Zack Gold
Zack Gold is a Non-resident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, where he focuses on Egyptian political and security developments and US policy in the region. His work on Sinai security and Egyptian-Israeli relations has been published and quoted widely, including the 2015 Strategic Assessment article, “Sinai Militancy and the Threat to International Forces”; the 2014 ICCT Research Paper, “Security in the Sinai: Present and Future”; and the 2013 Brookings’s Saban Center Analysis Paper, “Sinai Security: Opportunities for Unlikely Cooperation Among Egypt, Israel, and Hamas”. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and was a researcher at The Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Gold earned his M.A. in law and diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Tufts University; and his B.A. in political science and communication from the University of Delaware. He twice received the Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship to study Arabic in Oman and Egypt, and also studied Arabic at The American University in Cairo.
Follow him on Twitter at @ZLGold
This paper nuances existing understandings of terrorists’ motivations by uncovering the emotional process of ressentiment in the manifestos of three far-right violent extremists. Through the application of Reinhard Wolf’s framework of discourse analysis, it finds that ressentiment plays a significant role in self-legitimating perpetrators’ attacks, though the resented group is different than expected. Surprisingly, the […]
While the Islamic State’s early years after its expansion from Iraq to Syria are generally considered a success, it was also during this period that internal ideological tensions developed within the group. The emerging faction of al-Hazimiyya, named after the Saudi cleric Ahmad al-Hazimi, instigated a power struggle within the group that posed a serious […]
This policy brief discusses the threat of maritime terrorism in the Tri-border area and the weaknesses of the Trilateral Cooperative Arrangement, a trilateral treaty between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines that was set up to mitigate terrorism in the region. We also highlight the challenges associated with counter-terrorism in the region such as resource allocation […]