I had a few problems with the study, to be honest.
First, as the author notes, "tactical success" (insurgents stopped/killed/etc) is far from being the same as "strategic success" (which is what counts in the end). In the IDF's case, it might well be argued that some of its tactical counter-terrorism measures, while enhancing immediate Israeli security, have fanned radicalism in the long term--for example, the election of a Hamas government in 2006, and its subsequent take-over of Gaza.
Second, I'm a little unclear whether the post-2005 data includes rocket attacks from Gaza. If it did, and the data were extended through to the end of 2007, the trend lines would look far more negative than Figure 1 suggests. It certainly doesn't include Israeli external operations related to Palestinian armed groups, notably the 1978 invasion of South Lebanon, or the 1982-2000 occupation of Lebanon. (Also, given that the data is from terrorism database, it presumably should exclude attacks against the IDF and only include attacks against civilian targets.. which again may raise some questions about the utility of the data.)
Third, Figure 3 gives a rather particular view of settlement growth, suggesting that it flattened after the mid-1980s. This, however, is because the chart depicts numbers of "settlements" not the "number of settlers", and most settlement in the 1990s and subsequently has occurred by the expansion of
existing settlements or the establishment of satellite settlements (or outposts) rather than "new ones," as the chart below shows:
(In fact, the numbers are higher than this, since CBS data excludes East Jerusalem.)
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