In
fact the PIJ has always identified one further step. Having eliminated Israel, the organization
intends to replace it with a hardline Sunni Islamist state stretching from the Jordan
river to the Mediterranean sea.
Active since the early 1980s, for much of the time the PIJ scarcely figured in the terrorist big league. Media attention was mainly focused on al-Qaeda, ISIS, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hamas and Hezbollah. PIJ would spring to prominence only occasionally as it promulgated some particularly heinous atrocity.
That changed on May 2, when prominent PIJ leader Khader Adnan, on hunger strike in an Israeli jail, died after refusing to eat for 87 days.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) decided to meet aggression with aggression, and on May 9 targeted and killed three leading PIJ figures. During the subsequent conflict 15 other PIJ terrorists were killed as Israel struck 371 terrorist targets, including PIJ command posts, rocket facilities, and attack tunnels.
The PIJ, suddenly in the
world’s headlines, retaliated by firing nearly 1500 rockets from Gaza into Israel.
Iron Dome air defenses successfully
intercepted most, but there were three direct hits - one in Sderot, another on
a Rehovot apartment building killing an 80-year-old woman, and a third which
killed a Gazan man working in open fields in Israel.
The media reported that
hundreds of the PIJ rockets launched against Israel misfired and landed inside
the Gaza Strip. The IDF believes that
about a quarter of all the missiles fell short.
In one incident two teenagers were killed when a failed rocket crashed into
a residential area of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.
The PIJ, apparently
firmly established and in the ascendant, is in fact positioned on shaky ground.
Its onslaught on Israel, based as it is in Gaza, depends on the continued
tolerance of Hamas, while for its finances and military supplies it is wholly
reliant on Iran. Neither are rock solid
in their support.
The PIJ is not entirely under the thumb of Hamas. Its
headquarters are in Damascus, while its senior leadership also directs policy from Lebanon, but its active military operations against Israel are
centered in the Gaza Strip. Gaza of
course is in the iron grip of Hamas. Is there room for two active terrorist bodies
in the same small parcel of land?
Apparently so, for the PIJ
is clearly tolerated by Hamas and allowed to carry out its anti-Israel
operations. But all is not sweetness and
light between the two bodies. During the recent flare-up Hamas provided no facilities
or equipment to the PIJ, and it stayed out of the conflict. Moreover, rumor has it that Hamas pressed the
PIJ to agree an early ceasefire. Commentators noted that in celebrating its
supposed achievements during the conflict, PIJ thanked Iran, Hezbollah, and
Qatar by name, but did not mention Hamas.
Hamas and the PIJ certainly
have the common aim of attacking Israel indiscriminately, but there are key
differences between them. PIJ, which is focused solely on military
confrontations, has the most to gain from promulgating violence against Israel,
while Hamas, the civilian government in Gaza, has the most to lose. In the past, escalations between Israel and
the PIJ have jeopardized Hamas’s cash flow from its ally Qatar, decimating
public services and vital infrastructure.
So Hamas has recently sought
to keep a lid on conflict with Israel, aware that it could cost thousands of
Gazans permits to work inside Israel and deepen the fatigue of a population
that has already suffered four devastating wars. But to preserve its reputation as the main
Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas has professed support for its rival
through an umbrella group known as the “joint operations room.”
“Publicly, Hamas has to
support Islamic Jihad,” said Erik Skare, author of a book on the group’s
history and researcher at the University of Oslo.. “But it’s also telling them…to
avoid a major escalation. It is urging Islamic Jihad to show restraint.”
PIJ,
a Sunni body, which sprang from the loins of the Muslim Brotherhood, is very
largely financed, equipped and supported
by the leading Shi’ite state in the region, namely Iran. The bond uniting them – a hatred of the US
and a desire to remove the state of Israel from the Middle East – is
sufficiently strong at present to overcome their fundamental religious
differences. Should they ever come close to achieving their common purpose,
though, their alliance could never survive.
Indeed the fatal flaw in their relationship was publicly revealed back in May 2015. When Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), assembled a coalition to oppose Iran’s proxy, the Houthis, from taking over Yemen, Iran expected full-hearted support from the PIJ.
The freeze lasted more than a year. It was only in mid-2016, following a visit to Iran by the organization’s then-leader, Ramadan Shalah, that Iran renewed its full support for PIJ.
The PIJ’s hatred of Israel is boundless, and in its depraved operations it targets all Israelis without distinction. Indeed in the 1990s, and again during the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, PIJ positively targeted civilians. One of its deadliest terror attacks was the suicide bombing at “Maxim” restaurant in 2003, in which 21 civilians, including the elderly and young children, were murdered. The PIJ viewed the deaths of the civilians as a great operational success.
Then came the Netanya mall bombing in 2005, which killed five Israelis and wounded 50, a 2006 suicide bombing on a Tel Aviv shawarma restaurant which killed 11 and injured 70, and the shooting at the Max Brenner Café in Tel Aviv on June 2016 which left four people dead seven others injured. Moreover, launching rockets and missiles into Israel regardless of where they might fall and who they might kill, has for years been a staple of PIJ - and Hamas - activity.
For Israel, faced with an enemy like the PIJ which explicitly rejects any peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, there can be only one objective – to identify and exploit its weaknesses, and to defeat it.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-744005
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