The Intellectual, the Militant, the Prisoner and the Partisan: the Genesis of the I slamic J ihad M ovement in P alestine (1974–1988)

The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine is known today as the second-largest Palestinian Islamic organization, following Hamas which was however established almost ten years later. The mediatization of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad has been driven, since the beginning of the 21st century and the outbreak of the second Intifada, by the large number of suicide bombers, "martyrdom operations" carried out on Israeli territory, the most famous being the attack on Maxim's in Haifa. On October 4, 2003, a young (twenty-eight-year-old) Palestinian woman, Hanadi Jaradat, set off explosives strapped to her body. Twenty-one people were killed, and fifty-one wounded. But limiting the analysis of a movement to only one of its aspects, no doubt the most notorious one in the media, political violence, does not help resolve all the difficulties associated with it. Islamic Jihad in the 1980s broke the monopoly of Fatah and leftist forces, bringing them to admit that Islam was from now on a symbolic force that had to be reckoned with. The paradoxical Islamism of Islamic Jihad may have accomplished, and declared at a given moment in history, a double break in the order of symbols, both nationalist and Islamist.