On Suicide Bombings

( In Arabic, Al Quds Daily Newspaper, Jerusalem, 12-12-2001)

Rema Hammami  &  Musa Budeiri

Resistance is a form of communication and successful resistance depends on sustaining the link between the right message and the right audience. If a struggle has no clarity about its message and the appropriate means of communicating it, then there is the greatest risk that its message will be manipulated in ways that are counter productive or even self destructive to the aims of the resistance itself. Thus in this process of communication there is a fundamental necessity to understand the mental framework of the audience so as to ensure that the message will be received with the intended meaning.

Another fundamental lesson from history is that in the long and protracted process of national liberation a primary task of those fighting for their independence and liberty is national self preservation. Simply stated, if the national liberation movement or the entity representing the collective national identity are destroyed, the possibility for national liberation is destroyed with them.

It is in the light of the above that it behooves us to address various strategies of the intifada and particularly the issue of suicide bombings, first asking whether they constitute successful or unsuccessful means of communicating the Palestinian people's goals, and thus trying to measure their military/political efficacy, while not discounting the concomitant moral issues that such actions give rise to.

There are many ways to approach the issue of suicide bombings. For some, they are merely justified acts of revenge and retaliation in response to the death and destruction wreaked by the superior force of foreign military occupation. As such they serve as the weapon of the weak in order to demonstrate a determination of continued resistance, to make the enemy suffer, and to provide solace for those who have lost their loved ones. In this sense, they do not constitute part of a political/military strategy and are primarily aimed at the victims of Israeli state sponsored terror and violence, serving to compensate and satisfy an all too human desire for revenge.

Others (and especially in the case of Palestine) argue that they are indeed a strategic political weapon whose aim is to assert that current Israeli policies cannot deliver on their promise to guarantee each and every Israeli’s personal security, with the wider aim of toppling the current Israeli government. In a mirror image of Israeli policies they are based on the premise that the more pain inflicted on Israelis, the sooner they will relinquish their hold on Palestinians and agree to come to terms with their just demands for independence and statehood. Israeli society is regarded as possessing a low pain threshold, and the example of the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon is held up as a model of the successful conclusion of a strategy based on inflicting the maximum amount of damage leading to an Israeli decision to evacuate their forces.

The first approach to suicide operations does not see them primarily as means to communicate a message to the adversary while the second does. In the first case, the audience is the Palestinian street and what may be communicated to a wider (or more relevant) audience is immaterial. In the second case, it is believed that the operations are sending a strategic message to the Israeli street -- that until they overthrow Ariel Sharon, and/or force their army to withdraw from the occupied territories they will not live in peace and security. The first approach, suggests that such operations are not conceived of as having any larger strategic political function -- and dangerously ignores the fact that despite this, they do have a strategic but negative political impact. The second claims to have all of the components of a strategy but is based on fatally flawed premises.

Understanding Israeli Society

A main problem with both approaches is that they are isolated from a strategic reading of Israeli society's reaction to and understanding of the uprising and of Palestinian resistance in general i.e. they fail to understand their audience. Most important here is the way in which past and current Israeli leaders successfully waged a propaganda campaign to their own public, portraying Palestinian resistance as additional evidence that Palestinians seek to destroy the Jewish state. At Camp David II the Israelis argued that the Palestinian leadership refused the most generous Israeli offers. Building on this Barak and Ben Ami were able cynically to convince the Israeli public that they had "unmasked" the Palestinian leadership at Camp David, whose  refusal of Israeli generosity stemmed from Palestinian desire for the total destruction of Israel. A peaceful solution they argued was impossible because the Palestinians did not desire peace. In this context, the majority of the Israeli public came to believe that the sole goal of the Palestinian uprising was the total destruction  of Israel-- thus Israelis needed iron resolve (in the form of Ariel Sharon) in order to crush the uprising and ensure Israeli survival.

Thus, the various intended messages of suicide bombings entered into a field of Israeli misconceptions and manipulations and remains there. The Israeli street receives the message simply as more evidence that Palestinians seek only Israeli destruction and that since the bombings take place within the 1948 armistice lines, clearly Palestinians seek not  just to end the occupation but desire all that lies between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. As such, the intended message has completely fallen out of the hands of the messenger and has been manipulated into a weapon to be exploited by the Israeli leadership.

Arguably one could reason that over a period of time these arguments will no longer suffice and that Israeli society (as in the first intifada or in South Lebanon) will decide that another alternative must be found. However, under closer scrutiny the military and political environment of the current intifada does not bear comparison with those earlier two cases. In terms of the first intifada, clearly what led to the desire for a political exit for Israel was, firstly, the high price (moral and physical) of directly patrolling a civilian population within their own towns camps and villages. In this intifada, the occupation is able to act like a conventional army by encircling population areas with heavy weaponry and when necessary entering them in tanks or strafing them from helicopters. As importantly, at the end of the first intifada there was a belief that a political solution could be found that would release Israel from overseeing the majority of the Palestinians directly without necessarily having to return the 1967 borders. The very failure of that political solution (and an inability to believe that it can be revived) is the context for the current quagmire and belief on the part of Israelis, that there is no alternative to an open ended military solution.

