by
Acharya et al. (2016), focused on communities that profited from slavery
in the southern United States. They were followed by studies such as
Charnysh & Finkel, 2017;Homola et al., 2020a, which increasingly
focused on the Jewish Holocaust and its impact on German and Polish
communities.
But this growing body of literature suffers from numerous challenges on
which we elaborate, some of which could be attributed to the limited geo-
graphical scope of the empirical inquiries, given that findings are based on
evidence from a few distinct case studies. We strive to identify and fill some of
these gaps using original data on the consequences of the Palestinian exodus
from the newly formed state of Israel, an often-overlooked case of mass
violence. While this is in some ways just another distinct case study, so
studying it does not solve the problem of generalizability in the literature, it
does allow for the testing of previous expectations in a radically different
context from prior studies. This can contribute to our confidence in the
universality of these findings while also enabling the advancement of our
understanding of this relationship, due to the unique empirical features of the
case study.
The case complements the existing literature by identifying the territorial
profit that groups perpetrating forced displacement generate from the violence
and its political effects, which shape the ensuing protracted territorial conflict.
Additionally, the theoretical basis of the current body of research can still be
expanded. Scholars have suggested numerous possible causal mechanisms,
using insights from psychology (cognitive dissonance theory) or economics
(material threat theory) to offer a robust explanation for the relationship
between the profit from violence and right-wing voting (Acharya et al., 2018).
However, there is still work to be done on extending these insights to in-
vestigate how numerous institutions and social processes affect this rela-
tionship, which has been established in numerous contexts, but with no
sufficient emphasis on how the relationship interacts and is conditioned by
these other variables. We focused on cognitive dissonance theory to generate
our predictions and explain why it is important to look at the obstacles to
rejecting guilt that leads to exacerbated effect sizes. Thus, in our study, we
develop the main theories of the body of research, adapting them to the case of
1510 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and developing new testable expectations re-
garding the effects of violence and its interaction with other influential ex-
planations, such as temporal political conditions, intergroup contact, and
exposure to the past. We do not show that the psychological mechanism—or
guilt more broadly—is what drives the results, but we do show that our
expectations of a heterogeneous treatment effect developed on this mecha-
nism are supported by the data.
We thus offer a more nuanced approach to the legacy of violent reset-
tlement, arguing that the effect of violence depends on the visibility of the past
in daily life and that it alters the result of inter-ethnic contact. As we show in
the next section, these are expectations that are derived from existing theo-
retical approaches on which the existing body of literature relies, but which
have not been previously deduced and tested. Prior studies have not accounted
for or seriously considered the extent of awareness about the past or explained
how contact with the damaged population might affect the legacies of vio-
lence. Although our observational and ecological study does not provide
direct support for any particular mechanism, we do show that the propositions
we generated from cognitive dissonance theory are well supported in our case
study, while the expectations of alternative economic-threat theories have
weaker support. This allows us to offer a preliminary indication of the
plausibility of these two mechanisms that the literature has previously em-
phasized, but we do not provide clear evidence in support of one specific
mechanism; we use the psychological mechanism only to develop theoretical
intuition.
Our case study includes unique events and a wealth of data that make
such inquiries possible. In this study, we develop an improved way to
operationalize and precisely measure which communities took others’
property and to identify the effects of those actions. We exploited
exogenous settlement dynamics, variations in levels of violence, changing
political conditions in Israel over time, clear ideological identification of
each village, and the spatial dispersion of villages in order to fully capture
the effect of awareness about the violent past and how it varied between
villages. The study thus supplements the literature with a new empirical
exploration of the historic roots of right-wing voting and a further ex-
ploration of the possible consequences of the psychological mechanism on
which it is built and heavily depends.
Finally, our study is important because it looks at the legacy of violent
resettlement in an active conflict. While studies noted above raised the
possibility that the behavioral result of wartime property transfers can in-
fluence processes of reconciliation and the resolution of conflicts, they tended
to look at peaceful, Western states. We examine the legacies of residing on
taken land in an intractable conflict that is central to world politics. This
enabled us to observe, on the one hand, how changes in the macro-level
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1511

conflict dynamics shaped these legacies and observe, on the other hand, how
micro-level inter-ethnic interaction affected them. As we discuss in the
conclusion, the findings point to multiple fruitful avenues of inquiry that can
improve our understanding of territorial conflicts, foreign policy attitude
formation, and the intractability of protracted conflicts.
Theoretical Framework and Expectations
How does the history of violence in a village shape the continuing political
preferences of its residents? Building on the literature described above, this
study advances theory by introducing a set of mediators and conditioning
variables that shape the legacies of violence on those that benefited from it. It
then uses a set of unique case-specific variations in the nature of displacement
and the visibility of the violent past to uncover this heterogeneous treatment
effect. The study does not develop new mechanisms or test them in any way.
There are two possible mechanisms offered in past research—cognitive
dissonance and economic advantage (Charnysh & Finkel, 2017) and we
relied heavily on the former. While we did not directly measure dissonance or
prove that it is the actual mechanism, we used it to develop our hypotheses and
thus gave it a more central place. We thus describe this one possible
mechanism, the psychological guilt mechanism, in greater detail; because it
forms the foundation of our theoretical intuition, it was used to develop our
theoretical thinking and forms the basis from which our hypotheses arise. We
do not, however, argue that this is the only mechanism leading to our results
since that is beyond the scope of this case study.
Cognitive dissonance, long studied by psychologists, is a phenomenon that
includes a powerful reaction of individuals to a clash (dissonance) between
their beliefs and values and their actions (Festinger, 1962). When these are not
consistent, a powerful psychological discomfort emerges that will induce the
individual to try to resolve the clash (Festinger, 1957). One common defense
mechanism used in these situations is rationalization, in which individuals
make excuses for their behavior in attempts to make their actions seem moral
or even admirable. The rationalization of political violence may include
relying on circumstances for justification, such as demonizing the victim or
rejecting moral fallacies in the behavior (Castano & Giner-Sorolla, 2006,
p. 804). Psychologists have found that this kind of rationalization about
profiteering leads directly to increased ethnic hatred (Imhoff & Banse, 2009).
As mentioned before, there are two main prior explanations for the re-
lationship between residing on taken land and right-wing voting: the
economic-materialist approach and the psychological cognitive dissonance
approach. The relationship can be represented by individuals feeling that their
control of a property is threatened by members of a damaged minority who are
demanding reparations. For example, citizens who profited from violence
1512 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

against Jews in the Holocaust may fear that the victims will return and demand
reparations; they will thus vote for anti-Semitic parties that fiercely oppose
reparations which will exacerbate the fear of the threat (Charnysh & Finkel,
2017, p. 806). Alternatively, the fear may be based on a psychological, non-
materialistic threat. This explanation is based on the influential cognitive
dissonance theory outlined above. According to this framework, the guilt over
violence will include dissonance between how individuals perceive them-
selves and their communities and their behaviors or actions in real life
(Acharya et al., 2018). The social psychology literature emphasizes the
centrality of group guilt in conflict processes and the strong need of indi-
viduals to believe that their group is righteous (Halperin et al., 2014, p. 15).
Most people strive to see themselves as good and their actions as justified. As a
result, to put their actions in a favorable context, they may adopt hostile,
degrading, and vilifying views toward the group that suffered from their
actions. Previous studies have reported that profiteering will lead to right-wing
voting, based on both these mechanisms.
The use of cognitive dissonance to explain the historically persistent shift
toward intolerant attitudes has been formally developed in the game theo-
retical model of Acharya et al. (2018, p. 406). They theorized that ethnic
hostility will persist well after violence has subsided because of guilt over the
hurt caused. Individuals like to think that they and their group are good, moral,
and righteous, but this belief clashes with the perpetrated violence, which is
normally seen as bad or immoral. This means that individuals that associate
themselves with the damage caused by violence face a conundrum that is
driven by three incentives; (1) Individuals find it essential to see themselves as
good, moral people; (2) Individuals must solve the clash of their actions when
residing on taken land with their view of themselves as good; (3) Individuals
would prefer to adapt their beliefs so they can view their actions more fa-
vorably rather than change their actions.
As a result, a common solution is to turn to beliefs that minimize feelings of
guilt about the violence through developing hatred of the victims. From an
intolerant and hawkish point of view, there was nothing wrong with the
violence or benefiting from it. These beliefs will be reflected in an individual’s
attitudes and ideological stances because they strive to minimize inconsis-
tencies in their belief systems. This mechanism applies not only to the original
perpetrators and settlers but also to their descendants and close community
members, who want to believe their ancestors and peers were and are good.
Thus, they also feel the need to justify the continuing benefit from the property
transfers, even long after the violence (Acharya et al., 2018, p. 408).
This theoretical discussion leads to the expectation in this study and in the
body of literature (Acharya et al., 2016;Charnysh & Finkel, 2017;Homola
et al., 2020a) about the nature of the relationship between profiting from
violence and voting, including this study’s additions to those expectations. We
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1513

