http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/print/rose01_.html

London Review of Books  Vol. 26 No. 21 dated 4 November 2004 |

Jacqueline Rose

Deadly Embrace


My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing by Christoph Reuter 
trans. Helena Ragg-Kirkby. Princeton, 246 pp, £15.95

Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers by 
Barbara Victor Robinson, 321 pp, £8.99

All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also 
always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after someone close to them 
commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of 
their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. 
Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, 
Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. 
But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst 
Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once 'the wish to 
die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed'. You can die, but you can't 
commit suicide, on your own.
At the end of Anna Karenina, Vronsky, Anna's lover, responds to her suicide 
by joining the thousands of volunteers leaving Russia for Serbia to protect 
the Slavs against the Turks. He had already tried to kill himself when, much 
earlier in the novel, Anna was assumed to be at death's door after the birth 
of their illegitimate child. Tolstoy's novel is riddled with suicidal 
moments. But this final one - since it is clear that Vronsky wishes only to 
die - is different. These men are sacrificing themselves for a noble cause, 
as Anna's brother, on his way to the war, insists when he converges both 
with Vronsky and with Levin - the inspired man of the countryside - on the 
same train. 'But it's not just to sacrifice themselves,' Levin responds, 
'it's to kill Turks.' Levin will not accept that the 'fine-talking' 
volunteers and the newspapers reporting them truly speak for 'the will and 
thought' of the people - 'a thought that expressed itself in revenge and 
murder'. Sacrifice, even in a noble cause, is an ugly affair. Today in 
Britain there is outrage, especially among their parents, that soldiers have 
been sent to Iraq for a lie. We can also see the injustice of the tens of 
thousands of Iraqi deaths, especially civilians'. But that war is murder, 
whatever the cause, as Levin insists, is not something that any of us is 
encouraged to contemplate.
By sending Vronsky off to fight in Serbia, Tolstoy brings suicide into the 
public domain. The last suicide in the novel is not Anna's: it is that of a 
man, already being fêted as a hero by many, who wants to kill and die in the 
same breath. Suicide bombing is a recent phenomenon, but it's an illusion to 
believe that it's only in the mind of Islam that a link has been made 
between war and suicide, murder and martyrdom, killing the enemy and killing 
yourself.
Suicide bombing is most often considered a peculiarly monstrous, indeed 
inhuman aberration that cannot - or must not - be understood. When the Lib 
Dem MP Jenny Tonge observed, 'If I had to live in that situation - and I say 
that advisedly - I might just consider becoming one myself,' the Israeli 
Embassy responded with this statement: 'We would not expect any human 
being - and surely not a British MP - to express an understanding of such 
atrocities.' Tonge was sacked from her party's front bench. We can be fairly 
sure that had she expressed similar understanding of the policy of targeted 
assassination, or extra-judicial killing, in response to suicide bombings, 
she would not today be out of a job. The wording she used - 'If I had to' - 
is crucial. She was not sympathising: she was trying to imagine what it was 
like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories. (She condemned the 
bombings.) When Cherie Blair said in June 2002, 'As long as young people 
feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to 
make progress,' Downing Street apologised. What need never be apologised for 
is the violence of state power. But perhaps there is a logic here. If the 
case for war is weak - or non-existent - then the ugliness and guilt of war 
rise perilously close to the surface of the public mind: war, in Levin's 
words, as murder and revenge. In which case, it helps to be able to point to 
something far worse, preferably from another culture or world, with which no 
reasonable human being could possibly identify. But apart from being 
evasive, this is inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents 
the first of his 11 rules of war: 'Empathise with the enemy.'
Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the 
reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the 
number of the dead. It is, of course, feared as a weapon against which there 
appears to be no protection, and to which there is no viable response: 
targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel's 
security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror 
it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate 
targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to 
death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the 
Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons 
of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated 
residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943.
The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker 
also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: 
it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. 
Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving 
yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the revulsion stems partly from the 
unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and 
her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification - 
you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a 
fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, and there 
is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide 
bombing might be the closest they can get.
There is a historical aspect to that proximity. By fostering Shia 
resistance, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 created a space for 
Hizbollah, who carried out the first suicide bombings in the early 1980s. 
