Threatened by the Worst but Hoping for the Best: Linking Threat, Hope, and Support for Peacebuilding: Evidence from Israel-Palestine and Cyprus

How do threats from violence and hopes for peace shape the opinions of those mired in violent intergroup disputes? Existing studies that examined threat and hope separately, yielded mixed results about their influence on public opinion during conflict. We argue that a nuanced relationship exists between citizens’ threats from violence and their hopes for peace and that this relationship can explain citizens’ attitudes towards conflict-related policies. The argument was tested using original data collected among representative samples of Israelis and Palestinians, two warring populations immersed in an intractable conflict. Results show that the greater the threat from the severity of violence, the more citizens hope for peace, but the greater the threat from the likelihood of violence, the lower their hopes that peace will materialize. This opposite pull negates the potentially positive influence that hope for peace might have on citizens’ willingness to take the necessary steps for the attainment of peace. Implications for the study of the link between threat, hope, and political behavior are discussed.