With thanks to Marco Verch (trendingtopics), the Flickr member who posted this photo and made it available under Creative Commons
I do not exist only to wind up those who have inflicted what I call GNASH, a Great National Act of Self Harm, on the UK. In an ideal - for me - world, I would have covered the subject again for my contribution this week to The Arab Weekly. The editor* wisely diverted my attention to the recent claim from ISIS to have made Israel its principal target. After comprehensive military defeats in Syria and Iraq, is its threat a classic piece of sabre-rattling or should the Israelis be taking heed? ....
Israel is back in the Islamic State firing line. Following the terrorist group's “declaration of war”, analysts have been assessing whether it has the ability to mount seriously damaging assaults on the state it might be expected to hate more than any other, including the United States.
Four years have passed since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the Islamic State (ISIS) leader, boasted “we are getting closer by the day” to attacking Israel. Little happened to suggest ISIS was able, however willing, to organise operations of major significance on Israeli soil.
As New Year’s Day ushered in 2016, six days after the message was distributed, an Arab from the northern Israeli region of Wadi Ara shot dead three civilians. Later killed by police, Nashat Wilhem apparently felt allegiance to ISIS and his crimes were listed as acts of terrorism. However, he also had known mental problems and a despicable triple murder hardly served as belligerent ISIS words put into action.
Baghdadi is now part of terrorism’s history. During a US attack in Syria last October, designed to capture or kill a man described by Washington as “responsible for the death of thousands of civilians in the Middle East”, he set off explosives, killing himself and two of his children.
Under the new leadership of Baghdadi’s fellow Iraqi, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi, ISIS now makes Israel its number one enemy by pledging to concentrate resources, much depleted by the US-led coalition’s military successes, to the Palestinian cause.
Despite Baghdadi’s sabre-rattling in 2015, Israel has not always occupied a prominent place in ISIS strategy. Given its deep reserves of hatred, this is not completely surprising. With so much contempt for humanity to go around, it has a multitude of targets.
In 2016, four months after ISIS attackers killed 130 people across Paris, with further atrocities happening or about to happen in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, the group chose to explain why it was not attacking the Jewish state.
The thrust of the argument, advanced in the ISIS newspaper al-Naba, was that fighting Israel carried no more importance than waging jihad in Pakistan and elsewhere. If any countries merited special attention, wrote the author of the article with what must have been leadership approval, these were hostile Arab countries, “first and foremost” Saudi Arabia.
Setting itself against almost the whole world, and the vast majority of those who observe Islam without thought of violence, may be no more than what ISIS does by default.
Yet serious analysts do not dismiss the renewed threat to Israel as meaningless posturing by a defeated private army. Terrorist attacks occur internationally at sporadic intervals and will continue; ISIS or those it inspires will strike wherever and whenever they can.
While its capacity to direct operations is diminished by the loss of key members and the Iraqi and Syrian territories once under its control, ISIS can still rely on “lone wolves”, individuals energised by exhortations to attack “infidels” around the world. That translates as anyone, Muslims included, who does not subscribe to its warped outlook and agenda and the human loss is sometimes heavy.
By and large, countries learn to live with the constant threat of terrorist outrages and do their utmost to minimise the effects with a raft of security measures and the admittedly patchy monitoring of suspects.
Israel is more experienced than most countries in handling internal as well as external menaces. Terrorist cells have been dismantled and, although reports suggest ISIS has recruited “several dozen” militant Israeli Arabs, the Tel Aviv-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre said the group was inactive in the West Bank throughout last year, with like-minded jihadist networks restricted to a low profile in Gaza.
Despite signs of renewed terrorist activity in January, ISIS warmongering may therefore owe more to the need to massage damaged pride, after crushing military defeats in Syria and Iraq, than to a true reflection of its strength. Other security sources argue that the greatest threat to Israel remains Hezbollah’s huge arsenal of rockets and missiles.
The loneliest of lone wolves can cause carnage. Any attack in Israel causing multiple deaths or severe disruption would represent a coup for ISIS and humiliation for the authorities. This is not lost on Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, however preoccupied he is by his own legal issues and Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan — a “win-win” solution, the US president said; a worthless conspiracy for Palestinian leaders.
Confident as Netanyahu may be in the efficiency of his security forces, he may heed the words of Ely Karmon, an Israeli counter-terrorism expert who detects an ISIS drive to “galvanise Muslims worldwide and especially in the Middle East”.
ISIS’s declaration, Karmon wrote ominously in the Jerusalem Post in terms that stirred memories of attacks dating to the Black September massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, “should be taken seriously, not only by Israel and its security establishment but also by Jewish institutions and potential targets (synagogues, schools, representative personalities, etc) around the world”.
* My thanks to the editor of The Arab Weekly for kindly permitting Salut! to reproduce my work here
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