The Culture of Martyrdom
How suicide bombing became not just a means but an end
by David Brooks
.....
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=S"}
uicide bombing is the crack cocaine of warfare. It doesn't just
inflict death and terror on its victims; it intoxicates the people
who sponsor it. It unleashes the deepest and most addictive human
passions”the thirst for vengeance, the desire for religious purity,
the longing for earthly glory and eternal salvation. Suicide
bombing isn't just a tactic in a larger war; it overwhelms the
political goals it is meant to serve. It creates its own logic and
transforms the culture of those who employ it. This is what has
happened in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Over the past year suicide
bombing has dramatically changed the nature of the conflict.
Before 1983 there were few suicide bombings. The Koran forbids
the taking of one's own life, and this prohibition was still
generally observed. But when the United States stationed Marines
in Beirut, the leaders of the Islamic resistance movement
Hizbollah began to discuss turning to this ultimate terrorist
weapon. Religious authorities in Iran gave it their blessing, and a
wave of suicide bombings began, starting with the attacks that
killed about sixty U.S. embassy workers in April of 1983 and
about 240 people in the Marine compound at the airport in
October. The bombings proved so successful at driving the United
States and, later, Israel out of Lebanon that most lingering
religious concerns were set aside.
The tactic was introduced into Palestinian areas only gradually. In
1988 Fathi Shiqaqi, the founder of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
wrote a set of guidelines (aimed at countering religious objections
to the truck bombings of the 1980s) for the use of explosives in
individual bombings; nevertheless, he characterized operations
calling for martyrdom as "exceptional." But by the mid-1990s the
group Hamas was using suicide bombers as a way of derailing the
Oslo peace process. The assassination of the master Palestinian
bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, presumably by Israeli agents, in
January of 1996, set off a series of suicide bombings in retaliation.
Suicide bombings nonetheless remained relatively unusual until
two years ago, after the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat walked out
of the peace conference at Camp David”a conference at which
Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, had offered to return to the
Palestinians parts of Jerusalem and almost all of the West Bank.
At that point the psychology shifted. We will not see peace soon,
many Palestinians concluded, but when it eventually comes, we
will get everything we want. We will endure, we will fight, and
we will suffer for that final victory. From then on the struggle (at
least from the Palestinian point of view) was no longer about
negotiation and compromise”about who would get which piece
of land, which road or river. The red passions of the bombers
obliterated the grays of the peace process. Suicide bombing
became the tactic of choice, even in circumstances where a
terrorist could have planted a bomb and then escaped without
injury. Martyrdom became not just a means but an end.
Suicide bombing is a highly communitarian enterprise. According
to Ariel Merari, the director of the Political Violence Research
Center, at Tel Aviv University, and a leading expert on the
phenomenon, in not one instance has a lone, crazed Palestinian
gotten hold of a bomb and gone off to kill Israelis. Suicide
bombings are initiated by tightly run organizations that recruit,
indoctrinate, train, and reward the bombers. Those organizations
do not seek depressed or mentally unstable people for their
missions. From 1996 to 1999 the Pakistani journalist Nasra
Hassan interviewed almost 250 people who were either recruiting
and training bombers or preparing to go on a suicide mission
themselves. "None of the suicide bombers”they ranged in age
from eighteen to thirty-eight”conformed to the typical profile of
the suicidal personality," Hassan wrote in The New Yorker. "None
of them were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or
depressed." The Palestinian bombers tend to be devout, but
religious fanaticism does not explain their motivation. Nor does
lack of opportunity, because they also tend to be well educated.
Often a bomber believes that a close friend or a member of his
family has been killed by Israeli troops, and this is part of his
motivation. According to most experts, though, the crucial factor
informing the behavior of suicide bombers is loyalty to the group.
Suicide bombers go through indoctrination processes similar to
the ones that were used by the leaders of the Jim Jones and Solar
Temple cults. The bombers are organized into small cells and
given countless hours of intense and intimate spiritual training.
They are instructed in the details of jihad, reminded of the need
for revenge, and reassured about the rewards they can expect in
the afterlife. They are told that their families will be guaranteed a
place with God, and that there are also considerable rewards for
their families in this life, including cash bonuses of several
thousand dollars donated by the government of Iraq, some
individual Saudis, and various groups sympathetic to the cause.
Finally, the bombers are told that paradise lies just on the other
side of the detonator, that death will feel like nothing more than a
pinch.
Members of such groups re-enact past operations. Recruits are
sometimes made to lie in empty graves, so that they can see how
peaceful death will be; they are reminded that life will bring
sickness, old age, and betrayal. "We were in a constant state of
worship," one suicide bomber (who somehow managed to survive
his mission) told Hassan. "We told each other that if the Israelis
only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death!
Those were the happiest days of my life!"
The bombers are instructed to write or videotape final testimony.
(A typical note, from 1995: "I am going to take revenge upon the
sons of the monkeys and the pigs, the Zionist infidels and the
enemies of humanity. I am going to meet my holy brother Hisham
Hamed and all the other martyrs and saints in paradise.") Once a
bomber has completed his declaration, it would be humiliating for
him to back out of the mission. He undergoes a last round of
cleansing and prayer and is sent off with his bomb to the
appointed pizzeria, coffee shop, disco, or bus.
