Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel

Abstract

Religious leaders greatly influence their constituents’ political behavior. Yet, it is unclear what events trigger nationalist attitudes among religious leaders and why this effect occurs more among some religious leaders rather than others. In this article, I examine the content of Israeli Rabbinic rhetoric during different military and political conflicts. Drawing on an original collection of Sabbath pamphlets distributed to Synagogues, I demonstrate that religious rhetoric is highly responsive to levels of violence for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I find that religious rhetoric and tone are more nationalist during conflict with the Palestinians and that this effect is mediated by religious ideologies toward the state. In contrast, religious rhetoric does not respond to military conflict in Lebanon or other internal Israeli political conflicts. These findings highlight under what conditions religious leaders infuse conflict with a religious tone, arguably making it harder to gain support for political compromise among the religious public.

Keywords

conflict domestic politics Israeli–Palestinian conflict legitimacy religious leaders

Ample evidence exists that citizens take cues from religious leaders when forming opinions about salient political issues (Grzymala-Busse 2012; Djupe and Calfano 2013; Masoud, Jamal, and Nugent 2016). The influence of religious leaders seems especially consequential during conflict, particularly when the conflict involves sacred places or territory (Atran, Axelrod, and Davis 2007; Svensson 2007; Hassner 2009; Manekin, Grossman, and Mitts 2017). Yet, measurement concerns and causal identification challenges have impeded the fine-grained study of religious leaders in conflict settings.

In this article, I explore how religious leaders respond to heightened conflict where religious beliefs play an important role. In this context, do religious leaders serve as a moderating voice or do they contribute to an escalation in violence? I examine this question by analyzing how religious leaders respond to different conflicts in Israel. In the past, religious support by Israel’s leading Rabbis was critical for the peace process, the Oslo accords, and for resolving conflict on the Temple Mount (Usher 1999; Gopin 2002; Hassner 2009). However, recent years have seen a right-wing shift in Rabbinic opinion, and the religious community has adopted a hawkish and uncompromising stance on the peace process.¹ For example, the Israeli police have investigated and pressed charges against several hard-line Rabbis for inciting violence.² In contrast, other religious leaders have been actively involved in peace dialogues.³

Despite the link between religious leaders and violence, the literature often does not consider temporality at all and treats the violent rhetoric of religious elites as if it was fixed over time (Nielsen 2017). I argue that this is not the case and that this oversimplification makes it difficult to understand when religious elites will stoke conflict. Since religious leaders see their primary task as upholding and enforcing sacred values, I argue they are more likely to use nationalist rhetoric during conflict when religious values such as the indivisibility of sacred territory are at risk. In contrast, they will be less likely to respond to conflicts that involve territory which is valuable for strategic reasons but possess less symbolic value.

Other scholarship that focuses on the effects of conflict, such as the “rally ‘round the flag effect,” typically distinguishes between political elites and the masses. However, it is theoretically unclear whether religious elites are more likely to view conflict as a strategic opportunity to become more popular (like elites) or to engage in patriotic impulses (like the masses). I argue that the incentives generated by conflict will be mediated by how one’s religious community views the state, implying that leaders cannot simply bend the power of congregations to their will.

To assess these hypotheses, I collect and analyze the writings of religious leaders from Sabbath pamphlets (Alonei Shabbat). These pamphlets are an important vehicle that Jewish Israeli religious leaders use to communicate with followers on a weekly basis.⁴ Building an original panel data set of over 10,000 articles written by over 200 religious leaders in these religious pamphlets, this article examines weekly changes in religious leaders’ discourse using structural topic models (STMs). I estimate the effect of conflict on religious leader rhetoric by exploiting the variation of conflict intensity over time for different military and political conflicts. To vary the type of conflict, I compare episodes of violence during the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, one of the best-known and longest-enduring religiously linked conflicts in the world today, to other instances of conflict such as the Lebanon war in 2006 or the evacuation of Israeli settlements.

My results indicate that religious rhetoric becomes more nationalist in frequency and tone during times of military conflict with the Palestinians. I find that conflict increases the share of nationalist rhetoric topics in Sabbath pamphlets by approximately 40 percent. I also find that nationalist rhetoric during conflict with the Palestinians changes from a mostly civic discourse which emphasizes statehood to an ethnic discourse which emphasizes fighting and defeating one’s enemies. Examining why conflict has this impact on religious leaders, I compare conflict with the Palestinians to conflict in Lebanon and other internal Israeli political conflicts. I find that these changes in rhetoric are reserved exclusively for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This result is consistent with a theoretical argument, which posits that religious leaders are more likely to reserve their religious ire for conflicts that involves sacred territory. In addition, these results weigh against a salience explanation where religious leaders respond to every conflict as part of a tendency to respond to important political events.

