Updates from AIJAC

The "Palestinian Despair" Myth

At a charity function on Tuesday, Cherie Blair, lawyer wife of the British Prime Minister stated about Palestinian suicide bombers, "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress." Meanwhile, the following day, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, "When young people go to their deaths, we can all feel a degree of compassion for those youngsters. They must be so depressed and misguided to do this."

These sentiments are all too common, but they are a myth - suicide bombing is not the result of despair, depression or desperation, as Prof. Mark Heller of Hebrew University argues below, it is about hope and power. As the New York Times editorialised this week, "For months, Palestinians have grown intoxicated with the idea of power through death." Moreover, Heller hits the nail on the head explaining why the myth remains so persistent.

Next, Rosie DiManno, columnist at the Toronto Star, looks at the physics of what a suicide bomb does to people, and why their persistence and celebration has convinced her that a new Palestinian state will necessarily be a dangerous rogue state.

Finally, William Saletan of Slate.com looks at the underlining logic of the "land for peace" argument behind Israel's decision to seize back Palestinian land in response to terror attacks until the violence ceases.

It's hope, Cherie, not despair

by MARK A. HELLER

Jerusalem Post, Jun. 21, 2002

The latest insight into the mind of the Palestinian suicide bomber comes from Cherie Blair. Mrs. Blair is a successful and prominent London lawyer, but her musings on the political psychology of Palestinian terrorists wouldn't merit much attention, were it not for the fact that she also happens to be the wife of Tony, the prime minister of the United Kingdom.

No adult in Britain can have grown up without being exposed to lots of discussions about terrorism. But there weren't many suicide-bombers in the IRA, and the phenomenon is apparently so bizarre that Mrs. Blair can explain it only by falling back on lazy liberal stereotypes. Since we are all humans, the assumption goes, the only explanation for people who act contrary to the most fundamental human instinct self-preservation is that they must be driven by an overwhelming sense of despair, deprivation, and desperation. Therefore, Palestinians who indulge in this most extreme sort of behaviour must have been forced into it by what Israel has done to them.

The conclusion seems to flow logically from the assumption. The only problem is that Mrs. Blair, like many others who explain (without, God forbid, justifying) these despicable acts, never examines the assumption.

So let's be a bit politically incorrect. The liberal assertion that people are basically the same invariably draws warm murmurs of mushy assent from western audiences. But it is nothing more than an expression of goodwill, without any basis in fact. We are not all the same. We don't speak the same language, dress the same way, or eat the same food.

We don't all pray to the same God, if we pray at all, and those who do pray to the same God don't pray the same way.

We don't all have the same political systems or the same attitudes to relations between the citizen and the state, between men and women, between adults and minors, even between parents and children. In Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, children were encouraged or brainwashed to inform on their parents. And in Islamo-fascist segments of Palestinian society today, young people are encouraged or even brainwashed to blow themselves up in order to kill Israelis (in the same way that Saudi and Egyptian Islamo-fascists none of them poor or oppressed blew themselves up in New York and Washington).

Even more alien to the "common humanity" school of thought, some of their mothers publicly glorify the death of their children and welcome their martyrdom.

A western liberal can probably only understand all this through the prism of despair. That still begs the question, even if we are all the same, why the same cause does not always lead to the same effect. After all, there is lots of despair, anger, and frustration in non-Islamic societies, but (except among Tamils) very little of the suicide-bomber phenomenon. More to the point, that explanation doesn't even entertain the possibility that in other societies, made up of people who are not the same as Cherie Blair, the phenomenon can be explained, not by despair, but by hate and hope: of going to paradise, of gaining financial reward for families, even of killing so many Jews and demoralizing so many others that Israel might eventually be destroyed. This hate and these hopes are so alien to Mrs. Blair's world that she can't fathom the possibility, but that doesn't mean that they are equally alien to everyone else.

RECENT OPINION polls show that about two-thirds of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, and that almost 90 percent oppose the preemptive arrest of the bombers or of those who recruit and send them on their way. It therefore took no little courage for a group of several dozen Palestinian intellectuals to issue a public statement appealing for an end to terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, even (one presumes) attacks in which the terrorists don't kill themselves. Never mind that the appeal was such a long time coming 21 months after the outbreak of the so-called intifada and about eight years after the suicide bombings began. Never mind that the appeal applies only to attacks within the Green Line, which presumably means that the bombings this week in Jerusalem's Gilo and French Hill neighborhoods are kosher. Never mind that it is motivated by instrumental considerations of what serves Palestinian national interests, rather than by any moral revulsion. Never mind that the signatories' cause is contaminated by the explanation of CNN/BBC's favorite Palestinian, Hanan Ashrawi, who mounts another excursion into the rhetorical gutter by arguing that Palestinians should avoid murdering civilians in order not to sink to Israel's level. Never mind all this. It's enough that there are still a few people who inhabit Mrs. Blair's cognitive universe the kind of people who get invited to 10 Downing Street and yet are willing to speak out against the rising current of Islamo-fascism in Palestinian society.

