Tribune. The recent escalation of violence between Israel and Palestine risks fueling the rhetoric of jihadist groups and, beyond these spheres, exacerbating tensions within the national territory. One year before the presidential election, the collective effort must focus on a cold and dispassionate analysis of the conflict.
First of all, it is necessary to make a point to distinguish the struggle of the Palestinians and jihadist terrorism. The two fights differ significantly in nature, goals and the ideologies behind them. In short, the struggle of the Palestinians is nationalist, territorial, while that of the jihadists is transnational and eminently religious. The jihadists criticize the Palestinian groups in particular for participating in the democratic process (accession to power by voting), proximity to Iran, links with political Islam and the fact that they place the law of men above divine law.
Hamas in open conflict with IS-linked groups
These disagreements have always been deep. Abdallah Azzam, tutelary figure of the Afghan jihad, of Palestinian origin, already reproached the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in his time for its secularism, and accused it of being subject to the Communists. In Gaza, if Hamas has oscillated between tolerance and coercion vis-à-vis groups linked to Al-Qaida, since 2015 it has been in open conflict with those (minority) linked to the Islamic State (IS).
This essential distinction between these two struggles (Palestine and jihadism) having been made, they are not totally mutually exclusive and, on many occasions, it has been observed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had fueled the discourse and actions of groups or jihadist individuals. Ahead of the Afghan jihad, Israel’s control of East Jerusalem in 1967 was a pivotal date, when military defeat turned into a feeling of collective humiliation in the Arab world. Subsequently, the reconquest of Jerusalem became a significant theme of jihadist discourse. Israel is presented there as the bridgehead of a hated West in a rhetoric also nourished by an anti-Semitic tropism of a religious nature or imported from Europe.
Representations of the Al-Aqsa Mosque
Abdallah Azzam himself, during his Afghan years, had never lost sight of the conflict and asserted that the establishment of an Islamic state in Afghanistan was the preliminary step to the liberation of Palestine. He wanted to train fighters there who, subsequently, could have stood up to Israel by means of arms, in a conventional manner. In jihadist iconography, the religious symbolism of this reconquest is expressed by the omnipresence of representations of the Al-Aqsa mosque. [de Jérusalem] or the Dome of the Rock. In the sphere of Al-Qaida, the official videos begin with the same opening: a message of solidarity from Bin Laden to the Palestinians; the mention of the conflict in the latest official speeches of the IS testifies to a desire to capitalize on this mobilizing theme.
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