Product Description: This book describes political and sociological developments in Israel before and after the February 2009 elections, alongside an analysis of electoral trends. It provides an effective analysis of contemporary political and sociological Israeli history...read more

Product Description: This book analyzes Palestinian attempts to create an organized military force from the period of the Mandate up to the present day. Beginning with a comparative overview of the relationship between insurgent movements and the quest to build up a standard military, the book looks, first, at how the 1936 revolt galvanized the Palestinian leadership to attempt to create a military...read more

Radical Islam poses a political challenge in the modern world which is like that of no other radical religious movement. Ideologically, it is perceived by Western policy makers as threatening the liberal-democratic ideology by which most states in the West abide and which most other states rhetorically espouse. This book serves as a welcome addition to the intellectual and policy debate on the nature of the radical Islam phenomenon and how to respond to it. The collection is divided into three parts: the first part seeks to understand the Islamic challenge in broad comparative and historical terms, while the second part deals with specific regional case studies, which seek to identify patterns of uniformity and variation in radical Islam across a wide swath of terrain. The third part is policy-oriented, suggesting possible responses to the Islamic challenge. The contributors include distinguished researchers from Europe, North America and the Middle East. This book will be of much interest to students of Islamism, political violence, international security and Middle Eastern politics.

Countdown to Statehood, based on Arabic, English, and Hebrew language sources, analyzes the form that the Palestinian state is likely to take. The book looks at past institution-building patterns in the West Bank and Gaza, the relationship between the PLO and the local Palestinians, and the nature of the conflict with Israel from 1967 through the first year of the Palestinian Authority under Arafat s leadership. A major reference point in this analysis is the Zionist experience of state-building in Israel s own pre-independence era. Not only did the Zionist experience serve as a model of a successful protagonist that Palestinians wished to emulate, but both also began as diaspora-based. These similarities and, even more so, the dissimilarities between these two struggles for national determination allow the reader to assess the potential likenesses and disparities of the future Palestinian state compared to its Israeli counterpart. The concluding chapter analyzes the findings in the broader context of third-world state-building by arguing, contrary to the common wisdom that war makes the state, that more peaceful routes to statehood lead to better states in the post-independence era." (view table of contents)