Last year, a feature film about Palestinian suicide bombers called “Paradise Now” caused an outcry among Israelis. Too sympathetic toward its main characters, who were depicted as being motivated by anger at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, was the main complaint.
This year, a new documentary, “Suicide Killers,” by the French filmmaker Pierre Rehov may draw as many complaints from the other camp. Rehov interviewed Palestinians imprisoned for trying to detonate suicide bombs. His conclusion was that they were influenced by a religious culture that represses sexual desires and channels the resulting frustration into homicidal rage. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated “Paradise Now” (directed by a Palestinian) for a 2006 best foreign-language film Academy Award, was considering “Suicide Killers” as a 2007 nominee for the Best Documentary, but after it was screened in New York and San Francisco, the Academy judges failed to select it as a finalist in the documentary category.
Rehov’s conclusion about what motivates suicide bombers is interesting if speculative, and may be laden with personal bias, something intimated in an interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter (see below).
The question of what motivates some Palestinians to strap on explosives and try to kill Israeli citizens has been debated intensively in past years. The string of attacks during the second Intifada resulted in the deaths of roughly 800 Israeli citizens. Some Palestinians say the bombers are fueled by revenge and hopelessness brought on by decades of Israeli occupation, which have choked off the economic and social life of the Palestinian territories, and by Israeli military actions that have killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC in 2002 that suicide bombers are “driven to desperation and anger by the Israeli activities.” Journalist and United Nations official Nasra Hassan, who has done extensive interviews with Palestinian suicide bombers, found that one of their prime goals was to spread fear in the hearts of Israelis. Hamas members told her that suicide bombings were a legitimate tactic against Israeli aggression. A study of failed Palestinian suicide bombers by an Israeli psychologist, who I recall being interviewed on TV, reported one single universal shared trait: “no fear” (I am unable to link to the study itself). Other studies by Israeli researchers have found that Palestinian suicide bombers are motivated by many factors, including religion and a desire to avenge the deaths of other Palestinians.
Rehov, who was interviewed about his Suicide Killers film, reached a different conclusion.
Several of the young men whom (Rehov) interviews behind bars say they are eager to reach paradise and the 72 virgins promised by Islamic theology. “Those who blow themselves up get a good bonus from God — they marry 72 virgins,” one tells Rehov. (A Hamas cleric told Hassan that the 72 virgins aren’t on hand for sexual gratification, however.) One jailed woman talks about wanting to be the “prettiest” among the heavenly virgins.
“I’ve studied psychology, (Rehov states), and there are a lot of things connected to flashers — they want to destroy innocence. I realized that these guys in the last minute of their lives have this same behavior. This is when I understood there is something really sexual about this extreme act they want to commit. I knew (about the Islamic religious belief) of 72 virgins, and I also knew about how sexual frustration can lead to people becoming serial killers.”
“Suicide Killers,” Rehov says, is “not politically correct.” It minimizes the role that Israel’s territorial occupation has on Palestinian anger and emphasizes the sexual repression that Rehov says contributes to the bombers’ actions.
Of course, this kind of armchair psychological theorizing from the literati like Rehov is not new. Sexual repression, of course, is an old Freudian notion and were it not for the fact that its reality has been refuted by science-minded psychologists, who see it as little more than a reified myth, one lacking empirical counterparts, it might be taken seriously. It is also obvious that Rehov’s sexual theory depicts Palestinian suicide bombers as pursuing a religious motive, i.e., radical Islam, given his emphasis on sexual repression and the suicide bomber’s quest for the “72 virgins,” which some interviewees apparently mentioned. Such a theory conveniently reinforces recent Israeli-US propaganda efforts to reinterpret the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the framework of the greater War on Terrorism or radical Al Qaeda Islamism, a theme emphasized in the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land.
In this, the US seems to be alone in the West to give organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah the terrorist stamp, forgetting that both were created to fight Israel’s military occupations of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, which still continues in the former. In Europe, the members of these groups are variously viewed as “militants,” “resisters,” or even “freedom fighters” rather than “terrorists,” and to respect this difference, news organizations like CNN reportedly interchange these terms when issuing reports in Europe and the US, respectively.
In the context of the second Intifada, which produced strings of deadly suicide bombings in Israel, a sexual-religious theory hardly seems adequate, given all of the other factors in play, not the least of which is the decades long military occupation. The killing of numerous innocent Palestinian adults and children, which both preceded and coincided with these attacks through unremitting cycles of violence, would also seem to induce retaliatory drive, even if it might not explain why one Palestinian would eventually volunteer to become a suicide bomber and not another. I will not attempt to discuss the internal or idiosyncratic factors, the personality variables, if one prefers, but rather the situational, contextual, or behavioral (stimulus) sources of motivation that may specifically apply to the Palestinian suicide bomber.
