On Aug. 5, as squadrons of Gaza militants from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group approached an Israeli border post, Israel initiated "Operation Breaking Dawn," striking PIJ targets. The operation included a precision strike that took out top PIJ commander Tayseer al-Jabari.

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What is this shadowy organization, what are its goals and capabilities and what is the nature of the threat it poses to the State of Israel? Fortunately, this information is publicly available; sadly, it paints a picture of a militant faction capable of immense violence. Moreover, PIJ operates under the command and control of the world's top terror sponsor – the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has provided the group "millions of dollars in direct funding, as well as training and weapons."

Despite being a Sunni movement, PIJ is inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

In 1981, PIJ's founders were expelled from Egypt after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by the related Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). EIJ, under the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri, merged with Al-Qaida in 1998. In the 1980s, PIJ leaders moved to Lebanon, where they "cultivated a partnership with Hezbollah" and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran began funding PIJ via incentive payments for successful terror attacks in 2000. In 2016, Iran's funding for PIJ was reported at $70 million annually. According to the US State Department, Iran provides the majority of the PIJ's budget.

PIJ does not hide its relationship with Iran. In 2002, PIJ's then-leader Ramadan Shallah met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and said: "The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is another fruit of the Ayatollah Khomeini's fructuous tree." In 2012, at the height of the Syrian civil war, PIJ moved its headquarters from Damascus to Tehran. That same year, Shallah stated: "The weapons used by [PIJ] – the whole world knows that they come mostly from Iran or were purchased with Iranian funding." PIJ is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, as well as the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Japan.

Starting in the 1990s, PIJ became a pioneer of modern suicide bombing. In 1995, PIJ targeted IDF personnel at a bus depot and followed up with a second bomber who targeted emergency responders. During the second intifada of 2000-2005, PIJ carried out more than 400 attacks in which 134 Israelis were killed and 880 injured. Since its allied terror group Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, PIJ has repeatedly carried out rocket attacks on Israeli families. Notably, in August 2019, it fired a rocket barrage directly at an Israeli music festival and in November 2019 fired hundreds of rockets at Israel.

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PIJ's goal is to replace Israel with an Islamic theocracy. In this regard, it is part and parcel of a global movement that includes organizations like Al-Qaida, which was intimately linked with the origins of PIJ. However, PIJ has long been a tool of Iran, which considers Israel the "Little Satan" alongside the "Great Satan" of the United States. Khamenei has threatened, "We regard Palestine as an organ of our body. … The only solution is the elimination of the root of this crisis, which is the Zionist regime."

Israel seeks peace with its Arab neighbors and has normalized relations with several of them under the framework of the Abraham Accords. PIJ is not representative of the will of the Palestinian people, who with Israel shares the dream of a two-state solution within the borders of the pre-1948 British Mandate. Instead, PIJ is a violent terrorist organization armed and funded overwhelmingly by Iran, and used by that rogue nation as a pawn in a global war on free nations. Faced with such a fierce foe and its dangerous patron, Israel has no choice but to defend itself.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Who in the Middle East has not been traumatized by the upheavals of the last century? All of us celebrate the history of our families and treasure the places where we have lived, yet only the Palestinian leadership has weaponized the memory of displacement and transformed it into an ideology of genocide.

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"Nakba Day," which occurs every year on May 15, was established in 1998 by former Palestinian Authority leader – and international terrorist mastermind – Yasser Arafat to turn Israel's Independence Day into a festival of grievance. The very fact of Israel's existence was branded a "catastrophe" – nakba in Arabic – but not the displacement that affected both sides in the subsequent war, which included the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from what became the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. And during and after Israel's War of Independence in 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab lands; that is, in fact, the true nakba.

In the war in what had been British Mandatory Palestine, Jewish communities were uprooted and expelled from their homes in Gush Etzion and Atarot in the modern-day West Bank by the British-commanded Transjordanian Arab Legion. The ancient Jewish community of Hebron, where the Cave of the Patriarchs – the burial site of the biblical forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – is located, had already been pushed out by a 1929 Arab riot and prevented from returning by the British authorities.

Baghdad was one-third Jewish in the early 20th century, and like the Temple Mount today, there were many sites there that were shared by both Jewish and Muslim worshippers, such as the Prophet Ezekiel's Tomb in al-Kifl, home for centuries to both a mosque and a synagogue. In 1941, during the brief Nazi-backed coup led by Rashid Ali al-Gailani, an antisemitic mob was allowed to murder and rape members of Baghdad's Jewish community in a pogrom called the Farhud. Iraq also persecuted its Jewish community after Israel's independence and, by 1951, Israel had rescued by airlift almost the entire Iraqi Jewish population in "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah."

The Jewish community in Yemen was also rescued by the embryonic Jewish state in 1948-49, within a year of Israel's independence, in "Operation Wings of Eagles." According to legend, many Yemenite Jews had never even seen an airplane before and took them as a literal fulfilment of the biblical promise that "they that wait for the Lord … shall mount up with wings as eagles" (Isaiah 40:31).

In all, more than 850,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab countries for Israel, followed by more than 70,000 Jews from Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Like Iraq, Iran was home to multi-confessional sites honored by both faiths, such as Queen Esther's Tomb in Hamadan, Iran. On "Nakba Day" 2020, a vandal set parts of the shrine on fire in a probable hate crime.

The Arab world has seen more displacement than almost any other region, as modern refugee populations from Iraq and Syria can attest. Although my family is Muslim, I was born in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, then under Jordanian control. In 1966, when I was 8 years old, the Jordanian government moved my family north of Jerusalem to the Shuafat Refugee Camp. It was the government of Jordan, not the government of Israel, which made me a refugee.

The difference between a Palestinian culture taught to celebrate grievance and an Israeli culture that idealizes freedom is stark. The Christian minority population, for example, has plummeted in Palestinian Authority-controlled territory. In Bethlehem, it has dropped from 84% to 22% in the last decade alone. Meanwhile, a party with Islamic foundations has a critical role in Israel's current government, and Israel's Supreme Court recently appointed its first Muslim justice, Khaled Kabub.

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Palestinians should celebrate our rich heritage and, like our Jewish cousins, grieve our losses. But now is the time for negotiated reconciliation, not the perpetuation of generation-old victimhood. "Nakba Day" is part of the victimhood problem, not part of the forward-looking solution. Reconciliation happens only when both sides take a step back and acknowledge joint suffering. "Nakba Day" does the reverse. Whereas Israel has three times offered Palestinians peace, dignity and independence, Yasser Arafat launched – and Mahmoud Abbas has failed to contain – the violent public culture of the 2000-2005 Second Intifada, for which the 1998 establishment of "Nakba Day" can be understood as a build-up.

The fetishization of Israel's very existence as a catastrophe is a distortion that wounds our children and leads them to war and suicide bombing. Nearly 1 million Jews in Islamic lands faced their own Nakba after Israel's independence. Perhaps if more Palestinians understood this, we would better understand our Israeli neighbors.

We must teach our children about our neighbors, seek understanding, and champion peace. The Palestinian leadership should reverse course on the incitement against Israel and Jews –including the spread of antisemitic stereotypes – in public education and media. Instead, Palestinian schoolchildren and citizens should learn the history, the joys and the traumas of our neighbors the Israelis, with whom we have a great deal in common. In so doing, we can lay the foundations of a new Middle East, and cities like my native Jericho in the Jordan Valley can blossom as hubs of international cooperation and commerce. This can only be achieved if we learn to understand our neighbors' grief, not exacerbate our own.

"Nakba Day" does the opposite and should be abolished.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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