Open-source intelligence is readily available and inexpensive. Hamas collected a lot of information from open sources, mainly the Israeli press. In this case, Hamas exploited the fact that Israel is a democratic state with a relatively free press to get valuable information for its operations. This sort of collection activity became more organized after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and was Hamas’s main source for strategic analysis. This chapter describes the intelligence content Hamas gathered from open sources and that content’s contribution to its activities.

Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organization Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas’s intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the author analyzes the development of Hamas’s various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas’s activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

Since its founding in 1987, the political and ideological dimensions of the terror organization Hamas have been well discussed by scholars. In contrast, this innovative study takes a new approach by exploring the entire scope of Hamas’s intelligence activity against its state adversary, Israel. Using primary sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, the author analyzes the development of Hamas’s various methods for gathering information, its use of this information for operational needs and strategic analysis, and its counterintelligence activity against the Israeli intelligence apparatus. The Hamas Intelligence War against Israel explores how Hamas’s activity has gradually become more sophisticated as its institutions have become more established and the nature of the conflict has changed. As the first full-length study to analyze the intelligence efforts of a violent non-state actor, this book sheds new light on the activities and operations of Hamas, and opens new avenues for intelligence research in the wider field.

The conclusion chapter sums up the contribution of Hamas’s intelligence to the organization’s activities associated with its struggle against Israel. It details the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s efforts to gather intelligence on Israel, counter Israeli intelligence activity, and assess Israel’s intentions and capabilities. This chapter also examines lessons from the case study of Hamas that may be applied to a general understanding of intelligence warfare by VNSAs.

The chapter analyzes Hamas’s use of intelligence to conduct successful operations against Israel. The combination of intelligence gathering and clandestine activities, as described in the previous chapters, led to several high-quality operations against Israel. For example, in an attack in 2006, Hamas successfully abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit and was able to keep him hidden for years, despite Israel’s efforts to find and rescue him in the tiny Gaza Strip. In addition, Hamas created a “bank” of targets through its intelligence-gathering efforts. This structured list of vulnerable quality targets was used to focus rocket attacks against Israel and find locations for suicide attacks.

The chapter deals with Hamas’s human intelligence (HUMINT) activity. Hamas, of course, makes use of the most traditional method of intelligence gathering – information from human sources. This chapter details how Hamas first recruited local sources for short periods and specific missions. Gradually, sources were recruited who could operate outside of Israel; these sources were sent on longer-term and more advanced missions. Hamas also used the internet, i.e., social media and email, to contact and handle potential sources. This chapter also describes how Hamas turned collaborators with Israel into double agents and ran operations using these agents.

This chapter describes how Hamas operatives set up tactical observation posts during the First Intifada, the years after the Oslo Accord, and the Second Intifada, and explores the systematization of this activity after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Eventually, Hamas established the murabitun, a border patrol force that staffs observation posts and serves as the first responder to any Israeli incursion, and instituted an observation section of the ʿIzz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The members of the latter section used more advanced equipment than had previously been deployed and documented their findings for in-depth analysis. This chapter also describes Hamas’s efforts to develop and operate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for observation missions.

The chapter sheds light on Hamas’s signal intelligence (SIGINT) and cyber warfare. It describes how, in the first decade of the 2000s, Hamas gained SIGINT capabilities that made it possible for Hamas to intercept the camera broadcasts of IDF UAVs, as well as the IDF’s visible tactical communication traffic. In the 2010s, Hamas began to invest in cyber warfare. This chapter also surveys Hamas’s successful use of various hacking methods to penetrate the smartphones of IDF soldiers and officers, extracting information and installing spyware and using social engineering techniques; descriptions of several real-life cases are included for illustration.

Chapter 17 considers Goethe’s extensive collections, which ranged in subject matter from art and ethnography to natural history and scientific instruments, and also included a vast library. It uses the period around his Italian journey (1786–8), when his involvement with art and art objects was particularly intense, to highlight tensions within his approach to collecting which apply throughout his career as a collector. The chapter also addresses the complexity of classifying Goethe’s collections, owing to their scale and diversity, and to the variety of his own collecting habits.

The coda traces the ways that the reprints featured in this book have continued to reverberate in the culture at large. It asks what to make of the reprinted book and the home library in our current age which is, on the one hand, increasingly online, and, on the other, increasingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of books and bookshelves.

This chapter makes a case for writing the institutional history of museums as the history of process. Rather than focusing on the choices of individuals or structural elements that uphold museums’ claims to permanence and stability, I examine manuscript and published catalogues to excavate the nineteenth-century museum’s ‘procedural rhetoric’, the way processes were used persuasively to support systems of meaning and instil specific values. Through comparative analysis of the Hunterian museums in London and Glasgow, I argue that processes of sequencing, labelling and organizing objects on paper were deployed to forge and consolidate, or, alternatively, disrupt and dispute, each museum’s nascent institutional identity. Catalogues function as ‘instituting genres’—that is, genres of writing that enact and thereby make visible the dynamic processes of institutional formation and evolution.

Humans have a long history of destroying wildlife in a variety of ways. Initially, this was mostly manifest as hunting for food and removal of competing predators. Some species were exterminated by these activities. Later came collection, especially of rare species, for museums and private collections. Plants and bird eggs were especially vulnerable, as were attractive invertebrates such as butterflies. Despite protective legislation, collection continues around the world, and the wildlife trade is thriving. Persecution of ‘pest’ species also continues apace, where the definition of pest is highly contentious. Badgers are killed regularly, as are animals likely to predate game on shooting estates. Predation of wildlife for human consumption is in most cases now only carried out on a small scale, but marine fish are an exception. They continue to be harvested around UK shores, and elsewhere, in unsustainable numbers. Pressure on fish stocks is exacerbated by increasing numbers of human consumers.

In his chapter on Proverbs, Christopher Ansberry provides a refreshing introductory approach to the book, not least because he starts with the history of interpretation rather than letting thematic concerns dominate. He identifies five patterns within the history of the book’s interpretation, including a focus on character formation, debates about the nature of its ‘wisdom’ and place in the canon, interest in its reception via matters of date and authorship, the discovery of comparative ancient Near Eastern material, and current, expanding interdisciplinary approaches to the book. A section on the fundamental nature of the book takes on matters of form, genre, poetic features, and the idea of a ‘collection’, whilst granting admiration rather than suspicion to the complexities of the book’s sayings. Likewise, the structure of Proverbs, though containing many parts, comes together into a coherent whole, an ‘anthology’, to which each piece contributes. Ansberry concludes by proposing four ‘dominant’ themes in the book: the fear of the Lord; wisdom; moral order and created order; retribution and reward.

Surrealism thrived within environments characterized by a profusion of collected objects that inspired the surrealist collector’s work and thought. André Breton (in Paris) and Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (in Sussex) had well-documented collections that reveal the practice of collecting at the root of surrealist theories of the object; they anticipated recent explorations of new materialism by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and of the object as thing by W. J. T. Mitchell. Breton saw “concealed realities” and “latent possibilities” in objects in a way that foreshadowed the “vital materialism” Bennett finds in things. Like Breton, Penrose and Miller favored objects that had had a ceremonial function in their culture of origin, remote in time as well as geographically, as a way of understanding themselves better. In both collections, the impressive sculptures from the Pacific Islands exemplify the surrealist desire to orient the self within a larger world through objects capable of looking back.