Terrorism also as an ideology

Khader Adnan, one of the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, died in prison after refusing Israeli aid and assistance. Adnan chose to starve himself to death rather than accept help from the state to which he had sworn destruction for most of his life.

Over the past 24 hours, alarm bells have been ringing in Israel again as more than 30 rockets have been fired by Palestinian terrorists from the Gaza Strip, the fire-controlled territory of Hamas, the terrorist group formed in the 1980s and which has kept its goal of annihilating Israel. If Hamas spent the same amount of resources and time on improving the condition of Palestinians in Gaza, there would be no need for Palestinian activism to beg for money in all regional and international political forums.

Any excuse is enough for Palestinians to call for an international activism that resonates around the world with a yearning to turn major European and US cities (because that is where this activism is most established) into an extension of the Gaza Strip or the territories under Palestinian control on what is known as the Day of Rage. Even if this yearning is not realised, Palestinian activism in Europe has become the medium and loudspeaker of a frozen anti-Semitism that is emerging with increasing force.

Khader Adnan, who was arrested several times over the last decade and had already gone on hunger strike, was not a Palestinian civilian or political prisoner. He was part of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a grouping created in 1981 with a strong religious background, influenced by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and with an increasingly permeable power in Judea and Samaria, a territory under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The latter is important: in recent hours there have also been several clashes between factions of Fatah, the secular armed wing of the Palestinian Authority, and other members of Palestinian Jihad.

In the same Gaza Strip, five Gazan children were injured after Hamas rockets misfired and landed in the same Arab localities.

The Palestinian leadership is atomised and each of its parts represents a different enemy, with particular characteristics, but with the same goal: to push any boundaries to attack the Israelis. In the Gaza Strip, Arab civilian residences have once again become a base for rockets that have been fired at various cities in Israel, where the anguish and terror that is the goal of terrorism reigned.

In the same Gaza Strip, five Gazan children were injured after Hamas rockets misfired and landed in the same Arab localities. This is not new, but the silence of the international bodies that should be looking after the human rights and safety of these children should stun with increasing force.

International Palestinian activism has raised these flags: the defence of Khader Adnan, the implicit defence of Hamas and its political intention that the grouping (whose leaders live outside the Gaza Strip) should definitively take control of the territories under Palestinian control as they disown the power of the Palestinian Authority. The coming war of succession will have the stands packed with an amateurish and radicalised public that is indirectly calling for greater power for Hamas, an organisation that is as dangerous as it is uncompromising.

International terrorism is also an ideology that seeps into every corner of society and is camouflaged by strongly inflammatory rhetoric. For Palestinian political activism, especially that located in Europe, does not recognise Israel’s right to defend itself because they do not consider that they have a right to exist. These dhimmis for pleasure, the pro-Palestinian Europeans, are behaving much like the European women who travelled to Syria to become the wives of jihad in the years of the Islamic State’s greatest power in the Levant.

The radicalisation of terrorism is so dangerous and harmful especially in the years where opinion and misinformation run rampant. There is no way to reason with a subject that has been radicalised for a cause it does not and will not understand, so it is impossible for it to understand that if Israel falls then Europe will be completely undermined in terms of its security.

Palestinian activism, full of intellectual fringe activists, is not only based in Europe or on university campuses in the United States where anti-Semitism is one of the strongest cards, but also in Latin America where there are increasingly active, organised and enlisted communities in the anti-Israeli ammunition.

A mentality similar to that of 1948, when the Arab armies wanted to annihilate and expel the Jews, is what covers Palestinian activism: from the river to the sea is the slogan that defines a cause that emanates with ever more radicalisation and irrationality into the pores of European society. Just look at what is happening in Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona or Brussels.