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By Root 2327 0

a small minority started a martyr’s cult around his grave. While the rest of Israel was appalled at his behavior, and was even more scandalized by the few settlers’ celebration of his terrible deeds, his supporters and sympathizers labeled his death as a martyrdom. Although ordinary Israelis can treat their victims of Arab terrorism as martyrs, they normally do not. They are normally seen as civilian casualities in a tragic war for the preservation of Israel. Furthermore, there is normally no incentive for suicidal bombing, especially if it includes killing innocent civilians, because those behaviors are contrary to the morals being affirmed in the formation of the Israeli state. In the minds of the vast majority of Israelis, there is no moral equivalency between the actions of suicide bombers and the Israeli army’s occupation, even those who oppose the army’s reoccupation of Palestinian territories.

In her interesting book on martyrdom, Elizabeth Castelli analyzes the deaths of early Christian martyrs Perpetua and Thecla and then compares them with the modern American martyr, Cassie Bernall, who died at the hands of two teenage misfits in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999.89 According to the popular memoir of the incident, She Said “Yes,”90 Cassie was asked if she believed in God and, when she answered “Yes,” she was killed. As a result, her parents and a large part of the evangelical world have proclaimed her a martyr because she died for her faith. This story, however, is factually inaccurate. Journalists interviewing several witnesses have demonstrated that it was another girl who made that remark and that she luckily survived the attack to confirm the story.

But the facts are not the only important aspect of the story. As Cassie Bernall was surely a tragic victim, grieving parents seek the religious solace of martyrdom as a way to understand the death of their daughter, taken from them by such horrible and senseless circumstances. In a way, it makes the claim that this tragically murdered youth is a kind of saint. Though the historian may critique the events, no one really blames the parents for seeking a solace in religious terminology when the martyr is truly a victim. Such is the power of martyrdom to inform our lives and help us come to terms with such terrifying intrusions of violence in our otherwise well-ordered society. But the religious motivation behind these sympathies can also be used to blind us to more practical ways of dealing with the violence: meaningful reform of gun-control laws, for instance, which has led to less violence in every modern country.

Very likely, the same sympathies are in the minds of the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers who praise their martyred children and profess no grief over their loss, though we might want to make a very large distinction between Cassie’s victimhood and acts of war against civilians.

One might, in fact, want to point out the injustices done to to the teenage attackers of Columbine High School, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who were clearly victimized by their own classmates. One might sympathize with the plight of intelligent, unathletic youth in an American high school where only athletics and popularity are valued. Similarly, one might sympathize with the terrible plight of the Palestinians in the political climate of the Middle East. Neither sympathy justifies deliberate killing of innocent civilians. The judgment seems simple enough, but it has never emerged publicly in Palestine and it does not seem clear to Americans opposed to gun control either. In fact, the closest Palestinian intellectuals have come to condemning suicide bombing is to say that it has not proven effective as a tactic. This only points out how these acts of carnage are never simply the acts of individuals; they are representations of the attitudes of the community. One might almost make the case that Palestinian national ideology is seeking to convince youngsters that they should seek to be transformed into popular Muslim saints. It is especially tragic when a viable Palestinian