I also consider how religious leaders face different incentives, which may help shape their response to conflict. I propose that religious leaders who belong to religious communities with prior nationalist beliefs will be more likely to view conflict as an opportunity to gain new followers and promote hawkish religious-nationalist opinions among the Israeli public (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). My results suggest that political theology does mediate one’s response to conflict, where religious leaders who belong to communities with favorable attitudes toward Zionism and the state adopt more nationalist language during conflict. In contrast, religious leaders in religious communities opposed to Zionism do not use more nationalist language during conflict.

This article makes four key contributions. First, despite the prominent link between religious leaders and conflict, it is unclear how religious leaders respond to conflict. I help fill this gap by providing a theoretical framework that distinguishes between distinct types of conflict and the political incentives which different religious leaders face. Second, scholarship has recognized that religious conflicts are harder to resolve, but our understanding of the social mechanisms through which this operates remains limited. My results arguably highlight a potential mechanism by which religious leaders help sustain conflict by providing moral authority to continuous state military actions and infusing the conflict with a religious tone.⁵

Third, scholars have mostly looked at religious wars in the context of Christianity or Islam (Toft 2007; Toft and Zhukov 2015). I contribute to this literature by examining Jewish religious leader rhetoric in the context of conflict. The focus on religious leaders also complements existing studies that have mainly focused on other religious actors in Israel such as the religious political parties and radical groups like Gush Emunim (Pedahzur 2012; Mendelsohn 2016) and other studies that have focused on the effects of terror without considering the possible mediating role of religious rhetoric (Berrebi and Klor 2008; Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014; Zeitzoff 2014; Peffley, Hutchinson, and Shamir 2015; Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik 2015; Canetti et al. 2017; Mitts 2019b). Fourth, the article provides a novel methodological approach to studying religious leaders and conflict by combining causal inference tools with big data. This contributes to several other recent works that have examined important determinants of religious leader behavior using text (Genovese 2015; Nielsen 2017). I add to these works by collecting a panel of time-stamped religious materials, which allows me to study changes in the weekly discourse of religious leaders during important political events.

Religious Leaders and Conflict

Despite the prominent link between religious leaders and conflict, there is little systematic work on the impact that conflict has on religious leaders, as expressed by their religious rhetoric. In this section, I outline my hypotheses and their application to the Israeli context.

Indivisible Territory and Different Types of Conflict

Many scholars note that conflicts which involve indivisible goods are harder to resolve. Typically, these indivisible goods relate to territory, the heart of many conflicts (Johnson and Toft 2014; Toft 2014). When the disputed territory is viewed as sacred, conflict can even take on a religious tone (Appleby 2000). These religious conflicts tend to be longer, more violent, and deadlier than other conflicts (Toft 2007).

However, scholars disagree why some territory is perceived as indivisible. According to Fearon (1995), a rational choice framework would argue that there are few issues which are inherently indivisible. Rather, this framework attributes the existence of indivisible goods to domestic factors or other mechanisms. In contrast, other work argues that there are sacred spaces which are inherently harder to resolve by division, such as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (Hassner 2003, 2009). In addition to sacred spaces, territory may be viewed as more precious if it was part of one’s homeland. For example, Shelef (2016) finds that homeland territory that has been lost increases the likelihood of future conflict.

Representing a middle ground between rational choice and constructivist theories, Goddard (2006, 2009) argues that territory can become indivisible due to social constructs. Specifically, territory which is initially divisible can become indivisible due to uncompromising claims made by political elites. In turn, political elites become locked into these intractable positions due to the need to maintain legitimacy. According to this view, territory can become indivisible due to political processes. This implies that the process is also reversible where indivisible territory becomes suddenly divisible.

Building on this theory of legitimacy, I argue that in addition to political elites, there are other elites in society who actively enforce the indivisibility of territory: religious leaders. Due to their moral authority, religious leaders are uniquely situated to help enforce claims of indivisibility (or potential compromises) with appeals to religious scripture and authority. Indeed, research has shown that religious leaders have a large and substantive influence on a host of controversial moral political issues, even when these messages are crosscutting (Djupe and Calfano 2013; Ben-Nun Bloom, Arikan, and Courtemanche 2015; Masoud, Jamal, and Nugent 2016; Margolis 2018). Moreover, exposure to religious teachings leads to more charitable giving and pro-social behavior (Warner et al. 2015; McClendon and Riedl 2015; Condra, Isaqzadeh, and Linardi 2017). Finally, religious leaders can also use prayer times to mobilize for street protests (Butt 2016).

One way for religious leaders to enforce claims of indivisibility on territory is to merge together nationalist and religious messages in their sermons. Yet, the desire for religious leaders to engage in religious-nationalist rhetoric should not be the same across all conflicts. Rather, this need should be stronger for conflicts that involve territory with high symbolic value that is perceived as indivisible (Manekin, Grossman, and Mitts 2017). In contrast, they should be less likely to attach religious value to territory which only contains strategic value (Zellman 2015). This suggests the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Religious leaders are more likely to engage in nationalist rhetoric during conflict that involves territory with symbolic value.

