Grasping Arab Islamist responses to the war on Gaza

A year after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks and Israel’s war on Gaza, it is clear that Islamists across the region are significant actors in the conflict and that the Arab Islamist field has been affected by the war. This raises several questions. How have Islamists responded to the war on Gaza? To what extent has the conflict triggered new dynamics? How can we explain spatial and temporal variations, and what might this say about (the study of) Islamism–and social movements more broadly? Introducing this Forum on ‘Arab Islamist responses to the war on Gaza’, we unpack these questions, drawing on classic debates on Islamism and social movements and the Forum’s country-specific contributions to offer some initial observations. We show that, while support for Palestine is broad, not all Islamists responded alike and that, although the war has triggered notable changes, there are important continuities. We note that ideology is a poor predictor of behaviour, with significant variations within sub-categories and across national contexts, as ideology and interests intersect within political opportunity and threat structures. Transnational dynamics are refracted through domestic conditions and, though Iran is the enabler, relations between members of the Axis of Resistance are also important.