All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after a loved one commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive, act it appears to be. The ego, writes Freud, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, psychoanalyst Karl Menninger stated in 1933, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you cannot commit suicide, on your own.
At the end of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, perhaps the greatest literary exploration of suicide, Vronsky, Anna’s lover, responds to her suicide by joining the thousands of volunteers leaving Russia for Serbia to protect the Slavs against the Turks. He had already tried to kill himself when, much earlier in the novel, Anna was assumed to be at death’s door after the birth of their illegitimate child. Tolstoy’s novel is riddled with suicidal moments. But this final one – since it is clear that Vronsky wishes only to die – is different. These men are sacrificing themselves for a noble cause, as Anna’s brother insists when he converges with Vronsky on his way to the war and Levin – the inspired man of the countryside – on the same train. ‘But it’s not just to sacrifice themselves’, Levin responds, ‘it’s to kill Turks.’ Levin will not accept that the ‘fine-talking’ volunteers and the newspapers reporting them truly speak for ‘the will and thought’ of the people – ‘a thought that expressed itself in revenge and murder’. Sacrifice, even for a noble cause, is an ugly affair. Today in Britain there is outrage, especially among parents, that young men have been sent to Iraq for a lie. We also see the injustice of the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, especially those of civilians. But that war is murder, whatever the cause, as Levin insists, is not something that any of us is encouraged to contemplate.
By sending the suicidal Vronsky off to fight in Serbia, Tolstoy brings suicide into the public domain. The last suicide is not that of Anna, convinced she is no longer loved, throwing herself under a train. It is that of a man, already being fêted as a hero by many, who wants to kill and die in the same breath. Suicide bombing is a recent phenomenon, but it is an illusion to believe that only in the culture of Islam has the link ever been made between war and suicide, between murder and martyrdom, between killing the enemy and killing yourself. Samson, arguably the first suicide killer, is the hero of a lovingly rendered novel by the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. ‘The world’s first suicide terrorists’, writes political scientist Robert Pape in Dying to Win – The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, ‘were probably two militant Jewish revolutionary groups, the Zealots and the Sicarii.’ From 4 BC to AD 70, they used violence with the aim of provoking a popular uprising against the Roman occupation of Judea (their numerous public assassinations could be described as suicide missions as they regularly led to immediate capture, torture and death).
Suicide bombing is most often considered as a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman, aberration that cannot – or indeed must not – be understood. When Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge observed ‘If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider being one myself’, the Israeli embassy responded in a statement: ‘We would not expect any human being – and surely not a British MP – to express an understanding of such atrocities.’ Jenny Tonge was sacked from her party’s front bench. I think we can be fairly sure that if she had expressed similar understanding of the policy of targeted assassinations, or extra-judicial killing, in response to suicide bombings, she would not today be out of her job (she was subsequently elevated, or moved sideways, to the House of Lords). The wording she used – ‘If I had to …’ – is crucial. Jenny Tonge was making a leap of empathetic identification. She was not sympathising; she was trying to imagine what it was like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories (she condemned the bombings). When Cherie Blair said in June 2002, ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress’, Downing Street apologised. What never needs apologising for is the violence of the state. Perhaps there is a logic here. If the case for war is weak (or indeed non-existent), then the ugliness and guilt of war rise perilously close to the surface of the public mind – war, in Levin’s words, as murder and revenge. In which case, it helps to be able to point to something far worse, preferably from another culture or world, with which no reasonable human being could possibly identify or empathise. Apart from being evasive, this is politically inept. In the film The Fog of War, Robert McNamara presents rule number one of his eleven rules of war: ‘Empathise with the enemy.’
Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must reside therefore somewhere else than in numbers of the dead. It is of course feared as a weapon against which there seems to be no protection or viable response (targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation and Israel’s wall is already showing itself incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, lie in the deliberate targeting of civilians. According to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo. In The Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the 10,000 tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943 (the whole city became a fireball).
The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is apparently less repugnant, it is somehow deemed, by the leaders of the Western world at least, to be morally superior. Why dying with your victim should be seen as the greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the reason lies partly in the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is in itself an act of passionate identification – you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a fortress state, and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, with less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide bombing might be, tragically, the closest they can get. ‘I will never cease embracing you. / And I will never release you’, writes Mahmoud Darwish in his poem ‘He Embraces His Murderer’ (he is not talking about suicide bombing but of the hateful intimacy between the two sides of the conflict).