The writer is principal research associate at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

Unlike victims, bomber died without pain

By Rosie DiManno

Toronto Star, June 19, 2002

TWENTY-TWO-YEAR- OLD Mohammed al-Ghoul, a master's student in Islamic studies, wrote those lines. Then he went out and blew up a crowded bus in Jerusalem.

Twenty dead, including the homicide bomber. At least 55 wounded. The most deadly terrorist attack in the Holy City in six years.

It was not a thing of beauty.

This is what happens when a conventional bomb ‹ garden-variety, garage-made ‹ is exploded in a contained space, such as a city bus:

The explosive material packed around the device, Semtex or dynamite, say, releases an eruption of energy that heats up the contents of the bomb ‹ in this case, a quiver of nails. In the blink of an explosive flash, the nails are pushed outward on a pressure wave that cannot be contained within the puny confines of a steel bus. Think of water boiling in a lidded pot. The lid will not hold.

This super-hot air will melt and warp everything in the immediate vicinity. It will turn the metal framework of a bus into instant shrapnel, over and above the shrapnel (the nails) fitted into the bomb itself. Now the bus becomes a killing instrument of metal and glass and fire.

The force of the blast is determined by the quantity of the explosive. An average bomb ‹ the kind strapped around a suicide terrorist's waist, covered by a shirt ‹ would likely detonate at a rate of about 28,000 feet per second ‹ or about 22 times faster than a 9 mm bullet leaving the muzzle of a handgun. That means that the surrounding air pressure ‹ normally 15 pounds per square inch ‹ would spike to 2,200 pounds per square inch. Such heat and pressure will melt iron.

A person sitting nearby would feel, momentarily, a shock wave slamming into his or her body, with an "overpressure" of 300,000 pounds. Such a blast would crush the chest, rupture liver, spleen, heart and lungs, melt eyes, pull organs away from surrounding tissue, separate hands from arms and feet from legs. Bodies would fly through the air or be impaled on the jagged edges of crumpled metal and broken glass.

"For the exposed part of the body, the side facing the blast, it would be like falling off a building," says Dr. Pekka Sinervo, a physics professor at the University of Toronto. "No, actually it would be worse."

"Think of a hurricane," adds Constable Ken Evans, a bomb squad specialist with Toronto police. "All that wind moving at, what, 100 miles an hour? Air pushed by a bomb blast could be going at 25,000 feet a second. If you're standing close, it will blow your organs off the bone structure."

If you're the suicide bomber, if you're Mohammed al-Ghoul, you would feel... nothing.

"Vaporised," says Evans.

Except for knowing that you were about to die ‹ unlike your victims, the children on their way to school, the secretaries on the way to the office, the shoppers who rely on public transport ‹ I fail to see the courage required in such an act of destruction. It is a coward's death.

Suicide bombers, homicide bombers, they are the instruments of cowardly terrorist organizations, proxy murderers who pick off Jewish children and women, young mothers, old grandparents, teenagers at a pizzeria, twenty-somethings at a disco, entire families sitting down to a Passover dinner at a banquet hall, shoppers squeezing melons at an outdoor market, bus riders: shredded Israelis.

Hamas, an extremist Islamic group, took "credit" for yesterday's bombing. U.S. President George W. Bush was quick to condemn to the attack, as will most Western leaders, perhaps even our own foreign affairs minister, Bill Graham, with his palpably pro-Palestinian sentiments.

But Bush, Graham, all those Western leaders, including European presidents and prime ministers keen to appease their own Muslim constituencies, don't have to live in Israel, where buses kill. They don't have to send their children to schools patrolled by soldiers. They needn't worry that a beloved teenage daughter, out for the evening with friends, will have her minced remains scraped off the sidewalk by volunteer crews that immediately descend on every explosion site, scouring for body bits ‹ because this is not debris, not effluent. These are the precious remains of human beings, and all their families might get to bury.

This is the beautiful spectre imagined by al-Ghoul? An educated Palestinian, resident of the Al Faraa refugee camp, a devout Muslim, a man of the Koran, blinded by the zealotry of Hamas, which had recruited him as one more human bomb. They won't do the killing on their own, the Hamas leadership. Why sacrifice themselves when there is so much human fodder at their disposal, all those hate-poisoned martyrs, little more than boys and girls, impoverished more inside their souls than in the outward manifestation of their lives.

Al-Ghoul ‹ how appropriate, that name! ‹ had twice before failed to stage suicide attacks, according to the note he left behind, although he didn't explain how or why he had been previously thwarted. Had he been repulsed by security, by the Israeli military, by checkpoints? Or had he lost his nerve?

