• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1038 0

captured trying to blow himself up. Many of them were motivated to kill Jews (as they invariably put it) by the loss of family or friends through Israeli military or police action. It is a matter of revenge in a society where blood feuds last generations. This multiplies the carnage. Others saw suicide bombing as a way out of a dysfunctional family, dishonour—especially in the case of women—or sheer boredom. Wafa Idris, a Palestinian woman suicide bomber, had been divorced by her husband after it became apparent she was infertile. Her husband remarried and moved his new wife into a neighbouring house where he threw a party when their first child was born. This sent Wafa Idris over the edge. Several female suicide bombers seem to have disgraced themselves by becoming pregnant with Fatah lovers, or had otherwise acquired a reputation for looseness which shahid or martyrdom would expunge.43 In 2004, Hamas’s first woman suicide, a woman with two children, was driven by her husband to the checkpoint where she blew herself up after she confessed to having had an extramarital liaison.

Ironically, some young female would-be suicide bombers saw joining a terrorist group as an opportunity to meet males without supervision. One of them explained: ‘We do not live in the West. When I went to training, I told my father that I was going to a girlfriend … I had freedom, even though our family is religious. It is natural to go and see girlfriends.’ She got cold feet only when the males informed her that the object of these training trysts was for the girls to blow themselves up. One shahida explained that when her father refused to allow her to marry a (poor) disabled man with whom she had fallen in love, she got her revenge by becoming a suicide bomber. The vision of life in the Garden of Eden overcame her depression. For women there would not be the seventy-two virgins, but an abundance of food and a doting martyr-warrior. A male failed suicide bomber explained his vision of heavenly delights, much of which was haram to Muslims: ‘All that is forbidden in this world is permitted in the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden has everything—God, freedom, the Prophet Mohammed and my friends, the “shahids” … There are seventy-two virgins. There are lots of things I can’t even describe … I’ll find everything in the Garden of Eden, a river of honey, a river of beer and alcohol …’44 Once dead, the suicide bomber joins the rollcall of martyrs, his or her photo ringed with a golden frame at home, and plastered everywhere on posters. Proud parents announce the death in the weddings, rather than obituaries, columns of newspapers. By 2001 Hamas was paying them between US$3,000 and US$5,000 in death benefits. Saddam Hussein raised this to US$25,000, with further perks such as clocks, rugs and TVs. Expectations are so low in places like Gaza and Jenin, that killing oneself can seem like an attractive career option, and a form of social mobility for the entire family or clan. Social endorsement of martyrdom further destroyed residual taboos about suicide, which in any case had been qualified by many Islamist clerics.

Suicide attacks were accompanied by vicious battles between armed elements of the Intifada and the IDF. One of these raged for ten days in a refugee camp at Jenin, home to fifteen thousand people. This was an Islamist stronghold variously described as ‘the capital of martyrs’ or ‘a nest of cockroaches’ depending on one’s point of view. Hamas and Islamic Jihad wanted to turn this into an Arab Stalingrad, wiring it with booby-traps and sniping from amid the mounting rubble. As the inhabitants were slow to abandon their homes, they also hoped that any Israeli assault would deliver a propaganda victory, with talk of massacre finding its way from journalists to human rights agencies. In fact, talk of ‘hundreds’ or even ‘thousands’ of victims, relayed by Western media outlets, whose presenters could hardly contain their own rage, was misplaced. The final agreed death toll was thirty-two Palestinian armed militants, twenty-two Palestinian civilians,