Religious Ideology and the State

My second hypothesis builds on literature which discusses the “rally ‘round the flag effect.” This effect refers to the boost in popularity for political leaders due to conflict. One important finding from this literature is that the effect of conflict on presidential popularity is mediated by political elites (Baker and Oneal 2001; Baum 2002). However, it is theoretically unclear to what extent religious leaders use conflict to gain followers (like other political elites) or respond reflexively with more nationalism (like the masses).

According to the former scenario, religious leaders may use nationalist rhetoric in an opportunistic manner. Specifically, during times of conflict, there is an opportunity for religious leaders to gain more supporters in a fragmented religious community (Berman 2009). If the median individual becomes more extreme at times of conflict due to a “rally ‘round the flag effect,” leaders vying for their support also must shift toward the more extreme. At the same time, we would expect that the potential for religious leaders to gain more followers using nationalist rhetoric will differ according to their religious communities’ relationship to the state. An important part of a religious group’s ideology is its political theology and political standing with the state (Philpott 2007, 2009). Consequently, when a religious group enjoys a good relationship with the state, religious leaders will have more incentives to use nationalist rhetoric. In contrast, religious leaders who lead religious groups with more ambivalent attitudes toward the state will have fewer incentives to change their rhetoric during conflict. Indeed, nationalist rhetoric could even backfire as some religious communities might penalize a religious leader who is seen as too close to the “secular state” (Juergensmeyer 2008).

In contrast, religious leaders may respond to conflict like other citizens and reflexively use nationalist rhetoric to signal their patriotism (Baker and Oneal 2001; Baum 2002). Under this scenario, religious leaders should respond in a similar fashion to conflict with more nationalist rhetoric, with less regard toward their community’s attitude toward the state. This is also consistent with the mechanism where religious leaders respond directly to the psychological effects of political violence associated with conflict with more nationalism (Bar-Tal 2000; Petersen 2002; Hirsch-Hoefler et al. 2016).⁶

I argue that religious leaders are more likely to act strategically like other political elites. According to several scholars, religious leaders make use of extreme rhetoric as a tool for ideologically outbidding opponents (Blaydes and Linzer 2012; Breslawski and Ives 2019). This extreme rhetoric signals one’s authenticity, as one eschews “political correctness” during times of conflict (Nielsen 2017). This suggests an additional hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: The effects of conflict on religious leaders will be mediated by the religious subgroup’s attitude toward the state.

In the next subsection, I describe how my hypotheses can be applied to religious leaders and conflict in the Israeli context.

Jewish Religious Leaders and Conflict in Israel

Jewish religious leaders have a great influence on religious and political affairs in Israel. Religious political parties will usually seek Rabbinical guidance and approval when deciding how to vote on key political issues of the day.⁷ This influence also manifests itself regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which involves territory that is considered sacred by many individuals. Many religious leaders subscribe to the view that it is forbidden to give away parts of the land of Israel, even in exchange for peace. Some observers believe that prominent conflicts such as the Six-Day War in 1967 (which tripled Israel’s territory) and the trauma of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War (Yom Kippur war) transformed Israeli society.⁸ This was particularly true regarding the religious ideology of Religious Zionism, whose focus shifted from supporting the state to strong beliefs in building settlements and Greater Israel (Shelef 2010). However, it is less clear whether smaller-scale military conflicts would have a similar impact on religious leaders, especially for conflicts that do not involve sacred territory (such as Lebanon).

In addition, the attitudes of religious leaders are not religiously or politically uniform in Israel. An important cleavage issue among religious leaders in Israel is a group’s political theology (Philpott 2007), as expressed by its attitudes toward Zionism and the state of Israel. On one end of the spectrum regarding attitudes toward Zionism are Haredi Rabbis who on religious and ideological grounds are opposed to Zionism. One reason for their opposition was a strong Haredi concern that secular Zionism violated traditional religious belief regarding the Messianic process (Ravitzky 1996).⁹ In contrast, leaders from the Religious Zionist community have a more favorable attitude toward Zionism and the state of Israel. This group primarily sees Zionism as the beginning of the Messianic process.¹⁰

These differences in religions theology have important political and social implications. For instance, the Religious Zionist community in Israel is more likely to support more hawkish political parties who have taken a leading role in the settlement enterprise, while Haredi political parties tend to not involve themselves in foreign affairs. In addition, members of the Religious Zionist community serve in the army with many becoming officers, while most Haredim learn in religious seminaries and abstain from army service (Cohen 1993).

Impact of Religious Leaders on Conflict

Finally, it is important to consider the following question: what impact does nationalist rhetoric by religious leaders have on conflict? In this context, it is important to distinguish between the logic of civil war onset and dynamics during civil wars (Cederman and Vogt 2017). While religious leaders respond to conflict, it seems unlikely that religious leaders initiate the precise timing of conflict in most contexts. First, conflict is often times initiated by the other side, catching religious leaders unprepared. Second, most religious leaders have no direct access to state or military power. However, even if religious leaders do not initiate the onset of conflict, they may still play an important role during conflict and contribute to the likelihood of future conflicts.