If only more of them would lose their nerve.

"This time, I hope I will be able to do it," he'd written in his farewell missive, this after paying one last weekend visit to relatives, including thee sisters to whom he'd brought sweets. When he took his leave, the sisters assumed their brother was returning to An-Najah University in nearby Nablus, where he was preparing for exams. But why bother to study, why embark on a new life when you can choose death instead, for yourself, for umpteen strangers.

What can Israel do now? Retaliate, no doubt. And vengeance is theirs. Continue building their 360-kilometre security fence to wall off Palestinians on the West Bank from Israel proper. Support, as a besieged nation, even more punitive actions against the Palestinian enclaves on the West Bank, even more humiliating rules that circumscribe normal movement.

Yes, to all that, if with heavy heart. Because to do otherwise, to placate the devastators, would be to reward Hamas and their kin.

These are not, I have come to believe in recent months, people who deserve a state.

Their independent Palestine would be a rogue nation, a failed state from infancy, a grotesquery from inception. I did not used to think this. The homicide bombers, and the families who celebrate them as martyrs beloved by God, have convinced me of it.

It was Kamel Irikat, an inspector in the Palestine police force and first generation Mufti terrorist, to whom history gives the dubious distinction of being the first Arab who vowed to "throw the Jews into the sea," this after the United Nations voted in favour of partitioning Palestine in 1947.

If not throwing them into the sea, then shrapnel-bombing them, one by one.

Land for War

Israel to terrorists: Take our peace, lose your land.

By William Saletan

Slate.com, Posted Wednesday, June 19, 2002

Last night, after a Hamas bomber killed 19 Israelis on a bus in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met with his Cabinet and authorized a new policy. Under this policy, "Israel will respond to acts of terror by capturing [Palestinian Authority] territory. These areas will be held by Israel as long as terror continues. Additional acts of terror will lead to the taking of additional areas." To prove its point, Israel sent troops into several West Bank cities, where they set up mobile homes, imposed curfews, commandeered buildings, and rounded up suspected militants.

Israeli rightists embraced the policy as a return to permanent Jewish rule of the West Bank. Israeli leftists, Palestinian moderates, and critics of Israel around the world denounced the policy as a betrayal of the peace process. Both claims could turn out to be true, but they needn't be. Properly gauged, the new policy can extend the logic of land for peace. Take our peace, lose your land.

The critique from the left, as voiced by Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and his Cabinet ministers, is that Israeli invasions of Palestinian territory belie and destroy "the peace process." But what exactly is that process? Israel gives the Palestinians land, and the Palestinians give Israel peace. (To be more precise, Israel gives the Palestinians back their land, and the Palestinians give Israel back its peace.) Some people think Israel reneged on its land commitment because the Palestinians reneged on their peace commitment. Others think the Palestinians reneged on their peace commitment because Israel reneged on its land commitment. But all of these people agree on the idea of land for peace.

Even many of the terrorists, in their twisted way, share this assumption. Hamas, the organization that sponsored yesterday's bus bombing, wants to obliterate Israel. But the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which sponsored today's bombing of a Jerusalem bus stop (killing seven people and wounding 38), officially just wants Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders. "Zionists, leave our land because we will not stop our operations as long as there is an occupation," the group warned in a statement claiming credit for the attack.

The Israeli policy turns this logic on its head. To the extent that the purpose of Palestinian terrorism is to get land‹and it must be understood that this extent is limited‹the clearest demonstration of the failure of that approach is to take land from the Palestinians each time they commit terrorism. If it wasn't crazy for the Israelis to halt their surrender of land under the Oslo agreement on the grounds that they weren't getting the peace they had bargained for, why is it crazy for them to raise the ante? The new policy simply pushes the Palestinian reward/punishment calculus into negative territory. If Israel is deprived of peace, it won't just stop giving up land. It will take land back.

By the same token, this policy only makes sense if it's limited. Reports from Israel indicate that hard-liners in Sharon's Cabinet see the policy as a return to permanent occupation of the West Bank. One Cabinet minister told Israel Radio, "The government should return absolute control over the whole of [the West Bank] to the army." That notion is self-defeating. If you're a Palestinian and the Israeli government tells you that it will keep your land regardless of your behavior, what incentive do you have to offer peace in return?

The conflicting statements coming out of the Israeli government today suggest that Sharon's ministers are fighting over exactly what the new policy means. Some speak of occupation; others speak of capture; still others speak of incursions. The defense minister and the chief of the Israeli army have indicated that they envision police actions lasting one to three weeks. That's a sensible stopping point for now. As for Israelis who want a pretext to rule the West Bank forever, they should bear in mind the impotence of total war. You can't threaten the peace of a dead man, and you can't threaten the freedom of a slave.