ABSTRACT
Israel is a real-life laboratory for the study of political tolerance, its antecedents, dynamics, and repercussions. Accordingly, aside from the United States, there have been more surveys of political tolerance in Israel than any other country in the world. Fortunately for the study of tolerance in Israel, the seminal work by Sullivan and his colleagues on the subject inspired much of this research, with the first large-scale survey of political tolerance in the country carried out jointly by Sullivan and Shamir in 1980. This chapter presents new findings from our current multilevel study of the impact of chronic and persistent terrorism on support for political tolerance over the long haul. Our goal is to illustrate how new directions of research build on the classic work. By relying on a large number of surveys carried out in Israel from 1980 to 2011, the focus shifts to the “Push” and “Pull” of macro-level conditions on political tolerance, using new methodologies and data to revisit old methodological conundrums and established theories.
