 | Hamas, Popular Support and War in the Middle East: Insurgency in the Holy Land Subjects: Area Studies; Politics & International Relations; Middle East Studies; Security Studies - Pol & Intl Relns; Military & Strategic Studies; International Politics; Political Research Methods; Security Studies - Military & Strategic; Middle East Politics; Quantitative Methods; Terrorism; This book offers a new understanding of the nature of power-seeking insurgent groups by empirically examining the use of violence by Hamas in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Though Hamas has learned to ride the tides of popular support, it remains suspended between its quest to achieve the values of its ardent supporters (reclamation of land through force) and the desire to grow popular support. This tension is reflected in how and when the group exercises violent resistance. The theoretical framework applied in this volume provides a simple construct to understand the dynamics that result in use and non-use of violence under changing environmental conditions by Hamas, but could be applied more broadly to other power-seeking insurgent groups, including ISIL. The book weaves together the dynamics between violent actions and internal and external influences on Hamas, including: expressed values of the group, Palestinian popular support measures, leaders' personalities and innovation (weapons and tactics), Israeli influence and targeted killings, peace processes and conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. With newly assembled datasets on Hamas' violent acts and public statements, Israeli Targeted Killings, historical measures of popular support and extensive field interviews, the book offers a fresh perspective on insurgent group violence by demonstrating under what conditions the group exercises violence or refrains from doing so. This book will be of much interest to both policy makers and students of the Arab-Israeli conflict, political violence, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and international relations in general. Author and journalist Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia on April 18, 1864. After studying at Lehigh and Johns Hopkins universities, he became a reporter and in 1890, he was the managing editor of Harper's Weekly. On assignments, he toured many areas of the world and recorded his impressions of the American West, Europe, and South America in a series of books. As a foreign correspondent, he covered every war from the Greco-Turkish to World War I and published several books recording his experiences. In 1896, he became part of William Randolph Hearst's unproven plot to start the Spanish-American War in order to boost newspaper sales when Hearst sent him and illustrator Frederick Remington to cover the Cuban rebellion against Spanish rule. In Cuba, Davis wrote several articles that sparked U.S. interest in the struggles of the Cuban people, but he resigned when Hearst changed the facts in one of his stories. Davis was aboard the New York during the bombing of Mantanzas, which gave the New York Herald a scoop on the war. As a result, the U.S. Navy prohibited reporters from being aboard any U.S. ships for the rest of the Cuban conflict. Davis was captured by the German Army in 1914 and was threatened with execution as a spy. He eventually convinced them he was a reporter and was released. He is considered one of the most influential reporters of the yellow journalist era. He died in Mount Kisco, New York on April 11, 1916. (Bowker Author Biography) |