There is a historical aspect to that proximity. By fostering Shia resistance, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 created the space for Hizbollah, who carried out the first suicide bombings in the early 1980s. Israel began supporting Hamas from the late 1980s after a deliberate decision was made to strengthen Islamic groups in order to weaken Arafat and divide the Palestinians among themselves. The Islamic University of Gaza was created with the approval of the Defense Ministry; when cinemas in Gaza were stormed by Islamic groups and restaurants set on fire for selling alcohol, Israeli soldiers stood by and watched. All this is detailed in Christopher Reuter’s My Life Is a Weapon of 2004. Hizbollah in turn would get a permanent foothold inside Israel when it offered vital support to the 415 leading cadres of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, expelled into Southern Lebanon by Yitzhak Rabin following the abduction and murder of an Israeli soldier in December 1992. It has always been a paradox for Western observers that Hizbollah, which promotes an Iranian-style Islamic revolution for the whole of the Middle East (the organisation was created following the arrival in Lebanon of 1000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the early eighties), is also the most efficient provider of welfare and support for displaced Palestinians in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories, sometimes with what might seem unlikely effects. One widow of a suicide bomber, under pressure to move into the household of her father-in-law, was enabled by Hizbollah to live with her children on her own.
That Israeli policy engendered suicide bombing was acknowledged by Rabin. Having originally promoted indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon ‘until there’s nobody left there’ – he was Defense Minister at the time – he was finally led to conclude that ‘terror cannot be finished by one war; it’s total nonsense’. Replacing ‘PLO terrorism’ with ‘Shi’ite terrorism’, they had done ‘the worst thing’ in the struggle against terrorism. ‘No one PLO terrorist’, he observed, ‘has ever made himself into a live bomb.’
According to Eyad El-Sarraj, psychiatrist and the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, those committing suicide attacks today are the children of the first intifada. Studies show that during that uprising, 55 per cent of children witnessed their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom – sacrificing oneself for God – increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. ‘It’s despair,’ Sarraj states baldly, ‘a despair where living becomes no different to dying.’ When life is constant degradation, death becomes the only source of pride. Kamal Aqeel is the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza. ‘In 1996,’ he explains, ‘practically all of us were against the martyr operations. Not any longer […] We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we’d simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.’ Martyrs are saying to their own people, writes Reuter, the cause is greater than our (and your) lives. To the outside world, they are saying: we fear humiliation more than we fear death.
It is a widespread religious belief, by no means exclusive to Islam, that life begins after death. But for those wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their culture, which is not the same thing as condemning the act, it is easy to degrade that belief. Humiliation can, it seems, pursue its quarry into the afterlife. Most often we are told of the seventy-two virgins proffering their favours in the skies. In fact the virgins reputedly awaiting the martyr in Paradise are symbols of purity and innocence – this is more a sacred utopia, a late, exalted, compensation for the wretched of the earth, than a second shot at worldly pleasures. ‘Thoughts of Paradise’, writes award-winning Ha’aretz journalist Amira Hass, ‘embody the evaporation of the dream of a Palestinian state.’ Or in the words of psychologist Shalfic Masalqa, interviewed by Barbara Victor in Army of Roses of 2004: ‘To be tempted to go to Paradise means that life on earth is hell.’
There are other myths that need to be challenged, such as the idea that the families of the suicide bombers only celebrate the martyr’s death. ‘The barrage of communications continued unabated, and the shouting and speeches being staged in the street made sure there was no room for tears and sadness’, writes Donia ElAmal Ismaeel in ‘Dates and Bitter Coffee’, her short story in the 2006 collection Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women about the family of a suicide bomber, ‘closing the door on people’s humanity’ – the family are stunned and grieving when Islamic Jihad arrive and start the barrage in the street. Or that there is never any doubt and can be no change of heart. In Hany Abu Assad’s Oscar-nominated 2005 film, Paradise Now, one of the two men on a suicide mission changes his mind, and the other is challenged by a woman friend in the longest dialogue in the film on the destructiveness and utter futility of such acts.
