Palestinian Islamic Jihad

Islamist Writings on Resistance and Religion

Erik Skare

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755635948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Founded in 1981, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is one of the most important yet least understood Palestinian armed factions, both in terms of its history and ideology. Yet no in-depth translation of its ideological corpus exists. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive account of the ideology of PIJ in the movement's own words. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork and archival research in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon, the book comprises the PIJ's written texts produced since 1979, translated here into English for the first time. In addition to the primary texts, the book includes expert commentary from the author for each source to help explain the context and the broader significance of the documents. The key contention of the book is that although PIJ employs Islamic signifiers and symbolism, its ideology is strikingly similar to the anti-colonialism of the PLO in the 1960s, and in stark contrast to Hamas. A comprehensive resource on the PIJ, it covers: · PIJ beliefs about the Palestinian problem
· what type of Islamism the PIJ espouses
· how the PIJ regards Shiites and Iran
· how it can be understood as an Islamist organization
· what it envisions for Palestinian society in the future This is the only sourcebook available on the PIJ.

Part I

Facts and Stances

What Is Palestinian Islamic Jihad?

Published as several pieces in al-Mujāhid, no. 146-149, June-July 1992.

PIJ was in many ways a response to the void appearing in the Palestinian resistance by the 1980s. The Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) had been defeated in the Gaza Strip in 1971/1972, the PLO had been exiled to Tunisia in 1982, and the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood (later Hamas) refused to engage in armed struggle. There was simply no credible organization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories if one wished to resist violently at the time.

PIJ’s formation process commenced in Egypt in the mid-1970s when a number of Palestinian students began discussing the Palestinian cause. It was there that the future leaders of the movement met—such as Fathi al-Shiqaqi, Ramadan Shallah, Nafidh Azzam, Abdallah al-Shami, and Muhammad al-Hindi. Reading Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, Sayyid Qutb and Muhammad al-Ghazali, and Mahmud Darwish and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, these students began stressing the necessity for the Islamic movement to lead the armed struggle for Palestinian liberation.

Returning to the Gaza Strip in 1981 following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, the Palestinian students soon engaged in fierce debates with the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood on the necessity of violent resistance. While PIJ’s founding fathers stressed the necessity of resistance now, and not later, the Brotherhood and its spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin stressed the importance of proselytization and the strengthening of Islamic values first. As the sympathizers of Islamic armed struggle were assaulted both physically and verbally by Brotherhood sympathizers, the former soon seceded to form their own project.

Spending the first years building an organizational base in the Gaza Strip, PIJ commenced employing violence against Israeli targets in 1984—five years before Hamas. As the organization received attention for the spectacularity of its attacks, most of its leaders were arrested and imprisoned by the mid-1980s by the Israeli occupation authorities. Between 1987 and 1989 several were also deported to Lebanon in an Israeli attempt to quell the insurgency.

As al-Shiqaqi and the PIJ spiritual leader, Abd al-Aziz Awda, found themselves in foreign lands, the deportation had unsuspected consequences for their movement. Primarily, it meant that the PIJ leadership could travel freely, cooperate with others, and broker alliances with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah. From initially being a group of students who had never touched a rifle, PIJ had become a force to be reckoned with by 1992.

The following text thus matters because it is PIJ’s own recollection of its history up until 1992, which includes its view on the PLO and its role in the Palestinian resistance. Although the author is unknown, this text features in the collected works of Fathi al-Shiqaqi, who is most likely the author.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a Palestinian Islamist fighting organization that crystallized organizationally in the early 1980s in occupied Palestine. It did so after an intellectual and political dialogue, which commenced in the mid-1970s among some Palestinian students during their time in Egypt. This dialogue included methodological issues related to understanding Islam, the world, and reality, and how to see and understand history in general and Islamic history in particular.

The starting point was the systematic understanding of Islam as a creed, of the principles of religion, of jurisprudence, and of law, based on the Qur’an and the sunna. The early movement’s consciousness of history, and its deep sense of this method, was a way of seeing the world as it was. It thus facilitated awareness and discerning the means for change, which led to the realization of Palestine’s particularity in the contemporary Islamic problem. Palestine was therefore considered the central cause of the Islamic movement and of the Islamic umma. This assumption was based on the Qur’anic understanding, as explained in surat al-isra’ and several other verses in the Holy Qur’an and the prophetic hadith.¹ The systematic discernment of history and reality contributed to the formulation of this theorem: the centrality and particularity of Palestine.

The trajectory of contemporary history is embodied in the colonial activity against the Islamic homeland that has lasted for two centuries. This activity has centered and focused on Palestine after it overthrew the Islamic political system, and it did so with the establishment of the territorial state and the promotion of Westernization as a model for culture and life in Muslim societies from Egypt via Turkey to Iran. Reality confirms that the peak of evil and the satanic colonial polarization embody themselves on the land of Palestine through the Zionist entity allied with the colonial West.

The aforementioned intellectual and political dialogue among some of the Palestinian Muslim intellectual youths during their studies in Egypt in the late 1970s turned into a political climate from which an organizational nucleus emanated. This nucleus later set out for occupied Palestine in order to build the revolutionary Islamic movement, surrounded by the aware masses, enthusiastic for the salvation of self and homeland under the banner of Islam. The goal was to realize the neglected duty in order to solve the existing problem at the time with nationalists without Islam and Islamists without Palestine. The Palestinian nationalist movement excluded Islam as an ideology, with its absence from its programs. The traditional Islamic movement, on the other hand, postponed answering the Palestinian question and jihad in Palestine for both objective and subjective reasons. Palestinian Islamic Jihad thus came to answer the Palestinian Islamic question, and it raised the slogan: Islam, jihad, and Palestine. Islam as the starting point, jihad as the means, and Palestine as the goal for liberation.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad passed from its inception through three main stages. The first included mass, political, media, and tactical work. The second witnessed armed jihad and fighting against the enemy. The movement entered its third stage on October 6, 1987, with the eruption of the popular intifada in Palestine.