look at violence in two forms: forced migration or depopulation of whole
villages, and the physical violence that was used to achieve this goal. While
many studies concentrate on mass violence, we focus on this form of violence,
which is more widespread and common. Our main independent variable is
profiteering, the process by which individuals gain an advantage from vio-
lence. Our conceptualization does not emphasize receiving material profit
from violence; instead, the focus is largely on the association the profiteer is
forced to make between their community and historic violence, which is what
ignites the mechanisms.
1
That is why we focus on what might increase
awareness of the violence and thus generate this association. We argue that
this psychological process has political implications, specifically focusing on
right-wing voting, since right-wing ideology encompasses more of the values
that residing on taken land is likely to induce, such as nationalism, hawk-
ishness, intolerance, bigotry, militancy, and prejudice (Mitts, 2019;
Rubinstein, 1996;Suleiman, 2000;Yakter & Tessler, 2022;Yishai, 2001).
We measure this ideology by focusing on how it is displayed in voting
choices, given that the beliefs and attitudes created by this psychological
process may change electoral outcomes and thus have real-world implications.
Building on the past studies discussed above, we expect that those associated
with violent resettlement will be more likely to vote for right-wing parties.
H1: Individuals that took others’property would show higher electoral
support for parties with right-wing ideologies.
2
To continue the theoretical inquiry, we focus on the obstacles to denial as
part of the process of dealing with guilt and how those factors can change the
strength of the effect outlined in H1. Individuals strive to avoid cognitive
dissonance as much as possible; thus, the presentation of evidence that en-
hances their awareness of the past only serves to strengthen their defense
mechanisms. While the best solution might be for those feeling guilt over
violent resettlement to ignore the history of the villages where they live, when
that is not possible, those individuals will likely resort to the psychological
mechanism discussed above, which in turn will increase right-wing voting.
There is a vast body of evidence that contradicting a person’s prior beliefs
about a conflict may reduce that individual’s prejudices and increase support
for peace, but it may also backfire (Saguy & Halperin, 2014). The present
study uses proximity to the remnants of depopulated Palestinian villages and
their visibility to measure this dynamic.
H2a: The association between residing on taken land and electoral support
for parties that hold right-wing ideologies will strengthen as a result of
exposure to evidence of historical violence.
1514 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

Similarly, a significant obstacle to ignoring the past and a possible igniter of the
right-wing defense mechanism is the presence of a population that was damaged
by the violence. The common belief in the prejudice reduction literature is that
intergroup contact will usually lead to more tolerant behavior, but it can also have
the opposite effect if that interaction is not positive (Enos, 2014;Maoz, 2011;
Mousa, 2020). There is also research indicating that the effectiveness of contact in
changing attitudes depends on whether the interaction was confrontational or a
peaceful acceptance of narratives (Kalla & Broockman, 2020;Lowe, 2021). We
contribute to this literature by identifying a variable that will determine the
consequence of contact: shared history. While communities that did not profitfrom
the wartime violence and that live in close contact with the out-group will be more
likely to vote for tolerant, left-wing parties, communities that reside on violently
taken lands and in close daily contact with the out-group will exhibit increased
right-wing voting. This is because the nature of the interaction will change in
accordance with the political history of the village. Confronting the population that
suffered, or its co-ethnics, will be likely to ignite the proposed psychological
mechanism and thus increase the size of the effect. Some of the displaced Pal-
estinians did not flee Israel but instead joined surviving Palestinian villages, so this
study focused on contact with them and their surviving group members.
H2b: The associations between residing on taken land and electoral
support for parties with right-wing ideologies will be exacerbated by
contact with the ethnic group whose members were displaced.
Historical violence will also be more difficult to ignore if it was part of an
infamous, extreme event, such as a massacre. Similarly, individuals will
respond more strongly if the property they own was taken with direct violence
as part of an intentional effort than if their property was taken after its previous
inhabitants fled as a consequence of violence in other places. Therefore, to
observe associations of violence with electoral outcomes, the present study
uses variations in the intensity of violence, which is possible in this case
because of the different ways land was taken during the war.
H2c: The associations between residing on taken land and electoral support
for parties with right-wing ideologies will be stronger if the violence used
during the displacement was more pronounced and intense.
In summary, we extend the expectation that profiteering will lead to right-wing
voting by testing how the strength of the effect of residing on taken land varies
depending on the nature of the interaction with the violent past (H2 a, b, and c). In the
appendix, we also look at how these relationships change over time, depending on
context. We now turn to the use of the Israeli case study and the empirical tests for
these expectations, showing how we use case-specific variation in the nature of
displacement to show the heterogeneous treatment effects of taking others’property.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1515

Displacement and Resettlement in the First
Jewish-Arab War
It is important to be aware of the setting and characteristics of the case study, to
better contextualize the results. Moreover, studies of the Palestinian exodus
have to date focused mainly on historical questions, and only recently has it
begun to receive attention from political scientists (Arnon et al., 2022;Haran
Diman, 2023;McAlexander, 2022;Muchlinski, 2021). We describe the
general historical events that were studied and explain why this case study is
interesting. We then detail its benefits for empirical research.
Historical Background
Arabs and Jews lived together in Israel/Palestine under the Turkish and British
rule for decades with varying degrees of coexistence and violence (Klein,
2014;Naor & Jacobson, 2016). But in the early 20th century, the growth of the
Zionist movement, which aspired to create a national home where Jews could
settle, created increasing strain between the groups. Some Zionists organized
themselves into relatively homogeneous ideological groups that began settling
in small, rural villages of Jews across the country. This effort was given a
boost by waves of Jewish refugees after WW2 arriving up to 1947 when war
broke out over the division of the land between Arabs and Jews. During the
war, Jewish militias made significant territorial gains that eventually forced
the Arab states supporting the Palestinians to end the war and the creation of a
Jewish state on 78% of the land.
The early Israeli narrative was that Palestinians voluntarily fled villages
and were not forcibly expelled. Some Israelis also placed responsibility for the
war on the Arab forces that had rejected UN resolution 181 which proposed to
partition the land. However, beginning in the 21st century, some Israeli
historians and textbooks adopted a more critical perspective and recognized
that some areas had been intentionally cleansed (Nets-Zehngut, 2013, p. 41).
The Palestinian narrative, which is also promoted by several Israeli historians,
is that part of the military strategy of the Jewish forces was to methodically
cleanse the captured Palestinian villages by forcing their inhabitants to leave
(Pappe, 2006). This depopulation was carried out through the use of dis-
placement, the demolition of homes, and massacres (Morris, 2004, p. 504). It
also frequently included mass looting and quick resettlement of a village with
Jewish refugees (Raz, 2021). At other times, flight happened before the
villages were captured as a result of perceptions of threat and the fear of
massacres, particularly after the events at Deir Yassin in April 1948.
After the war, the wave of Jewish immigration to the new state of Israel
from European and Arab countries was much larger, in part because of vi-
olence. The population was sent by the same settling movements
3
to different
1516 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

