Examining the effect of repressive and conciliatory government actions on terrorism activity in Israel

•We examine the impact of the Israeli government actions on terrorist activity.•This study endogenizes repressive and conciliatory government counterterrorism policies.•An increase in repressive actions leads to a reduction in terrorist attacks.•An increase in conciliatory actions has no effect on terrorism.•Terrorists' response to government actions is symmetric.

This paper examines the impact of repressive and conciliatory actions by Israel on terrorist activity using vector autoregression. Increases in repressive actions lead to a significant reduction in terrorist attacks. Conciliatory actions, on the other hand, have no effect.