Beyond the Battlefield: Localized Civilian Clashes and Political Attitudes in Violent Conflict

Abstract In protracted conflicts, civilians frequently encounter low-level, hostile actions from adversary civilians in nearby communities, yet the political consequences of these events remain understudied. We investigate this question in the Israeli–Palestinian context, examining how community-level exposure to hostile actions by Israeli settlers shapes Palestinian political attitudes in the West Bank. Leveraging a novel data set containing thousands of geo-coded conflict events from 2010 to 2020 paired with forty-six Palestinian public opinion polls in the West Bank, we find that district-level increases in settler hostilities are significantly associated with heightened political militancy among local Palestinians, associations that are larger and more robust than those from local Israeli military actions. A second empirical strategy examining changes in Palestinian attitudes before and after the establishment of nearby settler outposts reveals that this form of civilian land expropriation likewise leads to modest increases in political militancy among Palestinians in proximate towns. These findings highlight the distinct political impact of localized, low-level civilian actions and territorial expropriation—central but often overlooked features of sectarian territorial conflicts—offering insights for territorial and ethnic disputes globally.