parts of the state and established hundreds of villages that were intended to
protect Israel’s territorial integrity. Some of these villages were built on the
ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages or their land, while others were
established on previously unoccupied land. About a third of the villages
founded by these movements before 1948 were expanded to include lands and
property that were taken from displaced Palestinians who were once their
neighbors.
4
The result was that some Jewish settlers became owners of
property that had belonged to populations that were violently displaced, while
others became owners of property that did not have such a violent past. As we
show, this process was exogenous to personal preferences; the control over
where settlements would be built and who would reside in them rested with
governmental agencies and the settling movements. Individuals who joined
the settlement enterprise—voluntarily or in some cases less freely—had no
control over where they were sent.
In sum, some immigrants were forced to settle in rural areas, often ex-
plicitly against their wishes, and then the decision of where to settle was done
centrally by the national leadership, so they had no control over it. This means
that immigrants’attitudes are exogenous to whether they settled on taken land
or not. Immigrants had limited ability to decide on which settling movement to
join—which usually correlates with their idealogy; for this reason, we control
for the movement the village belongs to, only comparing villages of the same
movement, to eliminate the possibility of endogeneity stemming from this
fact. After the war and until reforms undertaken in the 1980s, inter-village
migration was strongly restricted—it was very hard to join existing villages if
you were not a member of one of the original families and very few people left
the villages that survived beyond a few years. This limits the risk of post-war
sorting violating exogeneity, and we make sure the results are robust if we
only look at elections conducted before the reforms of 1980 or at villages
founded after the first few years. Violence against Palestinians did persist after
the war, though it was mostly concentrated on Palestinians in the occupied
territories (the West Bank and Gaza, occupied by Israel in the 1967 war). In
contrast, in land taken after 1948, violence was more restricted and does not
nearly compare to the events in the 1948 war, meaning it is unlikely post-war
violence would influence the results beyond the limited ways we discuss in the
appendix.
Case Selection
The Israeli-Palestinian case complements the existing literature in a number of
ways, including a wealth of data and theoretical challenges. First, it broadens
the geographic scope of prior studies and tests their findings with an active
conflict, which underscores the importance of the findings for reconciliation
efforts, as we explain below. The displacement and settlement patterns have
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1517

unique empirical benefits arising from their spatial dispersion, creating av-
enues to capture differences in important variables that were not previously
observed. This process was also exogenous to personal preferences on the
exact location of the village, as explained below. It also allows us to theorize
the effects of residing on taken land on the results of intergroup contact and
engagement with the past, this has not been possible because of lack of such
fine-grained data and variation. It is possible now because of the charac-
teristics of the case study—the relatively clear ethnic segregation in Israel, the
variation in the remnants of past violence, and the differences in the intensity
of violence, for example.
This case study could be viewed as challenging to the proposed theory
because of its distinctive social context. In Europe and the United States, the
crimes of the Nazis and slave owners, respectively, have been mostly ac-
knowledged, at least by the mainstream. It is important to note that these mass
atrocities are inherently not identical or clearly comparable to the Palestinian
exodus—in the end, these are all unique cases of violence, on different scales
and with different dynamics and intentions. However, the Israeli state offi-
cially denies any wrongdoing, steadfastly refuses to accept responsibility or
apologize, and prohibits teaching about the victimization of Palestinian in
public schools (Koldas, 2011). This presents a challenge to demonstrating our
expectation that these violent events will have lasting legacies because it is a
symptom of the wider rejection of guilt and repression of this episode in
history by the majority of Israeli Jews.
Paradoxically, it may be a symptom that directly follows from our theo-
retical framework. We argue that dissonance and strong guilt induce an
unwillingness to engage with the past and the deliberate adoption of ignorance
with regard to the history of the displaced villages. The dissonance will be
particularly strong in the Israeli case because Jewish residents of lands taken
from others are publicly pointed out as such, due to the territorial nature of the
profit that makes it easy to identify the relevant villages. But as we dem-
onstrate, the rejection of guilt and obliviousness about the events of the war
does not mean that they have no lasting political impact. However, it is
important to note that just as the case can be seen in challenging in some ways
to the hypotheses, in other ways it is actually more likely for a relationship to
be found in this case. This is because, as mentioned before, the conflict is
ongoing and the Palestinians demand reparations—meaning support for the
right-wing among those on taken land would be even more likely.
As already noted, the case complements other studies that have speculated
that the patterns created by profiteering pose a possible challenge to the
reconciliation of conflicts, given those episodes of mass violence are fre-
quently accompanied by property transfers (Homola et al., 2020a, p. 588). In
fact, in one study, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was explicitly mentioned as
an important example (Charnysh & Finkel, 2017, p. 801). But these claims
1518 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

were based on tests conducted in peaceful Western countries that were not
directly involved in active conflict processes. As noted, the fact that a conflict
is ongoing makes it easier to vilify victims and deny guilt because it provides a
wealth of examples that can be used to justify the violence—so if we indeed
see an effect in spite of the denial, it will provide stronger support for our
intuition. It is also likely to cause strong dissonance because Palestinian
refugees were vocal in their demand for reparations and emphasizing
wrongdoing. We, therefore, expect to find similar results but will also have a
stronger and better-founded basis for claiming an important impact on conflict
processes.
However, the setting is also drastically different in many ways—meaning
that our study contributes to the external validity of the main finding
(profiteering leads to right-wing voting) but also that comparison is not
obvious. The extent to which the coercive structure in the American South still
persists is unclear, but at least some of the violent institutions do not exist
anymore. In the German case, the situation now is definitely different from the
short episode of the Jewish holocaust. In the Israeli/Palestinian case, violence
continues to be a regular occurrence, and the structure continues to be re-
pressive, though the Palestinian citizens of Israel have a much more peaceful
and free existence compared to those living in the occupied territories or in the
situation in 1948. In all of these, the violent past is more or less present both in
memory and in existing political institutions, meaning that comparison is not
obvious.
Finally, the Israeli case is particularly interesting because of the past
experience of those who settle on taken lands. To a significant degree, many of
the Jewish migrants to Israel were themselves refugees fleeing the atrocities in
Europe in World War Two or people displaced by violence and repression
Jews experience in MENA countries. This may make it easier for settlers to
justify violence against Palestinians and residing on taken land. In other
words, living on taken lands would be more likely to lead to far-right voting
because deflecting the guilt by justifying it would be easier. This also poses an
empirical challenge, since experiences of violence can also cause far-right
voting directly; we account for it by matching based on year of settlement and
country of origin as a robustness test that controls for differences in the levels
of violence experienced by different waves of migrants.
Empirical Opportunities
Our case study helps overcome problems that were previously challenging,
such as identifying moderators, the operationalization of contact and
awareness of the past, and endogeneity, due to the numerous opportunities it
presents. First, the study extricated some observable implications on the
moderators of the impact of residing on taken land and then tests these
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1519

implications in a way that was not previously possible. Additionally, the
present study addresses the problems of endogeneity between right-wing
ideology and the settling of violently taken land, due to Israel’s coercive
resettlement process.
A key useful phenomenon in our case study is Israel’s historic in-
stitutionalization of village-building. The construction of Jewish villages in
Israel was carried out by the settling movements before, during, and im-
mediately after the 1948 war. The ideological groups set up rural villages. As
already noted, the new immigrants were organized and sent by settling
movements. We argue that their control over where they were assigned was
extremely limited. The decision was mostly out of their hands, and we thus
treat their allocation as exogenous to their ideological opinion. These allo-
cations were not conducted by lottery, but they were made without consid-
eration of personal desires.
There is an abundance of historical evidence supporting this position. The
Jewish villagers in Israel were given financial assistance, governmental
support, and even free land in return for living in less desirable, non-urban
areas, which was seen as necessary for the nation-building project (Sofer &
Applebaum, 2006, p. 326). The selection of settlement sites by the movements
or the National Jewish Agency (Schwartz, 1999, p. 130) was influenced before
the war by land availability because the British and Ottoman administrations
decided where villages could be formed. In order to join a village, one had to
be a member of the ideological movement, and after joining members were
assigned a settlement site; however, many members of these movements did
not identify with the ideology at all. Rather, they were coerced to formally join
in order to obtain housing of any kind (Schwartz, 1999, p. 132). Decisions
regarding which settlers would be placed on taken land were not related to the
individual members’beliefs, and they had no influence over it.
This was particularly enforced following the 1948 war when the state
suffered from food shortages, mass migrations, and the need to prevent the
return of Palestinian refugees. Together with expanding the productive ag-
ricultural villages that existed before the war, the shared solution was to
resettle Jewish migrants on agricultural land, some of which were previously
occupied by Palestinians. This was done in spite of the migrants’reluctance to
work in agriculture when they want to live in urban areas. The state responded
to this reluctance with coercion (Schwartz, 1999, pp. 134, 139). This dynamic
was captured by Weingrod (1966), who dubbed the settlers reluctant pioneers
and wrote that the immigrants often painfully and rarely cheerfully sought to
adjust to their new condition. Additionally, before being moved to rural
settlements, most immigrants were housed in temporary camps in very poor
conditions (Simon, 2005); this made them less fastidious about the alternative
housing solution offered to them. The immigrants thus had only limited
control over the type of village or general location where they were resettled,
1520 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

