Hard thinking about suicide bombings

Yesterday, in West Jerusalem, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his
bomb on a crowded early-morning bus. Eight people–actually nine,
including
the bomber himself– were killed, and scores injured.
What a tragedy.

Here
are some details about seven of these people.

I was in West Jerusalem exactly two weeks ago. When I visited Israel in
2002, I was glad to have the opportunity to take a few bus-rides, as I
hoped
it would show some sort of solidarity with my many friends in Israel who,
I know, live with a constant level of dread that something like this may
happen.
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem, just two weeks ago, I
didn’t ride a bus.
But I made a point of spending an evening walking
over to Ben Yehuda Street and eating in a nice, popular restaurant there.
The same sort of (perhaps ill-focused) “solidarity” at work.

The Israeli government and, it seems, many people in Israel are vocal in
making the case that the fear they suffer from the suicide bombers
justifies
many of the policies their government has adopted taken and continues to
adopt
toward (or against) the Palestinians.
That includes the policy of not
negotiating with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority–on the grounds
that
the extremely hard-pressed PA is “not tough enough” on the militant
organizations
that organize the missions of the suicide bombers.
It also, more currently,
includes the government’s pursuit of its present wall-building project in
the West Bank.

I think I understand a little about how terrible it must feel to live in
a country that is subject to periodic suicide-bomb assaults, many of them
detonated in places filled with civilians.
I have only spent a little
time in Israel.
But back when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s, car-bomb
attacks against “soft”, civilian-packed targets were certainly one of the
many tactics used by the (Israeli-backed) Maronite extremist organizations
against the people of mainly-Muslim West Beirut.
Like most of the other
western journalists working in Lebanon at that time, I lived in West
Beirut.
I also had my children there.
Yes, we were living within the bounds
of an always unpredictable civil war (which was why I left the city, with
my children, in 1981).
Many horrendous things happened while I was
there– and of course, many even worse things, in 1982, after I was gone.
But one of the things that happened periodically in West Beirut was
certainly car-bombs.

I remember one in such attack in particular that I had to cover: the
assailants
had detonated a car-bomb outside a crowded movie theater near Corniche
Mazraa–
and then, a few minutes later, as confused and scared moviegoers were
milling
around on the street outside the theater, they detonated another car-bomb
right next to it.
I turned up, notebook in hand, within minutes after
that, and I can still remember some of the more vivid and disturbing
aspects
of the scene that met me.

Yes, it does lead to a constant feeling of dread and bereavement, and to
a terrifying sense of uncertainty.

So in response to the latest suicide bombing in Jerusalem, I want to
send
literally heartfelt condolences to the loved ones left behind by all those
killed, as well as sympathies and good wishes to all those wounded in the
assault– with this number including, at different levels, all
those
who have suffered wounds as a result of it, which probably includes all
israelis,
and many others.

However, it is also quite appropriate to start asking some realistic
questions
about this whole phenomenon of Palestinian suicide-bombings of Israeli
civilians
that are, it seems to me, too seldom asked in most western media.
Questions
like these:

1. Is there something about these types of attack that makes them
   uniquely
   different from any other form of assault against a society, and if so,
   what
   is it?
2. Do the “special” attributes of this form of attack justify “special”
   forms of response against those judged responsible for such attacks?
3. How broadly or narrowly should such “responsibility” be ascribed?
4. Given that during the current Palestinian intifada more than four
   times
   as many Palestinian minors as Israeli minors have been killed (and we
   might
   assume that the proportion of “civilians” of all ages killed on each side
   is roughly similar) can we say that Israel’s actions against the
   Palestinians–inasmuch
   as they are claimed to be “in response to” Palestinian violence against
   Israelis–have
   actually been proportionate?
5. And, given that the cycle of violence between the two peoples, with
   its terrible attendant casualty toll, shows no sign of abating, can we say
   that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians have actually been
   effective
   in achieving the claimed goal of ending the violence?

These are not small questions, I know.
But they have been weighing
on me a lot in the wake of my latest visit to Israel/Palestine, and I hope
to be able to start exploring them in some posts over the days ahead.

Today, I’ll start with Question 1 above, and hope to make a bit of
headway.

First, though, since I consider each human being on God’s earth to have,
at a very fundamental level, equal value as a rights-bearing person, let
me
give the best figures I have for the numbers killed during the current
intifada.
These are
the figures from B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for the Occupied Territories, as I
viewed
them there today.
They count people killed in phsyical confrontations
between Seotember 29, 2000 and January 24, 2004.
They do not count,
for example, Palestinians who died of avoidable causes because Israel’s
strict
movement-control regime prevented them reaching a hospital in time, or
people
on either side of the line who died much earlier than they otherwise would
have because of the high level of general stress in which they are living.
They also do not include people killed since January 24, of which there
have been many.

• Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces or Israeli civilians:
  2,385, of whom 449 were minors under 18.
• Israelis killed by Palestinians: 838, of whom 104 were minors under
  18, 471 were other civilians, and 263 were members of the Israeli security
  forces.

