Playing favorites : Washington's meddling for peace in the politics of Israel and the Palestinian Authority

Abstract

Governments often try to use their foreign policies to influence the choice of who will rule in other countries. However, scholars know strikingly little about this commonplace and consequential phenomenon, especially when it is scoped down to the use of diplomatic tools short of force. Indeed, this lacuna is especially striking in comparison to the voluminous literatures on other forms of international meddling such as military intervention or coercive diplomacy for producing policy change. This project seeks to contribute to the nascent research program on partisan intervention by drawing on the historical record to pose tentative answers to two pertinent research questions in the context of America's Mideast policies. The first topic focuses on occurrence: when are sender states likely to engage in this behavior, and when are they less likely to do so? The second topic focuses on efficacy: when does this policy help achieve the sender state's objectives, and when does it fail? This project seeks to answer these questions by drawing on Washington's peace process diplomacy. It uses official archives and expert interviews to supplement the existing historiographic record, documenting America's efforts to bolster perceived pro--peace leaders in Israel since 1977 and among the Palestinians since 1986. It also explores U.S. decision--making toward Iran as a shadow case for leverage over additional study variables, along with other instances of outside intervention into Israeli politics by European or Arab states. It finds that the issue area of leadership selection intervention is unusually subject to the individualistic preferences of top leaders in the sender state. Because exceptionally blatant meddling of this sort tends to elicit a backlash, self-admitted LSI is therefore discouraged. Instead, practitioners go to great lengths to maintain alternative pretenses that prevent revelation of their true intentions. This inherently complicates the task of legislative oversight, decreases points of leverage for lobbyists or working--level bureaucrats, and magnifies these leaders' subjective interpretation of international circumstances. In short, LSI is intensely personal.