The Quantitative History of The Arab-Israeli Conflict

The Arab-Israeli conflict has attracted more attention from scholars than any other conflict in the post-WWII era–with the possible exception of the US-Soviet rivalry. Yet despite the richness of research and data on the Arab-Israeli conflict and Arab-Israeli relations in general, we still lack a comprehensive quantitative history of the evolution of Arab-Israeli relations over the past fifty years. The Quantitative History of Arab-Israeli Relations data-base project was initiated in 1996 by Prof. Zeev Maoz with the aim of filling this factual void, by providing an integrative quantitative data set of multiple aspects of the conflict. The project, supported by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), offers three fundamental layers of information: Quantitative breakdown of facts over time and across meaningful categories on aspects of the conflict, such as economic, military, diplomatic and political interactions between states and domestic processes pertaining these categories within the states. Summary statistics about the conflict as a whole, such as number of hostile interactions fatalities, cooperative interactions, extent of economic costs, etc. Analytic evidence about relationships between or among processes in the conflict, such as between arms races and war, between alliances and conflict, between domestic and international conflict, between inter-Arab relations and Arab-Israeli relations, between economic changes and international conflict, and so forth. The basic framework of this data collection centers on the conception that the cornerstone for understanding this conflict, and others, are the facts of the conflict. The basic events and processes that make up the history of the conflict are caused or influenced by factors that are internal to the states involved, that concern the relations with each other, and their relations with states outside the region. The events and processes of the conflict also influence the internal makeup of the Middle East states, their relations with each other, and their relations with outside actors.