they also had no choice as to whether it was Palestinian land, so the variance in
violent or nonviolent resettlement was exogenous to their personal prefer-
ences or ideology.
Even the government did not fully control who will settle the new lands; as
Goldstein (2011) explains, it strongly preferred to use experienced agricultural
workers from existing settlements or among retired soldiers, but they were
unavailable, and their numbers did not fit the ambitious settlement plans.
Thus, the government reluctantly resorted to taking the incoming migrants,
who were readily available, and placing them in the hundreds of new villages
that were being constructed (ibid, 42). In other words, the need to crystallize
the territorial achievements and boost agricultural supply led the government
to create many new settlements and then fill them with its most available
human resource: new immigrants. The shortage in human resources led the
government to avoid placing restrictions on migration and to adopt a policy of
open, unselected immigration (Hacohen, 2003). This meant that abandoned
villages and free lands were settled with migrants not only without regard to
their personal preferences but also with no selection based on their identity.
5
Below, we provide the results of balance tests to empirically support these
claims and demonstrate that the villages set up with or without violent dis-
placement are not significantly different in multiple key social and economic
variables. We then describe how we use matching to account for possible other
selection biases originating in the state decision about land allocation and
control for varied possible confounding variables. Following the results
section, we use multiple robustness tests to answer concerns that this dynamic
only applies to specific historical periods or ethnic groups.
Data and Methodology
As noted above, focusing on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is beneficial not
only due to the reasons outlined above but also because of the empirical
opportunities it provides. This allows for testing of these expectations in the
field, utilizing variation that wasn’t used before, such as in the visibility of the
past. In particular, this study used an original data set containing information
about the First Jewish–Arab war (1947–1949), which was coupled with
longitudinal village-level electoral data (1955–2021).
6
Dependent Variable: Right-Wing Vote Shares
This study relies on an extensive and innovative and disaggregated analysis of
election results in Israel, which allowed for the estimation of the effects over
time. We collected voting data for elections held since 1996 from electronic
village-level files of the Central Elections Committee (CEC) and integrated
them into our data set using unique identifiers created by the Israeli Central
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1521

Bureau for Statistics (ICBS). For earlier elections, we collected text files from
the ICBS and digitized them.
Israel has a volatile proportional representation system with a constantly
changing set of parties, but the ideological makeup of the Knesset, Israel’s
legislature, is more stable (Hazan, 2021). Therefore, rather than focusing on
votes for a single party, the parties were instead categorized as belonging to
either the right-wing or the left-wing bloc. The distinction is not always
absolutely clear, so as the most important dimension in marginal cases, we
used the dimension of security policy, which is the party’s approach to the
conflict and to Palestinians. Emphasis was also placed on which bloc the party
supported (Shamir & Arian, 2014).
7
Independent Variables
Identifying Violent Resettlement. Identifying the communities that took others’
property and are exposed to the corresponding legacies is typically a major
methodological challenge, but it is easier in the case of Israel. This is because
the profit is in the form of land, and it is relatively easy to determine which
communities live on displaced lands. For this purpose, the study uses a list
created by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO devoted to the documentation and me-
morialization of the Palestinian Exodus that has recorded all of the Israeli
Jewish villages that were built on taken lands.
8
The Jewish villages on the list
were manually matched with villages in the ICBS records and with data on
Palestinian villages during the war. The list’s validity was corroborated by
comparing the locations of displaced Palestinian villages with the coordinates
of present-day Israeli villages, compiled from the data sources detailed below.
It is important to note that the list includes not just villages founded after the
war, which replaced depopulated Palestinian villages but also settlements that
were founded before the war and then expanded to include seized lands or
property. In both cases, the village residents took over others’property to
some extent, but the political dynamics involved may be different, so we
verified our results on subsamples that included villages founded before the
war and those founded after the war.
9
Our data set contains 836 non-urban
10
Jewish villages, of which 394 are on
land taken from displaced Palestinians, and 442 are on land that was not
violently taken. Of these villages, 68.2% were constructed after the war.
Figure 1 presents the locations of these two groups of villages in the
1948 lands of Israel. It is possible to empirically substantiate our view of the
settlement patterns as orthogonal to personal characteristics by regressing this
binary variable with key aggregated village-level variables from the earliest
comprehensive census (1961). Figure 2 displays the null results of such
models, providing evidence that ethnic origin, the economic situation in the
early years, and the average level of education are balanced across villages,
1522 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

whether or not they were settled on violently taken land. This shows that the
most relevant socioeconomic variables that predict right-wing voting were not
skewed across villages on different types of land.
Remains of the Past. One of the main contributions we offer to the field is an
exploration of the effects of remnants of the violent past on modern political
behavior. Prior studies about death camps have mentioned the importance of
evidence of the past and its visibility (Charnysh & Finkel, 2017;Homola et al.,
2020a). The Israeli case is different because the evidence is more subtle. There
are no museums devoted to the topic or large camps—only stone walls, rubble,
and a few remaining buildings, as documented by Khalidi in a survey of
displaced villages (1992). The locations of displaced villages depended on
proximity to agricultural land and water sources, along with, ultimately, the
decisions of the settling movements. We argue that the proximity of Jewish
Figure 1. Location of Jewish villages in Israel.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1523

villages to remnants of displaced Palestinian villages is exogenous and quasi-
random, and thus it was exploited as an instrumental proxy of awareness of the
past. Some villages were established in areas with Palestinian buildings, while
others were placed on agricultural lands that belonged to Palestinians. This
would create different interactions with the past: residents who face clear
evidence of the violence and the remnants of prior occupants will find it hard
to deny that anything happened and will be more aware of the history of their
village. It is hard to ignore destroyed houses if you pass them on a daily basis,
but it is much easier if they are far away. This is also true of villages that were
founded before the war and then expanded to Palestinian land due to the same
dynamic and interactions with these villages before the war.
Therefore, as part of our second hypothesis (H2a), this proxy variable was
used first to measure awareness of the past. The aerial distance was determined
with GIS software, using the geolocation of remains collected by Khalidi in
his fieldwork and the location of Jewish village centers according to ICBS
records. The mean distance between the Jewish villages that settled on taken
Figure 2. Balance tests with 1961 census data. *Note: these are the results of simple
ordinary least squares models with no controls or matching. Villages formed after
1961 are not included in the analysis. 1948 census was not used since it was carried
out before the vast majority of villages were founded and dramatic changes were still
happening due to the war; the resettlement process and any selection that can be
associated with it had not yet started. However, we tested whether the result was null
and balance was found if we regressed the violent history with the 1948-based measure
for ethnic origin and indeed found identical results—villages were not significantly
different in these observable aspects. “Ethnic origin”is coded as 1 = Mizrahi and 2 =
Ashkenazi. The results stay the same with regional fixed effects. This is not a perfect
test, since the data is only available for after the war is not measuring political
preferences—and thus can only indicate orthogonality, not confirm it.
1524 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

lands and the remains of the corresponding depopulated Palestinian village is
5.85 km (SD = 1.94) The locations of these remains can be seen in the map of
the displaced villages in Figure 3.
Similarly, the level of destruction in different villages varied; in some,
houses were demolished with explosives or other tools, leaving little or
nothing. In other villages, stone walls and houses are still standing—and
are sometimes inhabited by resettled Jews. We used data from Falah
(1996), who classified depopulated villages into seven categories ac-
cording to their visibility. These data were used with the expectation that
visibility of the remains increases awareness of the past, so effect sizes will
be larger. Of all the depopulated villages identified, 17.12% were com-
pletely obliterated, while 64.55% had visible, but not inhabited, remains.
In the remaining, 18.32%, Jewish families lived in houses taken from
Palestinians.
Figure 3. Location of remaining and displaced Palestinian villages in Israel.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1525

