Food for thought! There are two different, competing terrorist groups, one primarily operating out of Gaza Strip and the other one primarily out of West Bank.
This is one way to describe what Israel is up against!
The popularity of Fatah versus Hamas chart (see below) is a reminder that perhaps too many people living in Gaza Strip or West Bank actually support/sympathize with this terrorism against Israel and the opponents of terrorism in either Gaza Strip or West Bank. Very regrettable!
Notice here the sometimes absurd/abstract language used by these political scientists to describe terrorism e.g. completely neglecting the victims and pretentiously devoid of emotion.
Unfortunately, the study ends in 2018. Thus, it does not include the most recent coward mass killing and hostage taking by Hamas on 10/7/2023.
"In a world of multiple upsetting events, from natural disasters to civil wars, terrorist attacks stand out as particularly alarming. They are surprising, brutal, and generally target the seemingly innocent.
Terrorist groups rely on the shock value of these attacks to gain attention, financial backing, popular support, and new recruits from those who share their anger and thirst for change against what appear to be intransigent governments and their policies.
But when multiple terrorist groups compete for popularity, funding, and new recruits, how do their actions influence one another? ...
For political scientists, the canonical case study of competing terrorist groups is the push and pull between Fatah (the secular Palestinian National Liberation Movement [PLO]) and Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) as they each seek ascendance in their campaigns against Israeli policies toward Palestinian people and their lands. The competition between Fatah and Hamas is a rivalry that has been extensively documented by global watchdogs and professional researchers in the years between 1994, when the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO took effect, and 2018. This is the dataset upon which Gibilisco and Crisman-Cox's research rests. ..."
From the abstract:
"We introduce a dynamic game of outbidding [???] where two groups use violence to compete in a tug-of-war fashion for evolving public support. We fit the model to the canonical outbidding rivalry between Hamas and Fatah using newly collected data on Palestinian public support for these groups. Competition has heterogeneous effects, and we demonstrate that intergroup competition can discourage violence.
Competition from Hamas leads Fatah to use more terrorism than it would in a world where Hamas abstains from terrorism, but competition from Fatah can lead Hamas to attack less than it otherwise would.
Likewise, making Hamas more capable or interested in competing increases overall violence, but making Fatah more capable or interested discourages violence on both sides.
These discouragement effects of competition on violence [???] emerge through an asymmetric contest, in which we find that Fatah uses terrorism more effectively [???] to boost its support, although Hamas has lower attack costs. Expanding on these results, we demonstrate that outbidding theory is consistent with a positive, negative, or null relationship between measures of violence and incentives to compete."
FIGURE 2. Popularity of Fatah relative to Hamas over time
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