So, Question 1: Is there something about Palestinian suicide bombings
against Israel that makes them uniquely different from any other form of
assault against a society, and if so, what is it?

I start by noting that most (but not all) of these attacks seem clearly to
have launched in predominantly civilian-peopled places.
That means
that their civilian casualties cannot be seen as as “merely” collateral
damage,
but as an integral part of the “target set”.
Under all definitions
of terrorism, this makes them terrorism.
And indeed the broader political
intent of these attacks seems precisely to be to sow terror among
the civilian population and thus “force” the civilians to change their
government’s
policy in the direction the terrorists desire.

(I note that this was also, as far as can be discerned, the declared
political
intention of Israel’s deadly assault against South Lebanon in 1996, which
was therefore equally much “terrorism”.
But terrorism carried out by
a state, on that occasion.)

To say that a certain set of tactics constitutes “terrorism” may be
interesting;
but it certainly is not all that there is to say about it.
For example,
when we get to questions further along in the enquiry, a designation of ”
terrorism”
gives no ready-made answer as to what a government’s response should be (
the
Bushies simplistic imaginings on this core notwithstanding).

So, we have a phenomenon of bombings that are carried out against civilian
targets.
Does the fact that are suicide bombings (in distinction
from, for example, the several remotely detonated
car-bombings that
I witnessed in West Beirut) give them a special character?
Or, does
the fact that they are carried out by Palestinians give them a
special
character?

I think people have many different reactions to the “suicide” aspect of
these
bombings.
For some people, this makes them seem even more heinous and
hideous than would be the case if, for example, these same bombs were
delivered
by some form of “remote control”.
(How about if they were delivered
from helicopters or high-altitude planes, as several of Israel’s bombs
that
have killed numerous Palestinians have been?)

For some people (including at least one very sane Israeli friend of mine)
the “suicide” aspect of the bombing inspires a certain respect: “That they
are even prepared to give their own lives for this…
Like the kamikaze
bombers from Japan… You can fear it, but you have to respect it, as
well…
“

For me, any discussion of suicide is an intimate, difficult affair.
But
my understanding of the depths of despair that are needed to allow any
individual
to even contemplate suicide as an option makes me see this entire
phenomenon
of people apparently eagerly carrying out suicide attacks as deeply,
deeply
tragic.
I find it hard to disentangle everything that I see as tragic
about it–so many aspects of it are!– but certainly, one of them is the
idea that, as I understand it, so many Palestinian people live in such
deep
despair that volunteering for a suicide-bombing operation seems like not
just an option, but an attractive one.

Oh why, oh why couldn’t all that energy be channeled instead into building
a massive civilian-based movement to end the occupation????
They could,
I am convinced, have ended the occupation a long time ago that way.

And finally here the aspect of these suicide operations being undertaken
by Palestinians.
The way most of the western media presents
it, you’d think (1) that the only people in the world who have suffered so
terribly from suicide bombings are the Israelis, and (2) that the only
people
in the world depraved enough to have carried out so many suicide bombings
are Palestinians.

Not true, on either count. If you go
this website
that the notably not terrorist-friendly Council on Foreign Relations
maintains
on matters terroristic you can learn more about the “Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam” in Sri Lanka, otherwise known as the Tamil Tigers.
There
you can learn that in the past 20 years the TTs have undertaken some 200
suicide bombings.
Those and other tactics they have used have resulted
in 60,000 deaths among the country’s 19 million population.

• Deaths from TT violence of all types, per year per million of Sri
  Lankan
  people: 158.
• Deaths from Palestinian violence of all types since September 2000,
  per year per million of Israeli people: 42.

Okay, I know that “ranking” levels of suffering is hideous.
But it
is still very important to stick to a fundamental respect for the equality
of all human beings.
And the claim that many Israelis make that the
suffering inflicted on them by the Palestinian militants is somehow
uniquely
terrible in the current human experience (and that that uniqueness somehow
justifies their government’s pursuit of fairly drastic steps to counter
the
Palestinians’ violence) simply does not bear water.

I’ll just close here by noting that we are now at around the second
anniverary
of a ceasfire concluded between the Sri Lankan government and the TTs.
It’s
been a little ragged to be sure.
As you can discover if you go to
this well-informed site
that tracks the whole peace process there.

But here’s an interesting thing:
Far as I can figure, the U.S. government
and just about every other western government has been an active supporter
of that peace process in Sri Lanka, even though it has all along involved
the TTs as a full participant.
So what’s with that whole thing
of saying, in Palestine/Israel, not just that Israel and “the west” can’t
even talk to Hamas and the other militant groups that have actually
organized
the suicide bomb attacks– but also, that they can’t be expected to talk
to Arafat’s sad old PA because Arafat has “condoned” or “failed to crack
down hard enough” on the terrorists?

Do I detect a double standard at work here?
No, no, say it ain’t so…

Come back to JWN in the days ahead if you want to read what I have to say
on the other questions I posed.
Meantime, if you want to contribute
to this thinking-through exercize, please post your comments here.