As the Palestinian Liberation Organization engages in negotiations with Israel toward an interim period of limited Palestinian self-rule, this timely book provides an insider's view of how the growing hold of Islamic fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza challenges the peace process. Working from interviews with leaders of the movement and from primary documents, Ziad Abu-Amr traces the origin and evolution of the fundamentalist organizations Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas) and Islamic Jihad and analyzes their ideologies, their political programs, their sources of support, and their impact on Palestinian society. With a solid grasp of the dynamics of these movements, Abu-Amr charts the struggle between the fundamentalists and the PLO to define the identity of Palestinian society, its direction, and its leadership.

The ideology of Islamic fundamentalists is of central importance in the modern world, but it is often distorted or misunderstood by the international media. This insightful study provides a detailed analysis of the Palestinian Hamas movement's world-view, and shows how the theoretical framework developed by thinkers such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyis Qutb and al-Mawdudi is applied to a specific political, social and economic context. Nusse explains the fundamentalist position on recent events, such as the Gulf War, the Madrid peace negotiations and the Hebron massacre, and helps to dissipate myths surrounding modern fundamentalist movements and their overwhelming success as opposition movements in the modern world.

The upsurge in Islamic Fundamentalism throughout the Arab world has had a profound effect not only in the Occupied Territories, but on Arabs living in Israel itself. Israeli Arabs do not, by definition, share the basic ideology which lays out the foundation of the Israeli state. Spiritually, two socio-religious forces are in permanent competition for the souls of the people, established Islam, which enjoys the backing and financial wherewithal of the state, and popular Islam, which is more structurally amorphous at the base, but lurks on the horizon as a viable alternative. As popular Islam leads the impetus for spontaneity of the masses, it is the natural constituency of the fundamentalists. Muslim Fundamentalism in Israel studies the foundations, ideological and organizational, of the movement which has created a new and important dimension to the already complex Arab-Israeli conflict.

This book provides an in-depth account and analysis of Islamic fundamentalism today, and how it has an impact on Israel's relations with the Arab and Islamic worlds. In light of recent events, the book is important for the whole Western world, which now confronts revivalist Islam, both in the Middle East and Europe itself, and even in such far-flung fragments of European civilization as the United States and Australia. This book should be of great help for the West in developing a proper understanding of, and a strategy for dealing with, this movement. Co-published with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

In January 2006 Hamas, an organisation classified by Western governments as terrorist, was democratically elected to govern the Palestinian territories. Drawing on interviews with members of Hamas and its critics, this book offers an analysis of Hamas' understanding of its ideology and the tension between its dual commitment to God and the people.