For example, religious leaders can provide support for acts of political violence during conflict and help determine who is a legitimate target (De Juan 2008; Hegghammer 2013; Basedau, Pfeiffer, and Vu 2016; Hassner 2016). Other scholars also note that militant groups involved in conflict are increasingly likely to use religious rhetoric to help overcome collective action problems that plague mobilization efforts during conflict (Toft 2007; Berman 2009; Isaacs 2016; Breslawski and Ives 2019). In some instances, religious leaders can even serve in an advisory or leadership role, like religious leaders who helped set up the Jewish Underground in Israel (Perliger and Pedahzur 2011). In the next subsection, I elaborate upon the Sabbath pamphlets, my data source of religious leader discourse.

Converting Religious Pamphlets into Data

To study the effects of conflict on religious leader discourse, I converted religious texts from over 100 weekly leaflets into a format that can be analyzed quantitatively using web scraping and text analysis techniques (Grimmer and Stewart 2013). The overall sample size is 10,968 articles written by 250 different religious leaders over a ten-year span (2006 to 2015). This section and the Online Appendix describe in more detail how I built this unique corpus.

Religious Pamphlets

Religious leaders in Israel systematically communicate their opinions in several ways. In contrast to other religious traditions (Djupe and Calfano 2013), the local sermon is a relatively insignificant channel in Israel. Indeed, many local Synagogues and prayer services do not have a weekly Sabbath sermon due to the long prayer service (over two hours), cost of hiring a Rabbi, and religious prohibitions on microphones. Moreover, when there are sermons on the Sabbath, religious prohibitions on electronic recording (and travel) prevent their diffusion to larger audiences. In response, religious leaders in Israel have created other forms of religious communication such as audio tapes, radio shows, and religious pamphlets (Caplan 1997). In this article, I focus on religious pamphlets, which are viewed as a very prominent channel of religious communication. Qualitative evidence also suggests that the pamphlets have become an important institutional part of the Synagogue experience as other forms of electronic media are prohibited on the Sabbath (Caplan 2006).

According to a prominent overview on Israeli religious pamphlets, the motivations for producing and reading the weekly pamphlets are threefold (Caplan 2006). First, the pamphlets serve as a media alternative to the “secular” media in Israel. While the secular media is viewed by religious leaders, and large parts of the religious population as “biased” against religion, the pamphlets allow for a more positive religious perspective on the religious and political issues of the day (Cohen 2000; Rashi 2011). Second, the pamphlets serve as a gateway for connecting religious leaders to the mass religious public. While most scholarly work is “inaccessible” to most of the religious population, the pamphlets are written in a way that allow “ordinary” people to access religious leader’s opinion on religious and political matters. In this regard, they are part of a greater trend toward folk religion in Israel which includes visiting graves of famous Rabbis and religiously inspired music. Third, the great diversity of pamphlets reflects the fragmentation of the religious community in Israel. As noted by Caplan (2006), a widespread platitude in Israel is that “if your organization does not put out a pamphlet, it does not exist.”

While it is hard to quantify precisely the scope of the phenomenon, older estimates suggest there are over 1.5 million pamphlets published weekly (Israel’s total population is less than 9 million people).¹¹ Considering that the religious population who frequent a Synagogue on a weekly basis is estimated to be about one million people, this indicates that there are more pamphlets being published than those who go to Synagogue. Pamphlets are usually sent out in the mail and distributed by local organizations or volunteers to neighborhood Synagogues. Most Synagogues have a table where a multitude of pamphlets are put out prior to the Sabbath, and it is common for people to take several pamphlets when they attend Synagogue during Sabbath prayer. These pamphlets are also frequently read during the prayer service, a practice that has attracted Rabbinic criticism (Caplan 2006).

Many pamphlets contain advertisements, which mostly fund the costs of publishing. The pamphlets are typically eight to ten pages, which contain articles from the same five to six scholars on different topics. The typical pamphlet—like a newspaper—contains several genres. There is usually a main article that ties in events from the weekly Bible reading with current events. While the purpose of the article is usually homiletic, it is not uncommon for the discussion to focus on current political events.

Finally, most pamphlets are affiliated with religious movements. While Ultra-Orthodox pamphlets are less involved with politics, most Religious Zionist pamphlets are loosely affiliated with political parties. In other words, while having no explicit political affiliation, most make endorsements around elections for specific parties and will allow political entrepreneurs to advertise in the pamphlets.¹²

Sampling and Generalizability

My analysis focuses on religious leaders whose teachings are available in religious pamphlets. These pamphlets include articles by important senior religious leaders and articles by religious educators who are not well-known outside of their local community. My analysis, however, does not include religious leaders whose teachings are only available in other formats such as audio or video, due to the logistical difficulty involved in converting Hebrew audio or video to quantitative data.

I developed a sampling frame of written pamphlets using a combination of methods: multiple visits to different Synagogues across Israel, expert interviews, Israel’s National Library catalog, and Internet searches. With these methods, I identified over 25 pamphlets that are circulated nationally and over 400 pamphlets that are circulated locally among different Haredi communities.

