Income Inequality and Conflict Intensification in Mandate Palestine

Abstract

We examine the effect of income inequality on Arab-Jew conflict intensification in Mandate Palestine. Using archival, primary, and secondary sources, we construct a novel panel data set comprising district-level characteristics and conflict intensity across 18 districts over 22 years (1926-1947). We instrument income inequality by combing annual variation in rainfall with cross-sectional variation in pre-Mandate crop intensity, thus exploiting the relationship between crop harvests and agricultural earnings to extract plausibly exogenous variation in income inequality. We find a substantial effect of Jew-Arab income inequality on conflict intensification, which is primarily driven by Arab-in..