Studies of suicide bombers in general by political scientists and psychologists may be of value in understanding why an individual might volunteer for such a role, but they may not necessarily apply to what motivated Palestinian suicide bombers during the second Intifada. In other contexts, suicide bombers may be bona fide terrorists, i.e., retain a religious, ideological, or political reason for wanting to instill terror in a target civilian population. Excluding the sporadic Hamas suicide attacks in the 1990s, the motivation of Palestinian suicide bombers during the notorious period of the second Intifada may really have little to do with terrorism, as it is formally understood.
So what is it that might have motivated these Palestinian suicide bomber that is unique?
Do the Intifada suicide bombers fit the accepted profile of the terrorist? In the language of a 1999 UN Resolution, terrorism involves “criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be invoked to justify them (GA Res. 51/210 Measures to eliminate international terrorism).” Well, if we are talking about Al Qaeda or the PLO before Oslo acting to obtain political recognition of their cause, yes. However, typical terrorist motivation does not appear to apply to the Intifada suicide bombers. Although they did manage to throw the Israeli people into a state of terror, terror was hardly their purpose.
According to Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas suicide bomber coordinator and pediatrician, it was situational anger, and the desire for vengeance and retaliation. That is at least what he acknowledged in a Time Magazine interview before his assassination.
Summarizing what Rantisi reported, prior to the second Intifada, he had to scrap the bottom of the barrel to get volunteers to strap on bombs and enter Israel. As a consequence, there were only sporadic incidents during the Olso period, and no suicide bombings at all between 1998 and 2000. However, once the second Intifada began and Palestinians began dying, over fifty suicide bombers entered Israel in the first year alone. And it was not just Hamas; Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations were also involved in recruitment.
In Time Magazine interview, Rantisi gave some clues about what motivated these Palestinians to strap on bombs.
Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole–some might say brainwash–young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.
But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest Intifada that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas–and they didn’t require persuading. “We don’t need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past,” Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas’ senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. “When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong,” he explained.
Indeed, in her documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America, Alison Weir provided the names, ages, places, and dates of 27 Palestinian children who were killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) before a single suicide bomber entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada. These 27 children had been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, the oldest 17 years of age, the majority shot in the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye, presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. While it is unclear from the data provided by Weir, some of these children may have been participating in the Intifada, the resistance instituted by rock-throwing Palestinian boys and girls. Since an Israeli study on the effects of rubber bullets on Palestinian civilians revealed only three deaths in the first year, real bullets were undoubtedly used in the killing of most of these children.
Innocent children as well as adults kept dying throughout the Intifada along with innocent Israeli adults and children caught in the vicinity of suicide bombers in Israel. From each side, retaliation commonly stimulated more death. From the Palestinian side, just looking at the deadly effect of IDF actions on children alone would seem to be sufficient motivation enough. Rami Khouri, the Palestinian-Jordanian editor of the Beruit Daily Star quoted a report by the Health Development Information and Policy Institute based in Ramallah, which covered child deaths and wounding and other effects in the first two years of the Intifada.
In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:
- 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.
- Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.
- 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.
- The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans, which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.
- During the first two months of the Intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.
- An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.
- There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.
(quoted from the article, Ehud Olmert’s Profound Ethics and Deep Lies)
If child deaths were not enough, during the second Intifada, it was reported that of the more than 4,000 Palestinians killed in five years, 80% were classified as innocent civilians, adults and children. In the same period, roughly 1000 Israelis were killed, with the same proportion, 80%, being innocent adults and children.
To say the least, such killings would seem to boil into a sufficient cause for retaliatory reprisals by either side. For the suicide bomber, at least according to Rantisi, it was a necessary condition. His input reveals first, that when the killings of Palestinians are minimal, and there is a hope of peace on the horizon, as during the Oslo period, volunteers for suicide missions are scarce. When violence erupts, innocent people begin to die along with hopes for peace, and anger, hate, and cries for retaliation and revenge surface, “when the feelings inside become very strong,” volunteers for suicide bombings become abundant.
Here is a final commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber, where he offers some additional insight about motivation.
If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties, a grandmother, chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement”, the agonizing months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
The Israeli occupation is, of course, the problem. Without the occupation and the colonization of Palestinian lands going on under its protection, and the suffering it has caused the Palestinian people, Israel would not have experienced the suicide bomb culture that occupation sired. The Palestinian suicide bomber of the Intifada was not a terrorist, but an avenger. Opinions to the contrary merely repeat a line of propaganda offered by the Israeli and US governments, who wish to portray the Israelis as victims of terror and the Palestinians as perpetrators of terrorism. It is for this reason that Israel must maintain its brutal military occupation and explains its current ability to kill Palestinians with impunity, over 600 in 2006 alone.
Crossposted at My Left Wing, Eternal Hope, Evenhanded Democrats