As indicated by the sampling frame, the pamphlets differ in several important ways (see Online Table A1). First, they differ in which religious community they target: Religious Zionist, Ashkenazi Haredi, and Sephardic Haredi. Second, pamphlets differ in their circulation (ranging from 3,000 to 180,000), year they were first established (1984 to 2014), and their target audience (youth, the nonreligious, local community, or the well-educated). While it would be ideal to randomly sample from this sampling frame, this method proved unfeasible as many pamphlets are not available in any archive or only available at Israel’s National Library. Thus, I chose a stratified sample based on the following criteria: importance of the pamphlet, target audience, and ease of collection.

For the Haredi communities, I randomly sampled pamphlets from an independent online archive, which contains overtime copies of 200 distinct pamphlets.¹³ These pamphlets are typically distributed to local Haredi Synagogues, where the pamphlet is a written lecture by one religious leader. From the online archive, I randomly selected 20 percent of pamphlets from a large collection of 15,000 pamphlets.¹⁴

For the Religious Zionist community, there are nine pamphlets that are delivered together nationally to virtually all Religious Zionist Synagogues.¹⁵ I chose two important pamphlets that represent different segments of the community. The first pamphlet, Be’ahava Uve’emuna, is a well-known leaflet associated with Yeshivat Machon Meir, which represents the more hawkish wing of the Religious Zionist community.¹⁶ The second, Shabbat Beshabato, the first pamphlet to be published on a weekly basis (since 1985), is associated with the more mainstream part of the Religious Zionist community.¹⁷ Notably, each of these pamphlets contains about five to ten articles by a diverse set of leaders in the Religious Zionist community.

To complete my sample, I grouped together fifteen “independent” pamphlets that are distributed by other organizations. These pamphlets are typically distributed independently by activists and either engage in outreach or represent a “fringe” ideological community. From this group, I selected Sichat Hashavua, the pamphlet with the largest circulation. This pamphlet is associated with the Chabad movement, a well-known Haredi group known for its outreach to nonreligious Jews in Jewish communities around the world.¹⁸ Similar in style to the Religious Zionist pamphlets, this pamphlet also contains five to ten articles by a diverse set of religious leaders in the Chabad community.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of the sample. The sample is diverse but not strictly representative. It leaves out rarer and harder-to-access pamphlets, so the results say more about popular mainstream writers than fringe figures. The availability of issues also varies by pamphlet, so although I do my best to collect all of them, there are gaps due to availability. As such, I am confident in these results for the religious leaders, in the mainstream Religious Zionist and Haredi communities, who are religiously and politically influential in Israel. However, they may not hold if I were able to look at rarer or more niche pamphlets (such as the very nationalist Eretz Yisrael Shelanu or anti-Zionist Neturei Karta pamphlets) that play a more marginal role in Israeli society.

Measurement of Key Variables

To measure religious rhetoric, I used STMs. Specifically, these methods classified the large collections of religious texts into distinct themes/topics by looking for associations or clustering between words (Blei 2012; Grimmer and Stewart 2013; Lucas et al. 2015). In these models, a topic is defined as a collection of words where each word has a higher or lower probability of belonging to a topic. In addition, each document is composed of multiple topics. Using STM allows me to include covariates in the topic model, such as author or year (Roberts et al. 2014). This helps improve the precision of the topic model, since it can incorporate information about the texts in the analysis. Similar methods have been used by scholars to measure the political content of sermons, support for the Islamic State (ISIS), and Jihadism (Woolfalk 2013; Mitts 2019a; Nielsen 2017).

Using an STM, I identified ten main topics in the corpus, including nationalist and religious topics.¹⁹ Figure 1 plots the key words and topic labels for these ten topics.²⁰ As noted in the figure, most topics are concerned with religious and ethical teachings. For instance, prominent topics include writings that emphasize religious and legal scholarship (topics 2 and 4), mysticism (topics 7 and 8), and texts that cater to parents and kids (topic 5). In contrast, nationalist writings (topic 1) stress modern political and national concepts such as the state, land, community, and army.²¹

Figure 1.

Topics in the religious corpus. “F” indicates words that are most frequent in each topic. “FREX” indicates words that are both frequent in and exclusive to each topic.

A closer look at the nationalist texts indicates that the discourse reflects a religious nationalist discourse that places Zionism in a religious context rather than a secular nationalist discourse (Online Figure A3 shows snippets from the highest-ranked nationalist texts). The texts also do not hesitate to give right-winged nationalist advice that is critical of current government policy, including hawkish opinions such as more Jewish legislation or annexing settlements. Overall, the rhetoric is very hawkish, where the government and the army are encouraged to take harsh measures against the Palestinians during conflict.

