The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine

Palestinian Islamic Jihad began as a conversation among students. In the second half of the 1970s a group of religious Palestinian undergraduates in Egypt — most conspicuously Fathi Shaqaqi, a medical student at Zagazig University who had grown up in Rafah camp and had been in the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza — argued about why the Islamist movement had so little to say about Palestine and why the Palestinian national movement had so little to say about Islam. Shaqaqi described the founding in exactly those terms: “It began as an intellectual discussion among a group of religious, educated Palestinian youth while they were students in Egypt in the latter half of the 1970s… We saw there were nationalists without Islam, and Islamists without Palestine. The Islamic Jihad Movement came as a solution to this problem, born out of our awareness of Islam and the Quran, as well as of history and reality.”

The break with the Muslim Brotherhood was doctrinal and about sequence. The Brotherhood held that Palestine would be liberated after Muslim society had been remade; Shaqaqi’s group held that Palestine was the road, not the destination — that the confrontation with Israel was the act that would awaken the umma, and that to defer it was to guarantee it never happened. The Iranian revolution of 1979 supplied the proof of concept and the shock: Shaqaqi wrote a book, Khomeini: The Islamic and Alternative Solution, and was imprisoned in Egypt for it. The nucleus of the movement was probably formed around 1980. Shaqaqi graduated in medicine and returned to Palestine in early November 1981, joining friends already back, and organised in Gaza with the preacher Sheikh Abd al-Aziz Awda, whose sermons at the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam mosque in Beit Lahia gave the movement its congregation. It defined itself to its followers, in its own formulation, as “an independent, grassroots Islamist movement engaged in jihad” whose “means of operation combines grassroots and revolutionary work with armed jihad and its goal is the liberation of Palestine from Zionist occupation.”

It began armed operations in 1984, before Hamas existed, and its attacks in the mid-1980s — including the “Gate of Moors” operation in Jerusalem in October 1986 and a prison break from Gaza Central Prison in May 1987 — are widely credited by Palestinian historians with helping create the atmosphere in which the First Intifada erupted. Shaqaqi worked as a doctor at Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem and then as a paediatrician in Gaza; he was arrested in 1983 and held eleven months, arrested again in 1986 and sentenced to four years, and was taken from prison on 1 August 1988 and expelled from Palestine to Lebanon, and then to Damascus, which became the movement’s headquarters. Sheikh Awda was deported to Lebanon in 1988. On 26 October 1995 Shaqaqi was shot dead outside a hotel in Sliema, Malta, while travelling on a false passport, in an operation widely attributed to Israel; he was forty-four. Ramadan Shalah, an economist who had been teaching in Florida, succeeded him and led the movement until illness incapacitated him in 2018; Ziyad al-Nakhalah has led it since.

The record of the movement’s armed campaign is the record of the suicide bombing in its most concentrated form: al-Quds Brigades operations killed Israeli civilians in Beit Lid in January 1995, in the Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv in March 1996, at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 and in a long series of others, and the movement has fought repeated short wars with Israel in Gaza in 2019, 2022 and 2023 in which its commanders and large numbers of Palestinian civilians were killed. It has also produced the most sustained Palestinian challenge to administrative detention — imprisonment without charge or trial on secret evidence — through the hunger strikes of its members, above all the baker Khader Adnan of Arraba, who conducted a series of strikes from 2011 onwards and died in Israeli custody on 2 May 2023 on the eighty-seventh day of his last one.

Politically Islamic Jihad is the smaller and purer of the two Islamist movements, and its distinguishing feature is what it has refused. It rejected Oslo and every subsequent framework; it has never contested a Palestinian election, never joined the Palestinian Authority, never sought ministries or municipalities, and never joined the PLO; it argues that participation confers legitimacy on structures produced by the occupation. It is closer to Iran than any other Palestinian organisation and receives the bulk of its funding from Tehran, a dependence its critics inside Palestine consider its central weakness. The United States designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization in October 1997; the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan have made comparable designations. It remains, four decades on, precisely what its founders in Egypt described: a movement that exists to keep one question open.

Sources

• The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Palestinian Islamic Jihad — Wikipedia
• Fathi Shaqaqi — Wikipedia
• Foreign Terrorist Organizations — U.S. Department of State