Fatah and the Politics of Violence: The Institutionalization of a Popular Struggle

The institutionalization of Fatah mirrors the evolution of the PLO and the Palestinian national cause generally. This book assists in understanding the factors that have influenced Fatah's politics of violence, and its political path-and the balance between the two-which help to explain the political history of the Middle East in recent decades. Fatah's institutionalization is marked by alternating bases of the organization's legitimacy: organizational, communal, and external. Transformations from one phase to another are distinguished by the shifts in relative importance assigned to the different sources of legitimacy, which in turn dictated different courses of action for the organization.