Israel began supporting Hamas in the late 1980s after the decision was taken 
to strengthen Islamic groups in order to weaken Arafat and divide the 
Palestinians among themselves. The Islamic University of Gaza was created, 
with the approval of the Defence Ministry; when cinemas in Gaza were stormed 
by Islamic groups and restaurants set on fire for selling alcohol, Israeli 
soldiers stood by and watched. All this is described by Christoph Reuter in 
My Life Is a Weapon. Hizbollah in turn would gain a permanent foothold 
inside Israel when it offered vital support to the 415 leading cadres of 
Hamas and Islamic Jihad expelled into Southern Lebanon by Yitzhak Rabin 
following the abduction and murder of an Israeli soldier in December 1992. 
It has always been a paradox for Western observers that Hizbollah, which 
promotes an Iranian-style Islamic revolution for the whole of the Middle 
East (the organisation was created following the arrival in Lebanon of a 
thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the early 1980s), is also the most 
efficient provider of welfare and support for displaced Palestinians in 
Lebanon and the Occupied Territories.
That Israeli policy engendered suicide bombing was acknowledged by Rabin. 
Having originally promoted indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon 'until 
there's nobody left there' - he was defence minister at the time - he 
finally came to the view that 'terror cannot be finished by one war; it's 
total nonsense.' By replacing 'PLO terrorism' with 'Shia terrorism', he 
acknowledged, Israel had done 'the worst thing' in the struggle against 
terrorism: 'Not one PLO terrorist,' he said, 'has ever made himself into a 
live bomb.'
According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community 
Mental Health Programme, today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, 
children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 
55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by 
Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom - sacrificing oneself for God - increases its 
appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. 'It's despair,' 
El-Sarraj states baldly, 'a despair where living becomes no different from 
dying.' When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of 
pride. 'In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,' 
Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. 'Not any 
longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; 
we feel that we'd simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.'
That life begins after death is a widespread religious belief, by no means 
exclusive to Islam. For those wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their 
culture, which is not the same thing as condemning the act, it is easy to 
degrade that belief. Most often we are told of the 72 virgins proffering 
their favours in the skies. In fact the virgins reputedly awaiting the 
martyr in Paradise are symbols of purity and innocence: this is a sacred 
utopia, a late exalted compensation for the wretched of the earth, not a 
second shot at worldly pleasures. 'Thoughts of Paradise,' the Haaretz 
journalist Amira Hass writes, 'embody the evaporation of the dream of a 
Palestinian state.' Or, in the words of the psychologist Shafiq Masalha, 
interviewed by Barbara Victor in Army of Roses, 'to be tempted to go to 
Paradise means that life on earth is hell.'lllll
On the one hand, suicide bombers are beyond any understanding. On the other, 
the mind of Islam can be uncovered in its most intimate detail. Reuter opens 
his book by asking: what motivates a suicide bomber? Or rather: what 'kind 
of people' are they? He knows there is no answer. Suicide bombers are not a 
species. He also knows that his question is loaded. If suicide attacks are 
political, they call for a political response. If they stem from 
'perversity', then the perpetrators can be treated as a 'criminal sect', to 
be isolated, arrested, suppressed. Behind the argument that suicide bombers 
should not, or cannot, be understood lies a subtext of dehumanisation. When 
El-Sarraj is asked if it is true that Palestinians do not care about human 
life, even that of their own 'flesh and blood', he replies: 'How can you 
believe in your own humanity if you don't believe in the humanity of the 
enemy?'
How, then, should you write about suicide bombing? It is not just, as 
Avishai Margalit puts it, that every statement about it is liable to be 
contested. Nor is it just that the vocabulary is disputed (describing these 
attacks as 'suicide bombing', as the term appears in the title of each of 
these books, is already to beg the question). What is at issue is something 
more like an ethics of form. Reuter has chosen to write a history, or 
perhaps a geography, that traces the beginnings of today's attacks to 
Khomeini's child battalions, cannon fodder who went into battle with a key 
to Paradise around their necks, through Syria to Lebanon and 
Israel-Palestine. This allows Reuter to present the Palestinians not as 
freaks of nature (or culture), but instead as heirs of a contemporary 
realpolitik, for which the West bears more than a share of responsibility 
(Britain supported Saddam Hussein in the war against Khomeini). As Reuter 
also points out, the PLO were originally secular, but by now, the 
Palestinians are strangely in step with many of their Zionist counterparts 
in aligning nationalism with religious fervour. For both sides in the 
conflict, the struggle over Palestine constitutes a holy war.