It is important to note that the remnants of Palestinian villages if still
existing, are very obviously part of those villages. This is because pre-1948
Palestinian building style and materials were drastically different both from
those of pre-1948 Jewish villages and post-1948 Palestinian and Jewish
villages. They are often built using a particular method and rock and following
a traditional design, so ruins are distinctive and are identifiable to individuals
that encounter them as remains of a Palestinian village. In the appendix, we
included photos of what is left of three example villages, matching the three
levels of destruction described above.
Intergroup Contact. While many Palestinian villages were displaced, there are
120 villages in Israel that are homogeneous communities of Palestinian
citizens of Israel (PCIs), as shown in the map of surviving villages in Figure 3.
Some of these villages host refugees who were displaced or uprooted from the
surrounding areas. Even those that do not host actual refugees are home to
survivors who were significantly impacted by the exodus (Haran Diman &
Miodownik, 2023a) and are the close group members of the direct victims of
violence. We hypothesized that, normally, contact with these communities
would lead to a reduction in intolerant attitudes and thus right-wing voting,
similar to the expectation of the intergroup contact theory. But we also
contended that in villages on the displaced land, the result will be the opposite:
right-wing voting will be strengthened because the interaction with the
population that was harmed will be negative, and the psychological defense
mechanism previously described will be activated (see H2b). For this study,
the proximity of Jewish villages and PCI villages was used as a proxy for daily
intergroup contact, because there is usually economic interdependence be-
tween these villages, and PCIs are a key workforce in the agricultural,
construction, and service sectors. In later periods, the two groups also shared
the use of public services, such as mass transportation and malls. We cal-
culated the aerial distance between each Jewish village and the nearest PCI
village using GIS software and the records of the ICBS records (mean =
10 km, SD = 8.06). This serves as a crude, non-experimental proxy for inter-
ethnic contact, as a result of this economic interdependence and shared in-
stitutions, but it is the best measure that can be achieved with observational
village-level data.
The Violent Price of Resettlement. Among the villages built on seized land, there
is a variation in the level of violence used for the displacement of the village’s
former occupants. Morris (1989,2004) sorted the reasons for exodus into six
categories. Some of these included flight as the result of direct violence,
11
and
others included the flight as an indirect result of violence.
12
We used Morris’s
records to create a dichotomous variable that captures which villages were
actually violently displaced to test whether the residents who later settled in
1526 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

those villages tended to vote more for right-wing parties (possibly because of
stronger guilt—see H2c). A total of 77.65% of the villages of profiteers are on
land that was displaced with direct violence (SD = .416). Morris also gathered
evidence regarding whether there were massacres in each village, and we
included a similar variable to test whether villages that were established where
a massacre occurred have a similar pattern (11.69% of the villages, SD =
.326). Additionally, a greater number of people displaced by violence may
lead to increased guilt and make the possibility of refugee return more salient.
Thus, wider victimization will lead to increased guilt. We used two measures
to observe this variation: the 1945 population of the depopulated villages, as
documented in the British survey of Palestine (mean = 1763, SD = 2546); and
the 1998 number of refugees and their descendants from every village, as
documented by Abu-Sitta (2010) (mean = 12,159, SD = 18,119).
Method and Controls
In the following section, the results of a naive
13
ordinary least squares (OLS)
linear regression model are presented for illustrative purposes and to dem-
onstrate that our findings are not the result of suppression effects (i.e., those
that only appear when controls are used). However, for the substantive test of
our hypotheses we use coarsened exact matching (CEM, see Iacus et al., 2017;
Blackwell et al., 2009) in our linear regressions, and out analysis is centered
on it. This was done to account for spatial interdependence, temporal effects,
ideological identification, and village-level characteristics and to reduce the
imbalance in our model, using the data sources we describe below. With this
approach, the ability to infer causal relationships from the data is further
enhanced. Matching is used to limit confounding and bias in the estimation of
treatment effect with observational data by increasing the balance in the
data—meaning that across the key variables matched for, the two categories
will be similar, since units from each group are compared to the closest unit in
the other group. CEM is superior to other matching methods because it re-
quires fewer assumptions, limits the influence of researcher decisions on the
outcome, and is fast and easy to implement.
The treatment variable was the indicator of whether a village was located
on taken land.
14
We also controlled for the sub-district, election year, village
size, economic standing, and settling movement. This means that the CEM
algorithm compared observations from the same year, area, ideological or-
ganization, village size,
15
and village socioeconomic level,
16
so that the main
plausible difference between them is whether a village is located on violently
taken land. Next, observations are disposed of randomly in order to reduce the
imbalance in covariates between treated and control groups. The data on these
control variables were gathered from the ICBS records.
17
Since data is only
available after the war, it does lead to the danger of post-treatment bias
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1527

(Montgomery et al., 2018). We make sure our results are robust both with and
without the controls, to balance the bias arising from either omitted or post-
treatment variables; however, it is inherently a problem with no solution that
limits our ability to draw causal conclusions (King, 2010).
Including the CEM weights in our analysis enabled us to account for the
ideological homogeneity of rural villages in Israel as a result of the
ideological associations of the settling movements. This means that we
compare every village that settled on taken land to a village that belongs to
the same settling movement but did not settle on taken land in order to
calculate the size of the effect. This serves two purposes: first, it accounts
for the possibility of selection bias in the decision by settling movements to
place villages on seized land; second, it allows for a focus on the small
differences in generally homogeneous voting patterns created by a violent
history, thus challenging our theoretical expectations. By comparing
observations from the same election cycle, we account for changing
contexts and temporary effects that change over time, as is necessary with
panel data. Further, by comparing villages from the same area, we account
for the possibility of spatial interdependence, which is always important
but is particularly useful in historical persistence studies. Finally, village-
level characteristics such as size and socioeconomic status were introduced
because they may affect voting patterns and be correlated with residing on
taken lands, so including them eases concerns that these may have been
confounding variables.
18
Overall, matching on observable variables will not allow us to isolate the
cognitive dissonance mechanism, since our study suffers from an ecological
fallacy.
19
However, the matching does allow us to account for the central
drivers of right-wing voting in Israel and show that they do not confound our
results. Namely, the base of the right-wing in Israel is among the poorer
classes, peripheral towns, and Mizrachi communities (Getmansky & Zeitoff,
2014, p. 593). We match socioeconomic status, sub-district, and village size to
account for the first two, and in the robustness tests we introduce a measure for
ethnicity to account for the third.
Therefore, what the CEM algorithm does is to find for election results from
every village that settled on taken land a comparable village that belongs to the
same settling movement, is in the same sub-district, of the same socioeco-
nomic class, of the same size, whose members identify with the same ethnic
background (only in the robustness tests), and in the same election year; the
only key difference is not being settled on taken land. It then calculates the
differences between each pair of villages and sums them to calculate the
overall effect. Thus, we use the CEM algorithm to increase our confidence that
the difference between the villages is only in the history of the land on which
they reside and to isolate the variation that originates from it by comparing
only very similar villages.
1528 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

Analysis and Findings
Our findings supported most of our expectations in a significant, strong, and
robust manner. With both simple regressions and CEM weights, we con-
sistently found that wartime property transfers continued to affect the electoral
decisions of Jews in Israel, pushing them toward more hawkish and intolerant
right-wing parties. This pattern was found even seven decades after the
Exodus ended. Interestingly, wartime transfers also altered the results of
contact with the damaged group, a previously unidentified and far-reaching
consequence. Additionally, the effect of residing on taken land varied ac-
cording to the intensity of the violence used and the level of exposure to
evidence of the violence. Therefore, the effects are different for the various
village structures, which also are findings that had not been previously re-
vealed. These results are explained in greater detail in the following sections.
The Divergent Effects of Taking Others’Property
Figure 4
20
presents the results of our main models, the effects of settling on
violently taken land in the first Jewish–Arab war (1947–1949) on right-wing
voting in the last 20 elections in Israel. This enables us to test the expectation
detailed in H1 on the positive relationship between profiteering and right
wing-voting. The figure includes the results of the naive model (OLS) and
models that include the weights from the CEM analysis with the controls for
size, economic factors, spatiotemporal explanations, and ideological asso-
ciations. As is apparent from the models, residents of communities built on
land where Palestinians had lived vote more for right-wing parties, even with
matching that accounts for these control variables and which reduces im-
balance (p< .01). The effect size for the entire sample corresponds to a 2%
increase in voting for the right wing, which is identical in size to the effect
found in previous studies on profiteering and voting (Charnysh & Finkel,
2017, p. 813). However, the effect was substantially larger under certain
conditions, as we explain below.
We can strengthen our confidence that the effect is a result of residing on
taken land by looking at the different economic structures of the villages. The
two central rural village types in Israel are the moshav and the kibbutz; the
main difference between them is the land ownership structure. In a typical
kibbutz, particularly in the first decades following the war, the land is col-
lectively owned by the community, and members share the property col-
lectively. Private property rarely existed, and the land was owned by the
settling movement, not the villagers themselves. In a moshav, residents have
ownership of the land and manage it more independently, although still in
cooperation. Among a subsample of villages that belong to the moshav
movement, the relationship described above is stronger—the effect size is
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1529