The First Phase

The first phase commenced with the return and settlement of the first nucleus, which was formed during the studies in Egypt. This stage witnessed mass work, political work, media work, and strategic work, which the land of Palestine was thirsting for. This phase thus witnessed an Islamic and jihadist discourse paving the way to realize the neglected duty as long as the believing Palestinian masses yearned for it.

The movement’s student role emerged in all of the universities and institutions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at that stage. At the end of 1981, the student block representing Palestinian Islamic Jihad, The Independent Islamists, was formed in the Islamic University in Gaza. It received positive results in the first elections that took place in January 1982, although the movement had existed only for a short period. The idea of Palestinian Islamic Jihad soon spread quickly in most of the Palestinian refugee camps, all of the cities, and a great number of villages, and the followers of the movement were concentrated in a number of mosques in addition to the universities.

The movement began to issue the magazine The Light (al-Nūr) in Jerusalem from early 1982. It was originally the magazine of the Society of Muslim Youth in Jerusalem, which had ceased for more than a year before some brothers in Palestinian Islamic Jihad began working secretly with the Society’s management to reissue the magazine. Indeed, the magazine continued to be published intermittently until the end of 1982 and it expressed the ideological and political position of the movement. The movement began to publish the magazine The Islamic Vanguard (al-Talīʿa al-Islāmiyya) in the United Kingdom by the end of 1982, and it expressed the same ideological and political line. The Islamic Vanguard was secretly reprinted in Jerusalem and spread throughout Palestine a couple of days after first being issued in London.

The Islamic Vanguard had an important impact in the Palestinian street, which pushed the Zionist authorities to find out how it was printed and distributed. The authorities consequently carried out an arrest campaign in August and September 1983, which included dozens of the movement’s members—among them Dr. Fathi al-Shiqaqi. The interrogation of the detainees lasted for five months in the worst conditions of torture, and the case was called the Islamic Vanguard Case as it became one of the greatest political and security issues in that period. The investigation shifted after five months from the publications and the incitement for revolution and jihad to a search for political and security organizational structures, and thus shifting to a search for weapons and military cells. This Islamic group, which included dozens of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s sons, was considered the first Islamic organization arrested since the Zionist occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The traditional Islamic position had in other words avoided a direct political or security clash with the occupation authorities until 1983!!

In those years, Laylat al-Qadr² in the al-Aqsa Mosque witnessed gatherings and mass demonstrations under the care of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as the movement brought the Palestinian masses out into the open for Eid prayer in several areas as an expression of challenging the occupation. Such was the movement’s increasing role at that stage regarding tactical, political, and media work through its role in the universities and in the mosques in all of the cities, villages, and camps.

The Second Phase

Armed jihad against the Zionist enemy was the main justification for the advancement of Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the onset, despite the importance of its intellectual contributions and its distinguished Islamic political line. However, this matter—armed jihad—remained the most important for the Palestinian Islamic movement as it rose to form a new and real addition to solve the problem that existed between the nationalists without Islam!! and the Islamists without Palestine!! Armed military cells belonging to the movement were therefore organized within Palestine under the highest secrecy the first weeks of the movement and from the first beginnings of the first stage. There is thus no automatic separation between the two stages. The political, tactical, and mass work was growing with the launch of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, of course.

In the summer of 1981, the first military cell was organized. However, the armed work began gradually, slowly, and in complete secrecy between 1983 and 1985. Although the enemy raised the issue of armed military cells and the presence of weapons in the movement through its arrest campaign in 1983—the Islamic Vanguard Case—it failed completely in seeing a breakthrough.

The enemy caught Dr. Fathi al-Shiqaqi on March 2, 1986, for the second time, and it was two weeks after the latest military operation carried out by the movement in the Palestinian arena—in Gaza City on February 18, 1986. It was a hand grenade attack on a gathering of Zionist soldiers during a patrol change, and it was connected to the same place that Zionist soldiers martyred a Palestinian citizen one day before that operation. The masses thus considered this courageous operation as a response to the martyrdom of al-Akluk in Palestine Square in Gaza City.³ Dr. al-Shiqaqi was arrested, and the incident was accompanied by the discovery of eight military operations carried out by the movement.

The year 1986/1987 was the year of militant Islam in Palestine. At a time (before the intifada) when the Palestinian nationalist action entered a bottleneck and suffered multiple defeats, Palestinian Islamic Jihad proceeded to lead the armed jihad and to carry out the most important military operations. The operations began with the Buraq operation on October 16, 1986,⁴ by the Islamic Jihad Brigades,⁵ and then proceeded to the al-Shuja‘iyya operation on January 6, 1987.⁶ These operations were carried out with several stabbing operations in between. There was also the great escape from Gaza Central Prison led by Misbah al-Suri and Muhammad Sa‘id al-Jamal, which included six mujahidin from the movement, and there was the killing of Colonel Ron Tal, the commander of the military police in Gaza on August 3, 1986. Yitzhak Rabin,⁷ the war minister at the time, described the killing of Tal “as an exceptional operation that would receive an exceptional response.” There were other heroic operations as well, and the brave heroes of al-Shuja‘iyya—Muhammad al-Jamal, Sami al-Shaykh Khalil, Zuhdi (Fayiz) al-Gharabli, and Ahmad Halis—headed for their heroic operation and illustrious martyrdom. Indeed, Misbah al-Suri had been martyred days earlier.

The heroes of al-Shuja‘iyya were those who led the great escape from Gaza Central Pri...