https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/02/the-end-of-the-age-of-insurgency/
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.
The Second Intifada was the first eruption of political Islam in its insurgent form against a Western democracy (Sunni Islamism had already risen against and been defeated by the Syrian and Algerian regimes in the 1980s and ‘90s, respectively.) It felt unfamiliar at first, but would quickly become a harbinger. One year later, as Israel was still in the middle of its assault of suicide bombings, al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers in New York. That attack—together with subsequent ones in Madrid, London, and Paris—ushered in a global focus on the issue of insurgent political Islam.