tripled (p< .0001), as shown in the moshavim column in Figure 3. A 6.89%
increase in right-wing vote share is expected only in moshav villages as a
result of residing on taken land, as opposed to the 1.8% increase across all
villages. Conversely, the kibbutzim column reveals that in these villages, the
na¨
ıve model showed the opposite results (p< .0001) and that they were
insignificant with CEM weights. This suggests that directly owning land may
be an essential factor in the impact of violent resettlement—comparing very
similar kibbutzim that did and did not reside on taken lands revealed no
statistically significant difference while doing the same for very similar
moshavim that did and did not take over land did show statistically significant
and substantially large differences in right-wing voting.
This is an interesting and rather surprising finding that can be interpreted
using both of the theoretical approaches described above. We argue that the
collective ownership of land allows individuals to distance themselves from
violence. Individuals in communities whose land has no violent history can
still feel guilty over the harm caused by their group but can ignore it by
excusing themselves on the basis of not, strictly speaking, owning taken lands.
Similarly, kibbutz members can create an illusion that they are not residing on
taken land and thus avoid guilt in a way that moshav members cannot.
Alternatively, it is also possible that kibbutz members hold stronger leftist
ideological stances, leading them to accept the guilt more easily. But pro-
ponents of the materialist-threat theory could argue that this is the result of
Figure 4. Residing on taken land and right-wing voting.
1530 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

different levels of economic threat on owners and non-owners of land. Both
explanations are equally possible, and in order to better disentangle this
finding, further research on these village structures is needed, following recent
fruitful work in comparative politics that compared the moshav and kibbutz
(Muchlinski, 2021). Overall, the results in this section support H1.
Awareness of the Violent Pasts Increases Effect Sizes
Next, we turn to test the expectation in H2a regarding how evidence of the past
strengthens the main relationship. For the analysis discussed in this sub-
section, the sample included only villages that were created by residing on
taken land, so there can be no identical matching with villages that have no
violent past. Nevertheless, the same controls used for the CEM models are
used here.
21
We found that the greater the distance of a village from the
remains of a displaced Palestinian village, the smaller its share of right-wing
party votes. In other words, proximity to the remains of a violently seized
village, which served as the proxy for greater exposure to evidence of his-
torical violence and a stronger awareness of that history, is associated with
higher right-wing vote shares. This is significant with both the na¨
ıve model
(p< .0001) and with the controls (p< .001). Figure 5 presents the linear
prediction of right-wing vote share by distance from remains in both models.
22
It is clear that villages closer to remains vote more for the right wing.
Figure 6
23
presents the association between the varying levels of visibility
of village remnants and right-wing voting among those that took others’
property. As the figure shows, settlers who live on the land where a village was
completely destroyed and thus has no visible remnants, vote significantly less
for right-wing parties than other villages who also reside on taken lands (p<
.01).
24
The majority of villages on land with some remnants of a former
village do not significantly differ from the other villages with a violent past
overall. However, villages in which Jewish residents live in the former houses
of displaced Palestinians vote significantly more for the right-wing than other
communities who were involved in violent resettlement (p< .0001).
25
This
supports H2a.
Guilt Overshadows Intergroup Contact
Intergroup contact is the most intensively studied cause of prejudice reduction
in social psychology and political science (Paluck et al., 2021, p. 540).
However, research on the importance of the context of contact is still limited.
More specifically, there is inadequate research on how collective history
interacts with contact. Our study is thus consequential to this area of research
by identifying how contact is associated with varying effects of different
historical violence. We propose in H2b that contact will increase the difference
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1531

in right-wing voting between villages with and without a history of violent
resettlement. Figure 7,
26
which presents the linear prediction of the interaction
between distance to the nearest PCI village and residing on land taken through
displacement, is particularly illustrative. Among villages that were not es-
tablished on land taken from displaced Palestinians, proximity to Palestinian
villages leads to a decrease in the vote share of right-wing parties (or,
conversely, greater distance is associated with increased right-wing vote
shares; p< .0001). But among villages that are “guilty”of owning the lands of
displaced Palestinians, proximity to the nearest Palestinian village is asso-
ciated with an increase in right-wing voting (i.e., a greater distance is as-
sociated with a decrease; p< .0001).
Thus, while contact between majority and minority groups can have a
positive influence on reducing votes cast for intolerant parties, this rela-
tionship is reversed if the contact is overshadowed by a history of violence.
27
Among Jewish villages that are very close to Palestinian villages, the
communities who took others’property have a much larger right-wing vote
share. Looking at a subsample of villages that are less than five km away from
PCI villages, violent history is associated with a 7.19% increase in right-wing
voting (p< .0001) and among villages that are less than one km away from a
PCI village, the effect size is 13.45% (p< .05), which confirms our expectation
in H2b.
Figure 5. Right-wing voting among settlers on taken lands and distance from ruins of
Palestinian villages.
1532 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

Do Bloodier Pasts Create Greater Impacts?
In H2c, we also discussed the possibility that pronounced violence during
displacement will be associated with increased effect sizes. The analysis
focused on villages whose land was taken using active expulsion or on which a
massacre occurred. In the analysis of this relationship, along with CEM and
the same controls for socioeconomic status, village size, spatiotemporal ef-
fects, and the settling movement, we matched villages with more violent pasts
to two groups: those that are not on taken land at all (“between groups”) and
those that are, but the land was not taken with direct violence (“between
profiteers”). This allowed for the identification of both the effect of increased
violence by itself and how this effect is pronounced when combined with the
main effect of being located on taken land.
As shown in Figure 8,
28
the results were mixed: villages on land that were
taken violently vote for the right-wing significantly and strongly more than
those not on taken land. This was true with both the OLS regression and the
CEM method (p< .0001; see the second row in Figure 7). However, if we
compare villages where the land was acquired with active expulsion to those
Figure 6. Right-wing voting among settlers on taken lands and the visibility of the
ruins.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1533

where the land was taken as a result of indirect violence, the increased in-
tensity of violence led to strongly increased right-wing vote shares only in the
OLS model (p< .0001) and was not statistically significant with the CEM
method. Villages located on land where a massacre occurred do not signif-
icantly differ in right-wing voting in any of the models or comparisons.
However, a larger number of victims or people hurt by the violence, as
measured either by the 1945 population or the number of refugees in 1998,
was strongly associated with right-wing vote share, even in the CEM model
that included controls for village size. Figure 9
29
illustrates these results. Thus,
there is some indication that more violence leads to more right-wing votes, but
this finding is not conclusive in all model specifications and independent
variable operationalizations, so we cannot fully reject the null hypothesis
in H2c.
Robustness Tests
To increase our confidence in the results, we carried out a long series of
robustness checks that included the use of different model specifications,
various alternative data structures, many new controls, and the introduction of
new data. These robustness tests show that the effect we found is consistent
Figure 7. Right-wing voting and intergroup contact.
1534 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

and robust, rule out many alternative explanations, and may ease some po-
tential empirical concerns. The different tests are described below.
We tested the robustness of our results when they faced several statistical
challenges. The results were all consistent with robust standard errors that
account for heteroskedasticity (see Model A in Figure 10). Although we
accounted for spatial and temporal effects using matching with the election
Figure 8. Right-wing voting in villages on lands that were taken with direct violence.
Figure 9. Right-wing voting among those that took others’property and the number
of Palestinians uprooted from every village.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1535

year and sub-district level, we can also corroborate this with fixed effects at the
sub-district or election year level (see Models C and B) and can cluster our
standard errors by election year or village level (see Models D and G) with
consistent results. We then turned to account for other temporal or social
explanations and had consistent results, which are explained next. Taking
others’property was associated with right-wing voting in all model speci-
fications and with added controls, as shown in Figure 10.
In addition, the year each locality was founded could impact the observed
relationships. This is because different eras had different dynamics in the
interaction between settlers and the Palestinian population when the villages
were founded. As previously noted, some villages that were founded before
the 1947–1949 war were expanded to include Palestinian land, while villages
founded after the war were established on the land of already depopulated
Palestinian villages. In this case, villages that were founded some years after
the war likely would not connect the violent past to their village. Furthermore,
their inhabitants would have had more freedom in their decision to relocate.
We, therefore, tested our results on a subsample that includes only villages
founded before the war (Model H), after the war (Model I), or before 1960
(Model J), which resulted in consistent and even stronger correlations. Using
the CEM process and all other controls, we also tested the inclusion of a
variable that captured the decade a village was founded, gathered from ICBS
Figure 10. Robustness in various models.
1536 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