For many Israelis and Westerners, the strangest aspect of the
phenomenon is the televised interview with a bomber's parents
after a massacre. These people have just been told that their child
has killed himself and others, and yet they seem happy, proud,
and”should the opportunity present itself”ready to send another
child off to the afterlife. There are two ways to look at this: One,
the parents feel so wronged and humiliated by the Israelis that
they would rather sacrifice their children than continue passively
to endure. Two, the cult of suicide bombing has infected the
broader culture to the point where large parts of society, including
the bombers' parents, are addicted to the adrenaline rush of
vengeance and murder. Both explanations may be true.
It is certainly the case that vast segments of Palestinian culture
have been given over to the creation and nurturing of suicide
bombers. Martyrdom has replaced Palestinian independence as
the main focus of the Arab media. Suicide bombing is, after all,
perfectly suited to the television age. The bombers' farewell
videos provide compelling footage, as do the interviews with
families. The bombings themselves produce graphic images of
body parts and devastated buildings. Then there are the
"weddings" between the martyrs and dark-eyed virgins in paradise
(announcements that read like wedding invitations are printed in
local newspapers so that friends and neighbors can join in the
festivities), the marches and celebrations after each attack, and the
displays of things bought with the cash rewards to the families.
Woven together, these images make gripping packages that can be
aired again and again.
Activities in support of the bombings are increasingly widespread.
Last year the BBC shot a segment about so-called Paradise
Camps”summer camps in which children as young as eight are
trained in military drills and taught about suicide bombers. Rallies
commonly feature children wearing bombers' belts. Fifth- and
sixth-graders have studied poems that celebrate the bombers. At
Al Najah University, in the West Bank, a student exhibition last
September included a re-created scene of the Sbarro pizzeria in
Jerusalem after the suicide bombing there last August: "blood"
was splattered everywhere, and mock body parts hung from the
ceiling as if blown through the air.
Thus suicide bombing has become phenomenally popular.
According to polls, 70 to 80 percent of Palestinians now support
it”making the act more popular than Hamas, the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, Fatah, or any of the other groups that sponsor it,
and far more popular than the peace process ever was. In addition
to satisfying visceral emotions, suicide bombing gives average
Palestinians, not just PLO elites, a chance to play a glorified role
in the fight against Israel.
Opponents of suicide bombings sometimes do raise their heads.
Over the last couple of years educators have moderated the tone
of textbooks to reduce and in many cases eliminate the rhetoric of
holy war. After the BBC report aired, Palestinian officials vowed
to close the Paradise Camps. Nonetheless, Palestinian children
grow up in a culture in which suicide bombers are rock stars,
sports heroes, and religious idols rolled into one. Reporters who
speak with Palestinians about the bombers notice the fire and
pride in their eyes.
"I'd be very happy if my daughter killed Sharon," one mother told
a reporter from The San Diego Union-Tribune last November.
"Even if she killed two or three Israelis, I would be happy." Last
year I attended a dinner party in Amman at which six
distinguished Jordanians”former cabinet ministers and supreme-
court justices and a journalist”talked about the Tel Aviv disco
bombing, which had occurred a few months earlier. They had
some religious qualms about the suicide, but the moral aspect of
killing teenage girls”future breeders of Israelis”was not even
worth discussing. They spoke of the attack with a quiet sense of
satisfaction.
It's hard to know how Israel, and the world, should respond to the
rash of suicide bombings and to their embrace by the Palestinian
people. To take any action that could be viewed as a concession
would be to provoke further attacks, as the U.S. and Israeli
withdrawals from Lebanon in the 1980s demonstrated. On the
other hand, the Israeli raids on the refugee camps give the suicide
bombers a propaganda victory. After Yasir Arafat walked out of
the Camp David meetings, he became a pariah to most
governments, for killing the peace process. Now, amid Israeli
retaliation for the bombings, the global community rises to
condemn Israel's actions.
Somehow conditions must be established that would allow the
frenzy of suicide bombings to burn itself out. To begin with, the
Palestinian and Israeli populations would have to be separated;
contact between them inflames the passions that feed the attacks.
That would mean shutting down the vast majority of Israeli
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and creating a buffer zone
between the two populations. Palestinian life would then no
longer be dominated by checkpoints and celebrations of
martyrdom; it would be dominated by quotidian issues such as
commerce, administration, and garbage collection.
The idea of a buffer zone, which is gaining momentum in Israel, is
not without problems. Where, exactly, would the buffer be?
Terrorist groups could shoot missiles over it. But it's time to face
the reality that the best resource the terrorists have is the culture
of martyrdom. This culture is presently powerful, but it is
potentially fragile. If it can be interrupted, if the passions can be
made to recede, then the Palestinians and the Israelis might go
back to hating each other in the normal way, and at a distance. As
with many addictions, the solution is to go cold turkey.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Sep 22 2002 - 05:06:21 MDT