This week marks 20 years since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The years that followed witnessed bus and café bombings perpetrated by organizations wrapped in the banners of insurgent political Islam, most importantly Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Their tactics—including suicide bombings and the deliberate targeting of civilians—were borrowed from an earlier generation of Islamists, the Shiite jihadis of the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
The history of the past 20 years marks the rise of the revolutionary political idea of insurgent political Islam—but also its sudden decline. For a distinct period, bottom-up Islamism was the most vital political ideology in the Middle East, capturing the energy that was once invested in pan-Arab nationalism in an earlier era. Islamism’s ongoing eclipse is no less stark than the similar decline of its predecessor ideology.