Victory in Southern Lebanon

In terms of comparisons with Southern Lebanon fundamental aspects of that situation make it incommensurable with the occupation of West bank and Gaza. Firstly, Lebanon was not conceived of as a part of greater Israel (and thus there was no settlement project there) but simply as a buffer zone it was thought necessary to occupy in order to protect Israel's northern border. Thus, there was no ideological, religious or historic stake in continued occupation of south Lebanon and no Israeli population there to defend. S.Lebanon was always considered a foreign territory whose main interest for Israel was militarily strategic. When it became clear that its occupation did not achieve its military strategic purpose  but rather led to the continuing loss of many soldiers, it became clear that it was not worthwhile politically. Importantly here is that there was no constituency for a continued occupation -- there was no settler movement within South Lebanon that could make or break various Israeli governments. In the context of the West Bank and Gaza, the political power of settlers remains one of the main obstacles to ending the occupation and calls for a different strategy. Simply put, it calls for splitting Israeli society politically and  convincing the majority that their interest are separate from those of the settlers.

Even if one does not accept the above arguments about the incommensurability of the first intifada and South Lebanon cases -- it is hard to find a logic that connects the emptying of settlements with suicide operations within the 1948 armistice lines. The resultant connection made by Israeli society (and promoted by its leadership) seems to be the opposite of what the suicide bombers  intended. The logic between the two for the Israeli public is that if they retreat from Kiryat Arba or Gush Katif next they will be forced to retreat from Tel Aviv or Afula. In other words, the settlements are seen as strategic front-lines in the fight against Palestinian maximalism. Thus, rather than dividing the Israeli polity along the lines of settlers versus non-settlers -- the message received is that both must unite in order to confront a war being waged that does not differentiate between Israelis in the occupied territories and those within Israel proper.

But is the lack of political/military efficacy the only way suicide operations should be assessed? If such operations do not lead to political or military achievements then we are left with their role as a means of revenge. Is this enough to justify their costs? Here one needs to look beyond the cost that the whole society bears in terms of Israeli reactions or American dictates. Might we not raise some questions about the internal costs of such an enterprise -- its impact on a whole generation of youth and on how we shoulder our responsibility as a society for our own liberation? The fortitude and determination exhibited by the militants, who are ready to sacrifice their lives on behalf of the rest, risk transforming Palestinian society into one in which the only people with a political role are those willing to die or to kill while they die. The rest are confined to the role of spectators. They applaud, but are not called upon to shoulder any task in the ongoing struggle for liberation and independence. The history of political struggle teaches us that such actions belittle the role of the masses and reconcile them to their own powerlessness -- they merely exaggerate the feeling among exploited and oppressed peoples that the matter of resistance has to be left to a few martyrs.

The fact that such a situation exists -- in which so many selfless young men who want to serve the liberation of their people can find only self-annihilation as the means to do so, while the rest of the society stands by as onlookers, should force us to raise questions about the failure of political movements and society as a whole. Is it possible that there is no other way to utilize those willing to undertake the ultimate sacrifice, which is to lay down their lives for their country and their people, in any other way than to send them to their death? Have the Palestinian people lost all capacity to develop ideas, structures, means and methods in which their youth can contribute both to liberating their homeland and building their state? Should not the Palestinians be thinking of how best to preserve their greatest resource, youth, in order that they may best serve in the battle for liberation, which as the experience of other national liberation movements so clearly shows cannot  solely be summarized in the act of dying and killing? Is the fact of the vastly superior military power of our enemy and our justifiable rage at their actions enough to legitimize the cult of young men ending their lives?

Last though by no means least there is the moral dimension. The violence of the coloniser  invariably leads to the brutalisation of the colonized. In every instance of colonial domination whether in India, Algeria, Kenya, South Africa, the colonized ape the way of the coloniser and justify their use of violence by pointing to the indiscriminate terror waged by the coloniser at every stage of the colonizing project. Yet neither a legitimate sense of victim-hood, nor the justness of their cause should allow those engaged in an emancipatory struggle to abandon the moral high ground. No people fighting for their freedom and liberty should want to be killers of women and children. Hurting as they do as a result of the brutal and murderous policies pursued by the Israeli occupiers, Palestinians have to remember that means and ends are one, and that unjust means cannot and will not lead to just ends. 

The foregoing self searching is not the outcome of the success of the Israeli policy of inflicting increasing punishments on the Palestinians, in the guise of assassination, bombardment and closure. Rather it is based on the recognition that in an unequal fight between two forces of incomparable power, it behooves the weaker party to refuse to be drawn to a field of battle where the adversary possesses demonstrable superiority in tactics, weapons, numbers, foreign support etc., and to search for creative methods of struggle which can be pursed at the lowest possible cost. To borrow a dictum from the military lexicon, the strategic aim here should be to be able to pursue the struggle with the aim of inflicting the maximum damage on the enemy while preserving one’s own community. Suicide attacks meet neither criteria. Whether carried out in the spirit of revenge or in pursuit of a flawed strategy which cannot begin to grapple with the internal dynamics of Israeli society, they do not cause any structural damage to the enemy and constitute a self inflicted war of attrition, in addition to an ever rising death toll that the Israeli occupation forces continue to exact. And as the last few weeks (and especially last few days) have made clear to all, the toll they now exact is the very possibility of a Palestinian national future.