Extract from ABC News
Abdullah Azzam died a long time ago, in a country far from Israel.
But this Palestinian academic and preacher is a name people should know when asking if Israel has any chance of achieving its goal of "destroying Hamas" in Gaza.
Azzam was from a farming village in the northern West Bank but fled the Palestinian Territories when Israel invaded in the "Six Day War" of 1967.
He was assassinated in Pakistan in 1989, but not before building the first global movement of Muslim "jihad" in modern times.
The "Father of Jihad" is credited with bringing around 50,000 foreign fighters to help the Afghan mujahadeen fight the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and mentored Osama Bin Laden in forming the terrorist network Al Qaeda.
Azzam and Hamas, the Islamist group which governs Gaza, were mutual admirers.
Hamas named its military training centre and West Bank military wing after Azzam, while Azzam fundraised for Hamas and wrote his last book about the group.
Azzam's disciples would go on to attack the World Trade Centre in New York and he was one of the founders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group behind the 2008 Mumbai hotel attacks.
A generation later another Palestinian and contemporary of Azzam, Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, would mentor Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that would go on to terrorise the world as the Islamic State.
Palestinian suffering has global consequences
You can draw links from the Palestinian struggle to modern jihadist movements elsewhere.
"Palestine precedes Afghanistan," Azzam wrote in his book Memories of Palestine, "The bloody story of Kabul is the story of the war of a wounded Palestine … We hereby declare to the Jews and their satellites and the Americans and the Communists: We will not rest until we return to the jihad in Palestine."
The Palestinian cause has been used to attract recruits to extremist groups ever since.
This is not to conflate Palestinian nationalism with Islamism or jihadism – they are different things.
Abdullah Azzam hated and opposed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the more secular, internationally-recognised Palestinian leadership.
It's also not a view about whether Palestinian violence is "resistance" or "terrorism".
Instead, history suggests the grievous suffering of Palestinians in Israel's current Gaza campaign can have global consequences. The Israeli military's killing of thousands of civilians in Gaza and hundreds of people in the West Bank has given the plight of Palestinians a new urgency and wide appeal.
"The tragic loss of children's lives and the bombardment of innocent civilians have led to a deep sense of victimisation among Muslims," Dr Shafi Mostofa of the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh told ABC RN's Religion and Ethics report in November.
"I can see the extremist groups, especially the Al Qaeda, they have started exploiting particularly this attack and they are exploiting this attack to attract aggrieved Muslim youths.
"This is a strong element of the extremist narrative. Muslim victimisation is the heart of that narratives. This Gaza attack, they're capitalising on those issues to attract the youths to join the militant cause."
It is not just the people who study extremism voicing this warning — senior military and intelligence officials around the Western world are too.
"I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and a strategic imperative," United States Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said recently, citing the US experience against the Islamic State group.
"Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during the toughest battles," he said.
"So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. You see, in this kind of a fight, the centre of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat."
As war continues, support for Hamas is rising
New polling shows support for Hamas, previously flagging as the group presided over a miserable economic situation in Gaza, is rising.
"Support for Hamas has more than tripled in the West Bank compared to three months ago," the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found, although the support rose less in Gaza, where people are suffering through Israel's retaliation for Hamas' October 7 attack.
"Support for armed struggle rises ten percentage points compared to three months ago, with more than 60 per cent saying it is the best means of ending the Israeli occupation; in the West Bank, the percentage rises further to close to 70 per cent."
The increased likelihood of organised and widely popular armed "resistance" has implications for Australia and other Western countries too.
Australia's domestic spy agency, ASIO, warned before Israeli troops invaded Gaza that the fighting was likely to trigger violence here.
The recent history of conflict against Islamist groups suggests Israel will fail in its stated mission to "destroy Hamas".
Previous attempts to eradicate both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group have failed.
The extrajudicial, international assassinations of high-profile leaders, such as this week’s killing in Beirut of senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri, risks drawing Islamist militant groups around the region into a direct conflict.
Such assassinations were used in previous, failed campaigns to eradicate both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Both groups are still active.
Al Qaeda has been rebuilding, despite a lengthy US campaign against the group.
The Islamic State has stopped attracting tens of thousands of foreign fighters, but it remains active in Iraq, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula and Africa, claiming responsibility for hundreds of attacks, and has proven beyond the capability of US and local forces to eliminate.
The most important question of all
The question which must be asked of Israel's government is how its campaign against Hamas — and its horrifying civilian toll — will prevent a new generation of people taking up arms.
The answer, according to senior anti-terror experts, is not via military means.
"To 'eliminate' or destroy Hamas, Israel will have to destroy the root cause of Hamas, its reason for existence. That means Israel will have to accept progress towards a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood for Gaza and the West Bank," Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of US Army Europe, told US news outlet NBC.
That's something the current Israeli government does not appear willing to discuss.
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