Simple vs. Complex Learning Revisited: Israeli Prime Ministers and the Question of a Palestinian State G UY Z IV American University When does a decision-maker’s shift on a major policy issue represent a genuine reassessment in his or her beliefs as opposed to tactical maneu- vering? This article provides a framework to improve our confidence that a policy shift represents “complex learning,” which entails the adop- tion of new goals, rather than “simple learning,” which refers to a change in means but not goals. Challenging the conventional wisdom on learning, it argues that decision makers who alter their foreign poli- cies incrementally are more likely to have had a fundamental rethinking of their underlying assumptions on a core issue than those who exhibit sudden shifts in their foreign policy decisions absent a traumatic event. The public declarations of Israel’s three most recent premiers—Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu—in support of the establishment of a Palestinian state are used to illustrate the utility of this framework. Whereas Sharon and Olmert underwent complex learn- ing, Netanyahu’s swift change appears to represent merely a tactical response to pressure from the United States. For more than 25 years, scholars have used learning theory to explain major changes in international politics. This approach has been applied to such dispa- rate areas as shifts in US and Soviet foreign policy (Nye 1987; Breslauer and Tetlock 1991; Bennett 1999), states’ decision concerning entering alliances when faced with international instability (Reiter 1996), the growth in numbers and influence of international organizations, such as UN peacekeeping operations (Haas 1990; Howard 2008), and regional integration (Eising 2002; Bomberg 2007; Bulmer, Dolowitz, Humphreys and Padgett 2007; and Zito and Schout 2009). Since the publication of Lloyd Etheridge’s (1985) Can Governments Learn? learning theorists have largely selected the state, organization, or region as their unit of analysis; comparatively, few studies have focused on the learning pro- cesses of the decision makers themselves. This is unfortunate given the critical impact of decision makers on state and organizational behavior. To help improve our understanding of dramatic foreign policy reorientations, this paper builds on recent scholarship that seeks to return to the individual level of analy- sis in the study of foreign policy learning (Malici and Malici 2005; Malici 2008; Renshon 2008). Author’s Note: The author thanks Aaron Boesenecker, Mohammed M. Hafez, Jeffrey W. Knopf, Shoon Murray, Jonathan Pearl, and Shibley Telhami for their helpful suggestions. The author is also grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Foreign Policy Analysis for their constructive comments. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans, Louisiana, and a co-written paper with Brent E. Sasley at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Israel Studies in Toronto, Ontario. Ziv, Guy. (2012) Simple vs. Complex Learning Revisited: Israeli Prime Ministers and the Question of a Palestinian State. Foreign Pol- icy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2012.00180.x © 2012 International Studies Association Foreign Policy Analysis (2013) 9, 203–222