Replication Data for: Survey Experiment on Diversionary War: The Case of Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021

The survey of Israelis (hereafter referred to as the Israel Survey) was conducted between September 18 and 24, 2021, among 994 Jewish Israelis in Hebrew through a local Israeli contractor, commissioned by Dynate Inc. The survey questionnaire was distributed after a certain allocation for gender, age (in 10-year increments), and regional blocs based on the census published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. The current study used an online list experiment targeting the interpretation that Operation Guardian of the Walls was a diversionary war waged to preserve Netanyahu’s political career and life. We used the list experiment in this study because we lack direct evidence to determine that the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 was a diversionary war and have only circumstantial evidence that supports the notion that Netanyahu had a motive to use the conflict for political purposes. Because the evidence is tenuous, it is impossible to completely reject the justification that this armed conflict is purely the implementation of a national defense policy in response to Hamas' attack, and never a political use of force. Thus, when there are sensitive issues in a questionnaire, the social desirability bias, SDB, may prevent us from obtaining a true value. A greater concern in the present case is the possibility of unmeasured confounding between perceptions of diversionary warfare and leader evaluations during the war. We conducted a list experiment as reducing bias due to potential confounders can mitigate the impact of SDB.