Suicide Bombing as a Strategic Weapon: An Empirical Investigation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad

Using twice-yearly data from 1991 to 2003, we analyze the incidents of suicide attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Given the exploratory nature of the question, we have first estimated the relevant coefficients by using a Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Ratio and then checked their robustness by reestimating the model with the help of a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) as an interrelated system. The results indicate that the two groups deliberately use suicide bombings as strategic weapons within the larger Israeli-Palestinian political milieu. With the Western world locked in an armed struggle with the militant extremists of Islam based on millenarian ideologies, this study emphasizes the need to develop appropriate analytical capabilities to distinguish among terrorist groups and their motivations, ideologies, and tactics. At times, Palestinian politics are dizzyingly incoherent,…at times bloody, at other times perfectly clear.—Edward W. Said

[1]  Martha Crenshaw,et al.  The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of Strategic Choice , 1998 .

[2]  J. Muth.  Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements , 1961 .

[3]  Walter Enders,et al.  The Effectiveness of Antiterrorism Policies: A Vector-Autoregression-Intervention Analysis , 1993, American Political Science Review.

[4]  Lori A. Allen.  There Are Many Reasons Why: Suicide Bombers and Martyrs in Palestine , 2002 .

[5]  Youssef H. Aboul-Enein.  God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East , 1997 .

[6]  W. Quandt,et al.  Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad , 1995 .

[7]  R. Lebow.  Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis , 1982 .

[8]  P. Ruiz.  The Harvard Medical School Guide to Suicide Assessment and Intervention , 2001 .

[9]  C. D. Smith.  Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict , 1988 .

[10]  Barbara F. Walter,et al.  You have printed the following article : Sabotaging the Peace : The Politics of Extremist Violence , 2007 .

[11]  Sara Roy.  Hamas and the Transformation ( s ) of Political Islam in Palestine , .

[12]  Dipak K. Gupta,et al.  Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology , 2001 .

[13]  Gregory D. Saxton.  Repression, Grievances, Mobilization, and Rebellion: A New Test of Gurr’s Model of Ethnopolitical Rebellion , 2003 .

[14]  Lamis Andoni.  Searching for Answers: Gaza's Suicide Bombers , 1997 .

[15]  B. Weingast,et al.  Vicious Cycles: Endogenous Political Extremism and Political Violence , 2000 .

[16]  H. Khashan.  Collective Palestinian frustration and suicide bombings , 2003 .

[17]  R. Pape,et al.  The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism , 2003, American Political Science Review.

[18]  Hisham H. Ahmed.  Palestinian resistance and ‘suicide bombing’: causes and consequences , 2005 .

[19]  Christian Karner,et al.  Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence , 2000 .

[20]  M. Bloom.  Ethnic conflict, state terror and suicide bombing in Sri Lanka , 2003 .

[21]  Shaul Mishal,et al.  The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence , 2006 .

[22]  N. Kreitman,et al.  Definition of Suicide , 1988, British Journal of Psychiatry.

[23]  Mia Bloom,et al.  Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Outbidding , 2004 .

[24]  J. T. Wulu,et al.  Regression analysis of count data , 2002 .

[25]  Dipak K. Gupta,et al.  Government Coercion of Dissidents , 1993 .