Palestinian Armed Group from Nationalism to Islamism

On a religious level, some camps are stigmatised as “Islamist heaven.” More specifically, Nahr Al-Bared camp and Ein El-Helwe (EEH). EEH is still the unique camp governed by three bloc forces: PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisations) factions, Syrian aligned factions called the Alliance Tahaluf, and Islamic factions. In addition to unofficial governance and control of some squares by Islamist-jihadist unofficial groups such as Al-Shabab Al-Muslim and other jihadist movements.

This paper focuses on the head of Al-Shabab Al-Muslim armed group, Sheikh Usama Al-Shahabi, in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein El-Helwe in Lebanon and seeks to understand the dialectic relation between nationalism and Islamism among this group. I use the terms and concepts of agentivity, socialisation, and social identity to analyse the local factors of shifting from nationalism to Islamism and jihadism in a political vacum, in the first section. In the second one, I examine the division of the Sunni sphere and the rise of united Iranian Islamist ideology, which influenced the change of ideology of Al-Shahabi and his jihadist group.

EEH camp is the concern of this study, as the capital of the Palestinian diaspora and, what the Lebanese press has dubbed an “island of insecurity”. More specifically the paper will focus on the head of Al-Shabab Al-Muslim group, Sheikh Usama Al-Shahabi, to understand the dialectic relation between nationalism and Islamism among this group. I seek, through the analysis of a single trajectory, to bring to light this experience as the actor defines and constructs it, accepting the absence of statistical representativeness in favour of a more precise and detailed analysis that will focus on the relationships between social categories rather than on the categories themselves (Granger, 1988).