For data on weekly conflict, I use a (0/1) dichotomous variable. I define military conflict with the Palestinians as the start and end of hostilities for the three most recent military operations in Gaza (Operations Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, and Protective Edge).²² For a more fine-grained measure of conflict, I use data on the weekly number of Israeli and Palestinian casualties between 2006 and 2015.²³ These data also distinguish between Palestinians killed by Israel’s security forces or Israeli civilians and between Israeli civilians or security forces killed by Palestinians. Finally, I examine five other political events where one would anticipate higher levels of nationalism: the 2006 Lebanon War, settlement evacuations, protests concerning the drafting of Yeshiva students to the Israeli army, Israel’s large-scale social justice protests of 2011, and national elections.²⁴

Empirical Strategy

To estimate the effect that conflict has on religious leaders, I use a panel with two-way fixed effects. This model exploits the variation in conflict over time to assess its impact on the weekly proportion of religious leader discourse on nationalist topics. I propose the following model:

Y_{i, j, t} = α_{i, t} + β {conflict}_{t} + γ_{j} + δ_{p} + ∊_{i, t},

where the outcome variable Y is the topic proportion for nationalism made by Rabbi i in pamphlet j. The main explanatory variable β is the presence of conflict for week t. The model also includes γ_j, a fixed effect for each religious leader that controls for unobserved characteristics over time between different religious leaders, and δ_p is a year fixed effect to control for common factors that change over the period. Standard errors are clustered by religious leader.

Validity of Design

One threat to the empirical strategy is that since religious figures play a large role in politics, they can influence Israeli political leaders to pursue conflict. Under this scenario, the relationship between conflict and religious rhetoric would be spurious if religious leaders are influencing the onset of conflict—either by causing terror attacks or by influencing Israel military behavior. To overcome this problem, I exploit the variation of conflict intensity over time. For example, by focusing on conflicts with Gaza, I am exploiting the relative lack of violence in Israel before and after these conflicts. Moreover, the comparison of religious leader discourse during several different periods of conflict should allow for estimates of the impact of conflict on religious leader discourse.

Thus, the identification strategy relies on two key assumptions. First, that in the absence of conflict, the trends of religious leader discourse would remain the same. Second, that the precise timing of conflict is exogenous to the weekly content of each document. This is quite plausible since it is unlikely that Palestinian violence or Israeli military strategy is driven by the exact contents of a weekly pamphlet.²⁵ While the overall long-term effects of these publications are to plausibly move the Israeli religious public or religious politicians to adopt more right-wing opinions on the conflict, it is unlikely that specific documents drive short-term events (see also Figure 2 where I test for this possibility). However, one might also be concerned that religious leader rhetoric is correlated with other factors that do predict conflict such as influence on settler activities or Israeli religious political leaders. Conditioning on the content of prior documents provides a way of controlling for these factors, helping mitigate (partially) the effects of omitted variable bias. This strategy is similar in spirit to a difference-in-differences approach that uses the variation of conflict over time to control for possible time-specific effects. However, it must be acknowledged that this design does not strictly allow for making causal inferences.

Figure 2.

Nationalist rhetoric and Israeli military operations in Gaza. The plot shows the mean measure of nationalist rhetoric made that week with 95 percent confidence intervals. Conflict periods are highlighted.

Impact of Conflict on Religious Rhetoric

I present the results for my main specifications using an OLS panel fixed effects regression in Table 1 (see equation [1]). The estimated results from column 2 indicate that religious leaders increase their nationalist rhetoric during conflict with the Palestinians by 0.04 percentage points on average.²⁶ The effect is both statistically significant and substantively large. The results imply that conflict increases nationalist rhetoric by approximately 40 percent (baseline mean of 0.1). These changes in nationalist topic frequency during conflict come at the expense of other topics such as religious or legal scholarship (see Online Figure A7).²⁷ These changes are also larger than the shifts in topic frequency associated with the seasonal changes in the Biblical reading cycle (see Online Figure A5) and higher than estimates reported in other recent papers using STM.²⁸

Table 1.

Impact of Israeli–Palestinian Conflict on Nationalist Rhetoric.

Variable	Nationalist Rhetoric
Variable	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4
Military conflict	.049 (.013)	.043 (.012)		.043 (.011)
Military conflict	.049 (.013)	.043 (.012)		.043 (.011)
Political ties to coalition			−.001 (.006)	.003 (.006)
Political ties to coalition			−.001 (.006)	.003 (.006)
Economic conditions				.003 (.003)
Economic conditions				.003 (.003)
Rabbi fixed effects	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Year fixed effects	No	Yes	No	Yes
Observations	10,968	10,968	10,968	10,968
Adjusted R ²	.437	.437	.434	.437

Note: Standard errors are clustered by Rabbi.

One might be concerned that Rabbinic response to conflict would be dependent on the political climate, wherein stronger ties by religious leaders would increase their likelihood of pursuing nationalist rhetoric.²⁹ However, as shown in column 3, there is no significant relationship between nationalist rhetoric and political ties. Column 4 indicates that the impact of conflict on nationalist rhetoric is not affected by the religious ties to the coalition or economic conditions (proxied by the quarterly unemployment rate).³⁰

In addition to an increase in the prevalence of nationalist rhetoric, the results in Figure 3 suggest that the content of rhetoric shifts during periods of conflict with the Palestinians. For nationalist rhetoric, the figure suggests that during periods of nonconflict, there is an emphasis on developing the state. In contrast, during periods of conflict, there is an emphasis on Israel’s fight with its enemies. Thus, one can detect two types of nationalist rhetoric, where the more hawkish version is emphasized during conflict with the Palestinians.