records, and the results were once again consistent (see Model E). The results
were also consistent when looking only at elections before 1980, which was
done to ease concerns that the results were generated by later movement
between villages that introduced selection bias. The Likud party first gained
power in 1977; in the years that followed, it led to the privatization of rural
settlements and lifted governmental regulation over them. We only looked at
these rural villages because they stayed homogeneous and were closed to new
outsiders, but this policy change arguably made inter-village migration easier,
as villages were more open to new residents who were not just members of
founding families. This may lead to concern over selection bias. For that
reason, we carried out the same analysis just before 1980 and reached identical
results. All this means that the effect is not a result of patterns that arise from
the waves of migration or inter-village movement at specific periods—it is
consistent for subsamples that include various periods in which the village
was founded and years in which the voting took place. The time of settlement
did not matter for the relationship we observed.
Furthermore, the Jewish population in Israel is divided by ethnicity based
on the country of origin of many of the migrants who have relocated to the
state. These groups are usually distinguished as either Mizrahi Jews, who
originate from Asia and Africa, or Ashkenazi Jews that arrived from Europe,
the Americas, or the countries of the former Soviet Union. The former is, or at
least were, substantially disadvantaged because the most powerful positions in
society were held by Ashkenazi groups. Mizrahi Jews are also the electoral
base of the right-wing and are more likely to vote for right-wing parties, in
contrast to Ashkenazi Jews who traditionally are more likely to vote for the
left wing. Therefore, bias in the allocation of these two groups to villages may
create right-wing voting, and the ethnic origin of the residents of these villages
may be a key omitted variable. Luckily, these villages tend to be homoge-
neous, so we could categorize the ethnicities of residents. We used data on the
country of origin of the parents of respondents in the 1961, 1972, 1982, 1995,
and 2008 censuses in Israel, which were provided by the ICBS. We calculated
the mode response to a question on this origin in every village in order to
identify the largest ethnic group in each location and then merged it with our
data set.
30
We found that our results were consistent when the analysis was
conducted only on Ashkenazi villages or only Mizrahi villages as well as
when our binary variable determining whether the largest group is Mizrahi or
Ashkenazi was included in the CEM (see Model F in Figure 10).
Additional Survey Evidence
We also attempted to overcome the ecological fallacy inherent in our ob-
servational group-level study by using evidence from an original survey.
The results validated many of our proxies and showed that taking others’
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1537

property is related to not only right-wing voting but also directly to hatred of
the Palestinians. However, the survey did not test the mechanisms or provide
clear and strong support for any of them. We expand on the survey below.
In order to better understand and gain more confidence in our results, we
carried out a short online follow-up survey among the residents of rural
villages in Israel. A description of the method and questionnaire appears in the
appendix. The survey was carried out on a large online sample provided by the
Panel-Proyect Hamidgan company, which is the leading academic opt-in
survey company in the country and has previously supported thousands of
academic studies in Israel. The survey was approved by a university ethics
board. It was sent to 17,324 Israeli Jews who registered on the survey
platform; 1,293 started answering (9.8% response rate). Of that number,
812 were filtered out with a filter question, “Do you live in a kibbutz, moshav
or other rural settlement inside the green line?”Thus, 352 completed the
survey in full. 62 responses were later excluded for lying in the filter question.
Respondents were asked if they lived in a rural village inside the green line; if
they did, they were allowed to continue to fill out the questionnaire. All
relevant sections of the questionnaire are translated in the online appendix, but
there was also a set of demographic questions the respondents completed
when registering on the online platform.
Since the Israeli population is heavily clustered in cities and urban areas, it
proved difficult to reach a large enough sample, but we were able to collect
290 responses after filtering and testing whether the respondent’s village
actually met the filtering criterion. This makes the individual-level sample
underpowered for investigating the main effects because the small sample size
makes it hard to use interactions or detect mechanisms. However, we can still
test our key assumptions and the validity of our proxies and isolate the effect
on intergroup relations.
First, we assumed that people living in a village with a violent history are at
least somewhat aware of the past. Since denialism about the events of the war
is so strong among the Israeli public and education about violence against
Palestinians in the war so scarce, we expected there to be very low acceptance
and knowledge of that history. We asked respondents the following question:
There are villages in Israel that were established on buildings or land that were,
before the formation of the state, part of a Palestinian Arab village. To the best of
your knowledge, does your house in the village in which you live reside on land
or buildings that were in the past part of a Palestinian Arab village?
Because of the aforementioned tendency to deny the existence of these
events, we allowed survey respondents a few options to inadvertently ac-
knowledge that their land does have a violent history—they could reply with a
direct “Yes”but also with “Maybe, it’s possible”and “I don’t know,”as well
1538 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

as a clear “No.”Figure 11 plots the likelihood of every response by surveyed
individuals who reside in villages that we determined are or are not on taken
lands.
Figure 11 shows that respondents who do reside on taken lands are less
likely to say that they do not live on such lands and more likely to accept this
historical description. From this point on, we focus on the likelihood that
respondents replied with a straight “No”—considering the other responses as
not completely denying guilt, which is the norm in Israeli culture and political
memory. We found that respondents that we identified as living in a village
established on land that had once been a Palestinian village were indeed
significantly less likely to deny that they live on land taken from Palestinians
during the war (p< .01) in a logit model.
Second, we focus only on the group that does live on lands with a
violent history. We used a set of proxies for awareness of the past and can
empirically support this premise. The survey revealed that proximity to
the remnants of a previous village, based on the measure used in the main
analysis, is associated with a greater likelihood that the respondent would
acknowledge living on land taken from Palestinians during the war (p<
.1). Similarly, in villages where Palestinian houses still exist and are
occupied by Jewish residents, such likelihood was significantly higher
(p< .01). Looking at variation in rejection of guilt, as shown in Figure 12,
Figure 11. Responses to whether a village was on land that was once a Palestinian
Arab village.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1539

we can see that the likelihood that a respondent would categorically deny
living on such land decreases as the distance of the village from the ruins
of a previous village decreases. With every kilometer closer to the remains
of a replaced village, a clear trend emerges: respondents are less and less
likely to deny that they live on taken land. Among villages right next to
such remains, fewer than 40% of respondents denied that their village was
on former Palestinian lands which is a staggeringly low share given that
the public consensus ignores any such history. Similarly, as seen in
Figure 13, rejection of guilt directly relates to the visibility of the remains
of a displaced Palestinian village. Additionally, in villages in which there
are residents who live in a seized Palestinian house, a majority of re-
spondents would not deny that their village is located on displaced
people’sland.
Third, we also assumed that right-wing voting will be the natural ex-
pression of prejudice, intolerance, and animosity toward the out-group;
this assumption also requires empirical backing. We indeed found a strong
and significant correlation between both self-reported right-wing ideology
(on a scale of 1 to 10) or voting in the last two elections and the expression
of negative feelings about Palestinians (p< .001), negative descriptions of
Palestinians (p< .001), rejection of refugee return (p< .001), expression of
claims that the Palestinians were not forcibly expelled (p< .001), and
support for the repression of Palestinian attempts to memorialize the
Figure 12. Rejection of the land’s past and distance from remains.
1540 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

Exodus (p< .001). These questions appear in the online appendix. This
shows that right-wing voting and ideology, as opposed to left-wing voting
and ideology, are very closely related to intolerance toward Palestinians as
a group, support for revisionist historical accounts that reject Israeli guilt
for wartime events, and support for policies that reduce the threat of both
refugee return and the threat of Palestinian insistence on the memory of
wartime events.
Using a matching process similar to the one previously outlined but im-
plementing it on the survey data, we once again found that village-level history of
violent resettlement is positively correlated with self-reported right-wing ideology
(p= .065). Testing, if this association depends on age, reveals that it does not; Figure
?? reveals that there is no statistically significant interaction between residing on
taken land and age in their association with right-wing voting, suggesting that this
legacy is time-invariant and stable across generations. Furthermore, we found that it
is also directly and significantly correlated with the expression of negative emotions
towards the Palestinians (p<.05).
31
This survey evidence does not completely
eliminate the ecological fallacy embedded in our empirical strategy. In addition, it is
based on a limited sample, since the studied population is difficult to reach, which
limits the possibility of in-depth analysis. However, it does support our assertions
that our group-level proxies well represent individual processes and beliefs and so
complement the analysis to some extent.
Figure 13. Rejection of the land’s past and visibility of remains.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1541

