Following the collapse of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, jihadi terror groups in the Middle East are being reconfigured. While evident and significant differences exist between these groups, they do share a single overriding objective. It’s not geopolitical advantage or national self-determination, but rather, the idea of “power over death.” Whatever else differentiates jihadi ideologies and tactics from one another, all Islamist groups will still seek personal redemption through “sacred violence.” Moreover, core jihadi goals will be unaffected by the recent Israel-Hamas agreement.
Jihadist terror represents a convenient form of religious sacrifice. The rallying cry, “We love death,” is common to Sunni and Shia insurgents. In exclaiming this perverse cry, no fundamental differences appear between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, the Houthi in Yemen, and Hamas or Fatah in Gaza, and in Judea and Samaria. All jihadi forces seek “martyrdom” in order not to die. This is the case even though virtually all terrorist leaders in Hamas, Houthi, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Fatah prescribe martyrdom for their followers but not for themselves.
Despite easily discoverable commonalities of jihadi terror, the evolution of Palestinian criminal violence against Israel displays a singular historical narrative. The original fraternity of Palestinian terrorist groups contained markedly disparate bedfellows. Israel’s “liquidation” justified all manner of indiscriminate harms, and every Arab enemy of Israel was urged to join the obligatory war against “Zionists.” At that time, even Marxists and similarly flagrant “unbelievers” found welcome under the same operational tent.
Presently, things are different. The jihadi terrorist fight is now openly oriented as a “holy war” or religious sacrifice. This unhidden orientation is relentless, persistent, barbarous and potentially irremediable. The Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including the rape and murder of noncombatants, is the most obvious case in point.
In explaining such egregious crimes, history deserves pride of place. Speaking on official Palestinian Authority TV on Nov. 7, 2014, a senior Fatah official blessed all Islamic killers of Israelis, saying, “Jerusalem needs blood in order to purify itself of Jews.” Two days later, on Nov. 9, 2014, P.A. television honored these same killers as follows: “Greetings and honor to our heroic martyrs. … We stand submissive and humbled by what you gave and sacrificed.” A few days later, on Nov. 14, 2014, the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Religious Affairs summarized in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida: “Jerusalem needs sacrifices and blood.”
Who are these prospective “martyrs?” The deepest roots of jihadi terror stem from cultures that embrace religious views of belligerent sacrifice. In these cultures, the purpose of “sacred violence” extends beyond any expectations of civic responsibility. Instead, this purpose goes to the most elemental human fear, the palpable dread of personal death.
With this in mind, jihadi enticements are not difficult to understand as the promised reward for those who sacrifice for jihad is individual salvation. As it says in the Quran, Surah 2:154: “Do not think that those who are killed in the way of Allah are dead, for indeed they are alive, even though you are not aware.”
In the Islamist Middle East, where theological doctrine divides humankind into the dar al-Islam “world of Islam” and the dar al-harb “world of war,” acts of terror against “unbelievers” are defended as expressions of sacredness. For jihadi fighters, individual sacrifice ultimately derives from a feverishly hoped-for conquest of personal disintegration. By adopting atavistic practices, the jihadist expects to achieve an otherwise unattainable immortality.
For jihadists, there are aspects of sacrificial terror that ought never to be overlooked. This two-sided nature of terror/sacrifice, the sacrifice of “the Jew” and the reciprocal sacrifice of “the martyr,” is codified within the Hamas charter and elsewhere as a “religious” problem.
Always, for the Islamist terrorist, the true enemy is “the Jew” not “the Israeli.”
Years ago, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s appointed clergy, preaching on the Temple Mount, affirmed a religious precept that “Palestinians spearhead Allah’s war against the Jews. The dead shall not rise until the Palestinians shall kill all the Jews … .”
Today, when jihadists of any type plan acts of suicide terrorism—that is, when their leaders give orders from Turkey, Qatar, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq for “believers” to make sacrifices of themselves—they leave nothing about immortality to chance. Because dying in the act of killing the “infidels,” “apostates” and “unbelievers” is assured to buy freedom from the penalty of dying, these jihadists can conquer personal mortality by killing themselves. Although nonsensical ipso facto, it is a grand and incomparable bargain, one that deserves much closer consideration in Jerusalem and Washington. For Palestinian jihadists, homicide suicide offers not only a transient “death” for heroic Muslims but also the required annihilation of a religiously despised Jewish state. Accordingly, the promised bargain represents a “win-win” for all jihadi “warriors.”
Though not widely understood, this is the root terror problem in the Islamic Middle East—the jihadi death fear and the consequent compulsion to sacrifice the despised “others.” This often overriding compulsion stems from a doctrinal belief that killing unbelievers and being killed by unbelievers defines the best available path to personal immortality. To counter such fanatical belief, Israel must ultimately think in terms of desacralizing its relentless Islamist adversary and convincing this enemy that variously ritualistic murders of Jews will lead not to paradise and limitless pleasures, but, per the Quran, to untold “terrors of the grave.”
For jihadi terrorists, the violence-based struggle against Israel and America has never been about land, politics, “settlements” or “self-determination.” Always, it has been about God, sacred expectations and immortality. In this regard, Jerusalem and Washington should finally understand that there can be no greater “political” power in the Mideast than the “power over death.” The names of regional jihadi organizations may change, but they continue to embrace terror as a religious sacrifice.