Figure 3.

Impact of Israeli–Palestinian conflict on nationalist rhetoric. This plot shows the distribution of words in nationalist discourse during periods of conflict and nonconflict. Word color indicates the uniqueness of the word, with blacker nodes having a more positive association with conflict. Word size is proportional to the number of words in the corpus devoted to the topic.

Robustness of Results

In this section, I present several robustness checks to increase the confidence in the results. First, I assess whether the results are due to the possibility that religious leaders are relating to the salience of current events. In that case, one would anticipate that their religious rhetoric would change in response to other major political events in Israel. In Table 2, I run my main specification but examine periods where there were important political conflicts in Israel. As indicated by Table 2, other important political events, including the 2006 Lebanon war, have no significant effect on nationalist rhetoric. This implies that religious leaders do not respond to all important political conflicts (like newspapers) but respond selectively to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which involves a dispute over sacred territory.

Table 2.

Impact of Other Political Conflicts on Nationalist Rhetoric.

Variable	Nationalist Rhetoric
Variable	Model 1	Model 2	Model 3	Model 4	Model 5
Second Lebanon war	.015 (.015)
Second Lebanon war	.015 (.015)
Settlement evacuations		−.007 (.010)
Settlement evacuations		−.007 (.010)
Israel Defense Forces’ draft protests			−.009 (.013)
Israel Defense Forces’ draft protests			−.009 (.013)
Social justice protests				−.007 (.008)
Social justice protests				−.007 (.008)
National elections					−.008 (.010)
National elections					−.008 (.010)
Political ties to coalition	−.013 (.006)	−.013 (.006)	−.013 (.006)	−.013 (.006)	−.015 (.006)
Economic conditions	.006 (.004)	.006 (.004)	.006 (.004)	.006 (.004)	.007 (.004)
Rabbi fixed effects	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Year fixed effects	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Observations	10,968	10,968	10,968	10,968	10,968
Adjusted R ²	.435	.435	.435	.435	.435

Note: Standard errors are clustered by Rabbi (see Table 1).

Second, I assess to what extent nationalist rhetoric is conflated with words that simply describe events during periods of conflict. In order to perform this analysis, I acquired a list of fifty common words that are used by the media during conflict in Gaza (Fogel-Dror, Shenhav, and Sheafer 2018).³¹ I then reran the analysis without these terms. The results in Online Table A3 imply that the results remain statistically significant, although the estimates are smaller in magnitude. In addition, Online Figure A6 indicates that after removing conflict words, there is still a distinct form of hawkish nationalism that uses language such as “terror,” “enemy,” “united,” and “enough.” Overall, these results indicate that part of the effects of conflict on nationalism are driven by the description of conflict.

Third, I assess whether religious rhetoric responds to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or does it cause conflict. To examine the possibility of reverse causality, I plot for each military conflict religious rhetoric five weeks before and five weeks after each conflict. As indicated by Figure 2, religious rhetoric largely increases after conflict starts, suggesting that conflict drives rhetoric. This suggests that religious leaders respond to wartime dynamics but seem unlikely to be driving the actual conflict events. In addition, rhetoric tapers off after the termination of conflict, suggesting that conflict does not have long-term effects.

Fourth, I show that the main results are robust to different measurement choices. Thus, I rerun the main specification using a more fine-grained measure of conflict: Israeli and Palestinian casualties. Consistent with the results above, Online Table A4 indicates that Israeli and Palestinian casualties are associated with higher levels of nationalist rhetoric. The results suggest that the effects of military conflict are similar in magnitude to the effects of about 15 Israeli casualties or 500 Palestinian casualties. This magnitude implies that casualties during military conflict are primarily driving the results. Interestingly, the results also suggest that this increase is primarily driven by Israeli military casualties and Palestinian casualties caused by the Israeli army. In contrast, Israeli civilian casualties have no statistically significant effect on nationalist rhetoric.

Finally, I show that the results are not strictly dependent on the choice of ten topics in the corpus. I show this by rerunning the topic model, varying the number of topics. I then plot the model estimates separately for nationalism, using the main two-way fixed effects specification. As indicated by Online Figure A7, the estimates remain significant and largely similar when increasing the number of topics beyond ten (eleven to fifteen topics). However, the results are not robust for fewer than nine topics. This is due to the fact that the nationalist topic becomes less distinct, merging with other related topics (such as education, events, and Bible). This implies that the results are largely robust to the number of topics, with an important caveat that the number of topics is large enough to allow for a distinct nationalist topic.

Religious Heterogeneity

Why does rhetoric by religious leaders become more nationalist during times of conflict with the Palestinians? To examine what is unique about violent events involving the Palestinians, I explore to what extent there are heterogeneous effects of conflict for different types of religious leaders.