Conclusion
We investigated the continuing influence of the Palestinian Exodus on the
political behavior of Jewish Israelis. Using a large original data set, a de-
mographic transfer process in which migrants were settled without regard to
their preferences, varied spatial dispersions, and matching, we found that
communities that took others’property after the violence in the first Jewish-
Arab war are more likely to vote for the hawkish, right-wing parties. We relied
on intuition from cognitive dissonance theory and drew from it a series of
novel theoretical expectations that were supported by results showing that the
influence of the Exodus depends on economic structures, that violence alters
the result of intergroup contact, and that physical remnants of the past can
ignite the relationship between historical violence and right-wing voting.
This study advances our understanding of the roots of modern intolerance
and far-right voting, which are both crucially important in contemporary
politics. In recent years, there has been a surge in intolerant and nationalist
attitudes that is frequently accompanied by contentious discourse about guilt
and blame over the past in numerous countries. This study offers an ex-
planation for why these attitudes and beliefs about the past go together, al-
though more research is needed to disentangle the link between ideological
movements and historical negationism.
Our study also contributes to the vast literature on the contact hypothesis
and prejudice reduction by emphasizing the importance of collective history.
There have been divergent findings on the impact of intergroup contact, and
the field is increasingly focused on the conditions in which it succeeds in
lowering intolerance. We offer one crucial variable that exists in many post-
conflict settings. Further research could explore that variable with individual-
level and experimental research designs.
By continuing to study the legacies of violence, this field of research can
advance and open new avenues in areas such as the historical political
economy and the persistence of historical institutions, thus contributing to our
understanding of the deep roots of electoral decisions. Further exploration of
the mechanisms is needed, perhaps including efforts to observe dissonance
directly.
The results also have highly significant policy implications. The Israeli–
Palestinian conflict is intractable while also being central to world politics. A
significant barrier in negotiations, which has repeatedly caused their break-
down, is the question of reparations or a just solution for Palestinian refugees
(Barak, 2005). We have offered some new insights into why this issue remains
unresolvable—leaders who agree to accept guilt over the exodus will face an
electoral nightmare due to the residents of hundreds of villages on taken lands
who will oppose such a compromise, even if it does not affect them in any
material way.
1542 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

Since violent property transfers are a common aspect of territorial conflicts,
they could be an important factor in their protraction. Existing theories all
emphasize the value of territory to the public but then explain this value by
either focusing on the material and strategic importance of land or on the
symbolic importance of land to national narratives and identities (Hassner,
2007;Manekin et al., 2018;Shelef, 2016). Our results support a hypothesis
that an additional micro-level source for why territorial issues are particularly
contentious is psychological. The territorial acquisition is very frequently
accompanied by violence and thus guilt. This dynamic can create an aversion
to compromise that includes not only the rejection of territorial concessions
but also strong resistance to symbolic acts such as official apologies, ex-
pressions of guilt, reparations, or other essential elements of transitional
justice. This makes reaching reconciliation and a peaceful resolution of these
conflicts particularly challenging. Our study explores this possibility and
shows that ownership of disputed territory is associated with hawkishness
even when the material threat is low, but further research is needed in order to
directly observe guilt or dissonance and see how they affect conflict processes.
Acknowledgments
We thank Omer Yair, Chagai Weiss, Michael Freedman, Enzo Nussio, Simon Hug,
Kristian Gleditsch, Stathis Kalyvas, Ana Vilhelmina Verdnik, Jamie Shenk, Samuel
Ritholtz, Broderick McDonald, Mikael Naghizadeh, as well as other participants of the
2021 Jan Tinbergen Peace Science Conference and the T.E. Lawrence Graduate
Workshop on Conflict and Violence in All Souls College, the University of Oxford, for
their helpful comments and suggestions and two anonymous reviewers and the editors
for greatly helping in improving the paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
ORCID iDs
Amiad Haran Diman https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2861-8825
Dan Miodownik https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3825-3911
Data Availability Statement
Replication materials and code can be found at Haran Diman & Miodownik, 2023b.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1543

Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
1. This association is created in our case study by the resettlement of taken land, not
by classical war profiteering that involves overcharging on essential goods.
2. Our theoretical section and predictions are at the individual level, which is where
the mechanism we described takes place. Due to empirical limitations, most of the
testing of the theory is done at the community level, with some additional survey-
based individual-level data.
3. Ideological Zionist organizations that established groups of migrants with the
purpose of constructing and supporting rural settlements.
4. Concern may arise that the villages formed before the war may have a different
dynamic of settling on taken lands than those established after it. We address this in
the robustness tests and in the online appendix and show that our results are
identical for both groups even if they are analyzed separately.
5. There was, however, selection into different settling movements, which we ac-
count for in our statistical analysis.
6. Replication materials and code can be found at Haran Diman & Miodownik, 2023b.
7. See the coding procedure, information on the data, and examples in the online
appendix.
8. Available at https://www.zochrot.org/en/article/54772.
9. See further explanation of coding procedure in the online appendix.
10. We explain the scope of the data set and the exclusion of large cities in Section
9.3 of the online appendix.
11. For example, forced expulsion or transfer, house demolitions, and similar tactics.
12. For example, fear of massacre after incidents in other villages, whisper campaigns
by the Jewish militia Hagana, and so on.
13. With no controls or other specifications.
14. In the analysis of the effect of violence, the treatment variable in the CEM was
variable for a violent displacement or massacre.
15. Measured according to the governmental category it was given (“small rural
village,”“medium-sized town,”etc.).
16. An index produced by the ICBS that captures economic well-being and social
class (mean = .701, SD = .734).
17. The size and socioeconomic variables we used have the corresponding values for
2019 and 2017. Because there are limited historical data, we expect any difference
that results from the allocation after the exodus to be similar across years, and
introducing time-varying variables can be problematic in the matching.
18. For example, increased economic well-being is strongly correlated with a decrease
in right-wing voting (p< .0001, beta = .29), while it is also weakly correlated
with being on Palestinian land (p< .0001, beta = .045).
1544 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

19. Our proposed mechanism is psychological and best studied at the individual level.
We study rural groups, villages, and their micro-level dynamics, so we can only
present ecological correlations. Section 6.7 provides some survey evidence that
supports part of our individual-level claims.
20. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 1 in the appendix.
21. Titled CEM for convenience.
22. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 2 in the appendix.
23. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 3 in the appendix.
24. Thus, these communities do not necessarily vote less for the right-wing than
villages that did not benefit from the violence; they vote less for the right-wing than
other villages with a violent history that is more present in daily life because the
village is on land with more visible remains.
25. While our model controls for economic factors, it is important to note that
the extent of remains from Palestinian villages is positively correlated with the
economic status of the village, unlike the spatial distance from the remains, which
is exogenous to the class of village.
26. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 4 in the appendix.
27. This history of violence varies at the village level, due to our control for spatial
dependence. In other words, two Jewish villages that are a similar distance from
the same PCI village in the same area will be affected differently (i.e., our findings
are not the result of areas with historic violence overlapping with areas with ethnic
tensions, since we have accounted for spatial dependence).
28. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 5 in the appendix.
29. See regression Supplemental Appendix Table 6 in the appendix.
30. We did not use the 1948 census since it was carried out during the war and before
many of the villages were actually built. We were unable to identify a common
ethnicity in 125 villages (15% of the data set), due to data availability constraints
arising from the ICBS’s privacy policies.
31. With standard errors clustered at the village level.
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Author Biographies
Amiad Haran Diman is the Menashe Ben Israel scholar in Lincoln College
and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International
Relations, both at the University of Oxford. They research the causes and
1550 Comparative Political Studies 57(9)

consequences of political violence, with particular emphasis on using
quantitative methods to understand the 1948 Palestine War. Previously they
recieved with distinction a master’s research degree from the Department of
Political Science in the Hebrew University of Jeruslem, and an undergraduate
degree from the gifted high school students program of the Open University of
Israel.
Dan Miodownik is the Max Kampelman Chair in Democracy and Human
Rights and a professor in the departments of political science and international
relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research examines
dynamics of conflict processes, particularly the violent manifestations of
group mobilization, protest behavior, and ethnic polarization, in national as
well as urban settings.
Haran Diman and Miodownik 1551