What is unique about the suicide attacks of the second intifada is that they 
come 'from the people for the people', as Reuter puts it, unlike the more 
sect-based cults of the Tamil Tigers or the Kurdistan Workers' Party. This 
makes them almost impossible to defeat militarily. If suicide attacks come 
from below, as the reaction to an occupying army, the simple conclusion is 
that they will cease when the armies pull out. Enthusiasm for suicide 
attacks has dramatically declined since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. 
Sheikh Fadlallah, spiritus rector of the most radical Lebanese Shias, was 
one of the first high-ranking Islamic scholars to condemn the attacks of 11 
September 2001. In Iran today, the idea of killing oneself in order to enter 
Paradise has all but disappeared. There is a lesson here. What made the 
difference is not military intervention but Iran's internal development, the 
growing desire for democracy after two decades of theocratic experiment. 
Against the violent Manichean rhetoric of the times, and its brute 
interventionism, Reuter offers a counter-narrative: suicide attacks in 
Israel-Palestine will stop when Israel withdraws from the Occupied 
Territories; more generally across the region, the West should keep out.
Reuter has written a history, but Barbara Victor, a novelist and journalist, 
has produced something more like a novel or short story collection. As the 
subtitle of Army of Roses suggests, she sets herself the task of entering 
the world of the women suicide bombers, to tell their stories. Empathy here 
is in no short supply ('she tries to understand, even to feel,' as 
Christopher Dickey puts it in his foreword). For many in the West, the 
female suicide bomber is the most inhuman, since she violates women's 
perceived role in life. Victor's aim is to redeem her: 'This book tells the 
story of the women who died for reasons that go beyond the liberation of 
Palestine.'
Above all she narrates, uncovering the most private, indeed frequently 
humiliating details of these women's lives - six of them at the time of 
writing, more since. On 4 October 2003, as Victor was finishing Army of 
Roses, Hanadi Jaradat blew herself up at Maxim's restaurant in Haifa on the 
eve of Yom Kippur, killing 21 Israelis and injuring many others. From a 
privileged Palestinian family, on the verge of opening her own law practice 
in Jenin, Jaradat had witnessed the killing by the Israeli army of her 
cousin Salah and her brother Fahdi when they were sitting together in a café 
the previous May. Without preamble, the soldiers drew up and shot them. 
According to Victor, a bomb-laden car that Fahdi was to drive into Haifa the 
next day was parked only a few feet away. Jaradat fled but 'ran directly 
into the arms of Yasser Obeidi, one of the most wanted men in the West 
Bank', a 29-year-old married man and the military commander of Islamic Jihad 
in Jenin. (Literally into his arms? Was he standing on the street corner?) A 
very different account by Kevin Toolis in the Observer states that she was, 
in fact, in Jordan shopping for Fahdi's wedding when he was killed, but 
returned to Jenin to identify him in the morgue. Victor's story - as may 
already be clear - is a story of romance, passion and cynical intrigue. In 
her version, Jaradat is cruelly manipulated by Obeidi, who persuades her to 
become a martyr: 'He became her lover, mentor and one-way ticket to 
Paradise,' where they would find 'eternal happiness as man and wife'. The 
source for this narrative is not given. In fact, as it emerges, there are 
several conflicting stories as to how and why Jaradat ended her life. For 
the Palestinians, it was to avenge the deaths of her cousin and brother. For 
the Israelis, she was a 29-year-old woman depressed at her lack of marriage 
prospects: 'Allegedly she intimidated men because of her good looks and 
education.'
The Israeli reading of Jaradat's motives should warn us that, whether or not 
what they attribute to her is accurate, personalising the female martyr can 
be a way of denying the abuses of the army - the killing of her brother and 
cousin, the denying her sick father permission to attend a hospital in 
Haifa - and of silencing the Palestinian political case. Here the 
distinction between suicide and martyrdom is crucial. According to Islam, it 
is a sin to commit suicide. Your life belongs to God and is only his to 
dispose of. Martyrdom, however, is something else. 'If a martyr wants to 
kill himself because he's sick of being alive, that's suicide. But if he 
wants to sacrifice his soul in order to defeat the enemy and for God's 
sake - well, then he's a martyr,' the late Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi explained 
in 2001. In Victor's analysis, the only possible explanation of a woman's 
decision to become a suicide bomber is that she is sick of life (the back 
cover refers to the women's 'blighted inner lives').
Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber, was in despair after being 
divorced on grounds of her infertility; Darine Abu Aisha was determined to 
avoid marriage; Zina, the accomplice of Izzedine Masri, who detonated 
himself in Sbarro's Pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2002, had had her 
illegitimate child taken away: 'Without exception, every woman and young 
girl who attempted to or succeeded in blowing herself up had been 
marginalised by Palestinian society.' Victor is protesting the place of 
women in the Muslim world. She also sees herself as fighting a 'misguided 
feminist movement': 'We die in equal numbers to the men.' The problem is 
that the more she tries to apply her analysis to all women in the culture, 
the more its power to explain individual cases declines: if life is 
unbearable for women under Islam, then why this particular woman? Slowly and 
painstakingly, Victor has turned these women from martyrs into suicides. 
Some, such as Ayat al-Akhras, are described as taking their destiny into 
their own hands - she acted in order to redeem her father, who had been 
accused of collaborating with the Israelis, and to save her family from 
disgrace. But the overall message is clear. Not one of these women is truly 
the political agent of her own life.
In this form, empathy can start to look like a cover for prejudice. The 
Palestinian Zina - anonymous by family request - 'has a history of 
problems', whereas the Israeli Malki Roth, killed by the Sbarro bomb that 
Zina played her part in planting, was a 'well-balanced, wholesome teenager'; 
Rachel Levy, killed in March 2002 by Ayat al-Akhras in a grocery store in 
the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Kiryat Yovel, was finally adjusting to the 
'rhythms of teenage life'. In fact these young Israeli women are living in, 
and acutely suffering from, a society that encourages them to be blind. In a 
letter addressed to God on the occasion of the Jewish New Year, Malki Roth 
ended with the hope 'that I'll be alive and that the Messiah should come'. 
(Is this wholesome?) Rachel Levy's mother never discussed the political 
situation with her children: it was too frightening. Rachel would come home 
and turn off the television: 'She just didn't want to know.'
Although Palestinian suffering under the occupation has a central place in 
Army of Roses, at moments such as these Victor comes close to an 
idealisation of Israel not far from the myth that Israel continues to 
promote about itself. Put simply, the Israelis are better people. Faced with 
loss, they do not commit suicide, or kill, but care for their families, 
carry on with the business of living. The violence of the state is pushed 
aside. Life continues. Suicide bombing, on the other hand, involves 
abandoning limits 'as we understand them with the democratic mind'. Is it 
finally empathy at all if you enter a person's - a whole culture's - mind, 
only to make such a clean and confident exit?
One way of underscoring the precarious nature of such distinctions is to 
look back in time. Towards the end of Galoot (Exile), a remarkable 
documentary by the Israeli film-maker Asher Tlalim, Ariella Atzmon, a former 
lecturer in philosophy and education, recalls her life as the daughter of 
militant Jewish nationalists who arrived in Palestine in the late 1930s. She 
was named after Arie Itzhaki, who made bombs in his cellar. On the day she 
was born, he blew himself up, crying: 'Death to the British'. He was about 
to be arrested. As a child she sang songs to Shlomo Ben Yosef, who had 
lobbed a grenade onto an Arab bus, killing women and children: 'She will sit 
and weep, this woman who mourns for her son, so dear, so great.' We did not 
want peace, she says. The Palestinians will want peace when they have a 
country.
For years, Israeli secret service analysts and social scientists have been 
trying to build up a typical profile of the suicide 'assassin', only to 
conclude that there isn't one. It may indeed be that your desire to solve 
the problem is creating it, that burrowing into the psyche of the enemy, far 
from being an attempt to dignify them with understanding, is a form of 
evasion that blinds you to your responsibility for the state they are in. 
There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide 
bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. 'Children who have seen so 
much inhumanity,' El-Sarraj states, 'inevitably come out with inhuman 
responses.' We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, 
in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that 
we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.
Jacqueline Rose's next book, The Question of Zion, will be out in the 
spring.