Redress Information & Analysis
By
Stuart Littlewood
9 March 2010
Stuart Littlewood looks at how Israel’s incessant abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights and freedoms, and its trampling on their dreams, lie behind almost every act of suicide bombing.”Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.”
The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill? – Mahesh Bhatt
Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.
We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.
Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.
Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.
Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair.
B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket. Awesome hardware gives any murky mission a moral superiority that gets nods of approval from the governing élite in the drawing rooms of London and Washington.
What is not acceptable is delivering the high explosive in person, all the way to the target, and looking your enemy in the eye as you push the detonator. That simply isn’t cricket.
“There can be no justification, under any circumstances, for taking innocent lives through terrorism." Those were the very words used by Liberal Democrat Party leader Charles Kennedy in 2004, when he sacked British MP Jenny Tonge from her front-bench spokes job for suggesting she might consider becoming a suicide bomber herself if she had to live through the situation the Palestinians were in.
Statistics from Israel's
B'Tselem make the Palestinians’ situation clear. Between 2000 and the start of Israel’s "Cast Lead"
blitzkrieg on Gaza in December 2008, the Israelis’ vast standing army, equipped with the most advanced weaponry American money can buy, killed 4,790 Palestinian civilians in their homeland. Of these, 952 were children.
Yes, 952 young Palestinian lives horribly snuffed out and their parents desolated...
In response Palestinians, with their garden-shed weapons, killed 490 Israeli civilians, including 84 children. In this vicious game of murder the Israelis were leading the Palestinians by 11 to 1.
Those were the “circumstances” in which Kennedy sacked Jenny Tonge.
Terrorism most foul
During the Cast Lead onslaught – the foulest act of state terrorism for decades – Israel slaughtered at least 350 more children, and Gaza has been under daily attack ever since. So the "most moral army in the world" must have blown to bits, shredded, incinerated or smashed with snipers’ bullets at least 1,400 youngsters in the last nine and a half years. The numbers left maimed and crippled don't bear thinking about.
"Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell." |
In their study,
Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis, Sean Yom and Basel Saleh found that many Palestinian suicide attackers had been on the receiving end of violent encounters with the Israeli military, resulting in injury to themselves, or arrest, or a close family member being killed.
From October 2000 to March 2004, over 2,800 Palestinian fatalities and 25,600 non-lethal injuries were inflicted by the Israeli armed forces. Revenge, often fuelled by deteriorating economic prospects and the imposition of harsh policies, provided recruiters with a ready supply of volunteers. Persuading individuals not to support or participate in violence would necessarily involve “improving the structural health of Palestinian society”.
Fat chance of that. Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell. Far from allowing the health of Palestinian society to improve, they tighten the screw of oppression further. In the period covered in the study they deliberately destroyed some 4,700 Palestinian homes while continuing their normal programme of slaughter, dispossession, abduction and all the other atrocities they are famed for.
Since 1967, according to the
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Israel has demolished in total 24,145 homes in the occupied territories, including 4,247 (a UN figure) destroyed during Operation Cast Lead. Palestinians tend to have large families. Consider how many homeless have been created.
Professor Robert Pape’s comprehensive analysis,
Dying to Win, based on his work for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, advances the idea that suicide terrorism exerts coercive power “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland... The bottom line, then, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation”
Occupation includes control of territory, as in Gaza, not necessarily military occupation.
And of course, when it comes to Israel, we’re not talking about a democracy but a vile ethnocracy.
Religion has little to do with it. Pape dismisses the often-repeated view that Islam is the root of the problem. “Rather, the taproot is American military policy.” And the notion that Islamic fundamentalism is bent on world domination is “pure fantasy”.
Many suicide bombers are simply motivated by the desire for revenge. According to one researcher, harsh state repression "should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing" but "often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing."
One Saturday night in 2001
Saeed Hotari blew himself up at the entrance to a disco in Tel Aviv, killing 21 teenagers and injuring 132. Hotari was one of nine children from a poor Palestinian family living in Jordan and had been in the West Bank for two years hoping to find a better life. He left a message saying: “If we don’t fight, we will suffer. If we do fight, we will suffer, but so will they.”
The disco bombing was cited by the Israeli government as one of the reasons for building the Apartheid Wall.
In 2003 a female Palestinian lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, aged 29, killed 21 civilians at Maxim restaurant in Haifa. She acted to avenge the killing of her brother and a cousin (some sources say her fiancé) by Israeli security forces.
Surgeon Abdel Aziz Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas, warned: "Israelis will have no stability and no security until the occupation ends. Suicide bombers are Israel's future." Rantissi was assassinated in 2004 in a helicopter attack on his car. A mother and her five year-old daughter were killed in the attack and four other bystanders wounded.
Arrest, detention without due process, constant humiliation, homelessness, unemployment and other family suffering at the hands of the Israeli army are not the only spur. Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed “the Engineer” and regarded as the father of suicide bombing, became Hamas’s chief bomb maker and for several years topped Israel’s most wanted list. From a relatively well-off family, he gained a BSc in electrical engineering at Birzeit University and planned to study for a Master’s degree in Jordan but the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow him to.
Thwarted in his life’s ambition Ayyash joined Hamas. “Don’t get sore, get even” might have been his motto. He used household chemicals to manufacture an explosive brew called Mother of Satan. His devices were used in a number of “massacres” and he quickly achieved hero status, narrowly escaping capture many times. It is claimed he was responsible for the deaths of around 90 Israelis, a high price for the occupier to pay for robbing this youngster of his rights to travel and study – rights we in the West take for granted.
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