Is Islamist terrorism a response to Israel?

“If there is an occupation, there will be resistance. This is all a response to what Israel and the West do to Muslims.”

The claim is not stupid, and it is not always made in bad faith. Grievance about Israel is real, it is loud, and it appears in jihadist propaganda constantly. That is exactly why the question is worth answering with the casualty tables rather than with the propaganda, because the two do not agree.

Where the violence is

The Institute for Economics and Peace scores 163 countries in its annual Global Terrorism Index. In the 2026 edition, Israel ranks tenth. Above it: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Syria, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia. Every one of those except Colombia is a country where jihadist organisations kill people, and five countries alone, Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger and the DRC, account for close to seventy per cent of the world’s terrorism deaths.

Burkina Faso has no Israeli occupation to resist. It has JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate, and Islamic State Sahel, and between them they have made a landlocked West African state the second most terrorism-afflicted country on earth. There are no settlements in Mali. There are no checkpoints in Niger.

The victims are Muslims, and that is the answer

The people dying are not Israelis and they are not Westerners. They are Nigerian villagers killed by Boko Haram, Somalis killed by al-Shabaab, Pakistani schoolchildren killed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, which murdered 132 children at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December 2014, Shia pilgrims killed by Islamic State, Sufis killed at their shrines, Ahmadis killed in their mosques, and Yazidis massacred and enslaved at Sinjar.

A movement that kills Muslims by the thousand every year, in countries with no Israeli presence, is not a movement caused by Israel. It is a movement with a doctrine about who may be killed, and that doctrine reaches Shia, Sufis, Ahmadis, Yazidis, Christians, Hindus, apostates, secular Muslims, and Jews. Jews are an item on the list, not the reason for it.

The chronology does not work either

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, twenty years before Israel existed, with the programme of restoring Islamic government. The Iranian revolution of 1979 produced a state whose founding ideology named the United States before it named Israel. Bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war is titled for the American presence in Saudi Arabia, not for Palestine.

The test that settles it is what happened when Israel actually withdrew. Israel left Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, removing every soldier and every settlement. Violence from both did not decline; it escalated, through the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and through three Gaza wars and then 7 October 2023. A grievance that grows when it is satisfied was not the engine.

Xinjiang is the control experiment

If jihadist violence were a response to the oppression of Muslims, there would be a campaign over Xinjiang, where China has interned around a million Uyghur Muslims, demolished mosques, banned fasting and separated children from families. It is the largest state repression of Muslims in the world today.

There is no such campaign. Islamic State and al-Qaeda have issued statements; there is no sustained operational effort, and the governments of Muslim-majority states have signed UN letters supporting Chinese policy in Xinjiang. Meanwhile Israel, a country of ten million, occupies the movement’s rhetorical centre and the tenth slot on the terrorism index.

The difference between the two cases is not the scale of the suffering. It is that one grievance is useful for mobilisation in the West and the other is not.

The strongest version of the claim, and why it still fails

The serious form of the argument is not that Israel causes jihadism, but that Israeli and Western actions are used in radicalisation: that Gaza footage appears in recruitment material, that individual attackers cite Palestine, and that Western foreign policy supplies the emotional fuel for something that would otherwise stay marginal.

Part of that is true. Attackers do cite Palestine. Mohammed Merah said he was avenging Palestinian children, then shot an eight-year-old girl in a Toulouse school playground.

But a grievance cited is not a grievance that causes, and the tell is how interchangeable the citations are. The same movement has mobilised over Danish cartoons, a novel by Salman Rushdie, a French teacher’s civics lesson, a Pope’s lecture in Regensburg, girls’ education in Swat, and music at a concert in Manchester. When one item is removed the list does not shorten. Israel is the most effective entry on it in Western countries, which is why it appears most, and effectiveness in recruitment is not the same thing as causation.

And the argument has a cost its users rarely count. If jihadist violence really is a response to grievance, then the more than half of the world’s terrorism deaths occurring in the Sahel are a response to grievances against Burkinabè and Malian and Nigerien Muslims, by other Muslims. Nobody says this, because the moment it is said out loud, the framework collapses.