Figure 4 plots nationalist rhetoric by religious leaders overtime, distinguishing between religious leaders from different religious groups. The figure shows interesting differences between religious leaders, both in overall levels of nationalism and overtime trends. For instance, religious leaders from Ultra-Orthodox communities have low levels of nationalism, which remains steady over time. In contrast, leaders from other religious communities have higher levels of nationalism that varies over time.

Figure 4.

Nationalist rhetoric by group over time. This plot shows the proportion of nationalist rhetoric over time for each religious group.

To access to what extent these overtime fluctuations are driven by conflict, I rerun my main specification, distinguishing between religious leaders from different religious groups. The results in Figure 5 imply that not all religious leaders respond to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the same way. Specifically, Religious Zionist and Chabad leaders respond to conflict with more nationalism. In contrast, Haredi leaders do not use more nationalist rhetoric during conflict, even if this rhetoric could be used to attract more followers.³² Interestingly, Online Figure A9 implies that more nationalism during conflict largely comes at the expense of “worship” topics (for the Religious Zionist and Chabad communities) or “scholarship” (for the Haredi communities).

Figure 5.

Impact of Israeli–Palestinian conflict on nationalism, by religious group (see Table 1). The plot shows the coefficients and 95 percent confidence intervals for the main religious groups in Israel.

Potential Mechanisms

One potential explanation for these differences relates to religious leader ideology and support for nationalism, where religious leaders who oppose nationalism remain indifferent during conflict. This would support the argument that differences in political theology mediate nationalist tendencies and that religious leaders are unlikely to stray in the short term from important tenets of political theology (Philpott 2007).

Related, one can attribute these differences to social factors such as the level of varying service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) across religious groups (Cohen 1993). Specifically, we would expect that nationalist rhetoric would increase for religious leaders who belong to communities whose constituents serve in the IDF (Religious Zionism and Chabad). According to this explanation, differences between religious leaders relate to the need to express empathy during conflict, where this need is higher for religious communities whose families are actively participating in conflict. If this is the case, these results are consistent with the broader “rally ‘round the flag” literature, where the pressure to signal allegiance is larger for religious leaders whose communities are more actively engaged in the conflict.

Conclusion

Recent work titled “God’s Century” argues that conflict in the twenty-first century will be highly influenced by religion—helping determine whether conflict descends into a drawn-out civil war or reconciliation and peace (Toft, Philpott, and Shah 2011). Prominent examples of conflicts where religious beliefs play an important role include conflict between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq and Syria, between Hindus and Muslims in India, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. These conflicts are marked by recurring rounds of violence and their intractability.

In that vein, this article has examined how religious leaders in Israel respond to different types of military conflict. By showing how religious leaders are more likely to engage in nationalist rhetoric during conflict with the Palestinians, my findings provide evidence that even short bouts of violence have an effect in shaping and politicizing the messaging of religious leaders. My findings also show that religious leaders respond in a stronger nationalist manner to conflict which involves sacred territory (conflict with the Palestinians) and that these effects are mediated by the political ideology of one’s religious community toward the state.

This article contributes to previous literature on religion and conflict by providing a fine-grained analysis on religious leaders and their rhetoric during conflict. They highlight one potential mechanism for why religious conflicts are harder to resolve, where religious leaders frame conflict in a religious light. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that political leaders should provide incentives for religious leaders to moderate their nationalist rhetoric during conflict. In addition, reconciliation events between prominent religious leaders during conflict may help prevent religiously inspired forms of violence.

Finally, several key limitations to the study should be noted and exploited as avenues for future research. First, future research should examine to what extent religious leaders respond to conflict like other secular leaders. According to the “rally ‘round the flag” literature, both elites and masses may move in a more nationalist direction. While my results are consistent with this literature, it is beyond the scope of this article to analyze the Israeli press generally. I choose to focus on religious leaders since they are exceptional actors due to their unique moral authority. Second, future research should also examine in more detail to what extent religious leader rhetoric has causal effects on conflict—such as in influencing military actions, government policy, or people’s political behavior.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material, Online_Appendix_JCR_RandR_Final - Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel

Supplemental Material, Online_Appendix_JCR_RandR_Final for Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel by Michael Freedman in Journal of Conflict Resolution

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material, Replication_Files_JCR - Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel

Supplemental Material, Replication_Files_JCR for Fighting from the Pulpit: Religious Leaders and Violent Conflict in Israel by Michael Freedman in Journal of Conflict Resolution

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I thank Fotini Christia, Rich Nielsen, and Guy Grossman for their valuable guidance and comments on this article. I also received valuable comments from Nadav Shelef, David Singer, In Song Kim, Elizabeth Dekeyser, Reid Pauly, Weihuang Wong, and Yair Fogel-Dror. I also benefited from feedback received during the 2015 Ronald Coase Workshop and the MPSA 2016 conference.

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by the Israel Institute.

ORCID iD

Michael Freedman

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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