Armed Violence and Pro-State Mobilization: The Jewish Underground in Israel (1980-1984)

While dominant theories of terrorism and political violence conceptualize violence as primarily anti-state in orientation, directed against governments and their institutions and legitimized through revolutionary or universalist claims, a significant and growing form of political violence does not conform to this model. Across diverse political contexts, non-state armed actors mobilize in defense of the state, framing violence as the protection of the nation, the people, or a threatened moral and political order. Defined here as Pro-State Armed Groups (PSAGs), these actors operate outside formal state chains of command while maintaining ideological, symbolic, or strategic alignment with state institutions. Existing scholarship has largely addressed such actors through the category of Pro-Government Militias (PGMs), situating them within delegation-of-violence and principal–agent frameworks. These approaches assume that states intentionally create, arm, and finance militias to expand coercive capacity while maintaining plausible deniability, particularly in contexts of repression or territorial contestation. While analytically influential, this literature tends to overemphasize state control and instrumental rationality, and to under-theorize the relational, historical, and social processes through which pro-state violence emerges without formal delegation and develops autonomous trajectories. This paper advances a relational and processual approach to pro-state political violence through an in-depth case study of the Jewish Underground in Israel (1980-1984). It asks: How do Pros-State Armed Groups emerge? And, how does their emergence challenge dominant understanding of political violence? Drawing on archival sources and secondary literature, it demonstrates how pro-government violence emerged from the interaction between state institutions, an increasingly institutionalized radical milieu, and the clandestine armed network. Rather than resulting from explicit delegation, underground violence crystallized during moments of perceived existential threat, when segments of a radical milieu already embedded within legal and political institutions radicalized further and organized autonomously, while continuing to benefit from tacit tolerance, symbolic legitimation, and selective enforcement by state authorities. Ultimately, the paper contends that PSAGs constitute a critical yet under-theorized source of long-term political instability, and therefore demand systematic attention in debates on the future of political violence studies.