In July 2006, Hizbullah, the Lebanese political-military group, managed to do what few such groups, including PLO, never accomplished – deny Israel a medium-term military and political objective. Hamas has recently attempted to do the same in Gaza, arguably with some success. What accounts for the variation in effectiveness between these organizations? This paper explores this question by examining how the strategies organizations such as Hamas, Hizbullah, and the PLO employ for acquiring resources. I argue that resources themselves ultimately prove less significant than the means by which they were acquired. The proposed paper, an initial summary of the findings of my dissertation field research, will be based on interviews conducted in the Middle East, as well as existing public opinion data and statistical analysis using the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset. The literature on asymmetric warfare reflects a consensus that there are a variety of resources, material and non-material, that hybrid military-political organizations require for effective operations. These resources are for the most part acquired from local civilian populations and/or foreign sponsor states. In either case, there are three main strategies which non-state actors can use to convince civilians and/or foreign sponsors to furnish them with the resources they require: coercion, service-provision, and marketing. However, not all of these strategies provide the same quality or quantity of resources. Those who use coercion (violence against civilians, or compelling an unwilling state to provide safe haven) are likely to receive only material support, and will likely be unable to employ strategies for acquiring non-material support later on. Those who use service provision (that is, the provision of social services to civilians or the offer to act as a military proxy for a sponsor state) may find that they receive primarily non-material support from civilians, and that this support is not particularly durable. The most effective strategy is the use of marketing (the use of ideological or ethno-communal appeals to convince civilians or another host state to offer aid) which is most likely to generate a mix of material and non-material resources, and lead to the greatest degree of effectiveness for the militia in question. I argue that this is the best explanation for Hizbullah’s and relatively greater effectiveness and Hamas’ moderate effectiveness as compared with the difficulties experienced by the PLO in Lebanon and Jordan.