The mythology, however, suggests a contradiction. On the one hand, suicide bombers are beyond the pale of understanding. On the other, what goes on inside the mind of a suicide bomber can somehow be uncovered in its most intimate detail, both in this world and beyond. Reuter opens his book by asking: what motivates a suicide bomber? Or rather, what ‘kind of people’ are they? He knows there is no answer. Suicide bombers are not a species. He also knows that his question is loaded. If suicide attacks are political, then they call for a political response. If they stem from ‘perversity’, then the perpetrators can be isolated as ‘a criminal sect’. Behind the argument that suicide bombers should not, or cannot, be understood lies a subtext of racist dehumanisation. When El-Sarraj is asked if it is true that Palestinians do not care about human life, even their own flesh and blood, he replies: ‘How can you believe in your own humanity if you don’t believe in the humanity of the enemy?’
Writing about suicide bombing therefore poses a serious question of genre. It is not just, as Avishai Margalit puts it, that every statement is liable to be contested. Nor just the disputed vocabulary (describing these attacks as ‘suicide bombing’ is already to beg the question). What is at issue is something more like an ethics of form. Reuter has chosen to write a history, or perhaps a geography, that meticulously traces the beginnings of today’s attacks to the child battalions of Khomeini, cannon fodder who went into battle with a key to Paradise around their necks, through Syria to Lebanon and Israel—Palestine (those child battalions give the lie that sending children into battle is something only Palestinians have ever done). This in itself allows him to defuse the concentration on the Palestinians, stops them from appearing like freaks of nature (or culture), places them inside a legacy which stems from the realpolitik of modern times, for which of course the West bears more than a share of responsibility (Britain supported Saddam Hussein in the war against Khomeini).
What is unique about the suicide attacks of the second intifada is that they come ‘from the people for the people’, in Reuter’s phrase, unlike the more sect-based cults of the Tamil Tigers or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. This makes them almost impossible to defeat. If suicide attacks arise from below, as the reaction to an invading or occupying army, the simple conclusion is that, when those armies pull out, so the strategy will cease. Following the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, enthusiasm for suicide attacks has dramatically declined. Sheikh Fadlallah, spiritus rector of the most radical Lebanese Shi’ites, was one of the first high-ranking Islamic scholars to condemn the attacks of 11 September 2001. In Iran today, the idea of killing oneself in order to enter Paradise has all but disappeared. There is a lesson here. It is not military intervention – ‘the preferred (and not terribly successful) method of Israel and the United States vis-à-vis their Palestinian and Al-Qaeda jihadist foes’ – but the internal development of Iran itself, the growing desire for democracy after two decades of theocratic experiment, that has made the difference. Reuter was writing before the election of Ahmadinejad, which has put back the cause of democratisation, and advanced that of theocracy, to say the least. Nonetheless, against the violent Manichaean rhetoric of the times, and its brute interventionism, Reuter offers a counter-narrative. Suicide attacks in Israel—Palestine will stop when Israel withdraws from the Occupied Territories. More generally across the region, notably in response to 9/11, the West should keep out.
Robert Pape’s Dying to Win is based on a database he compiled of every suicide attack around the world from 1980 to 2003. ‘What nearly all suicide terrorists have in common’, he writes ‘is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.’ (To the charge that this does not apply to Al-Qaeda, Pape points to Osama Bin Laden’s repeated public statements that his actions were designed to remove the American presence from the Persian Gulf.) If this is true, then US strategy in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq is likely to provoke the very onslaughts it is intended to resist: ‘The sustained presence of heavy American combat forces in Muslim countries is likely to increase the odds of the next 9/11.’ ‘Our actions’, he concludes, ‘may well end up helping terrorist leaders recruit many more suicide terrorists to kill us.’
As Reuter also points out, the Palestinians are strangely in tune with their messianic counterparts in Israel, one of the farthest outreaches of Zionism, in aligning nationalism with religious fervour. There are voices on both sides in the conflict for whom the struggle over Palestine constitutes a holy war (for Pape, fundamentalism is not the cause of suicide bombing, but the presence of religious differences between occupier and occupied greatly increases the chances of the strategy taking hold). Torah scribe Elitzur Segal, from Ofra, a hilltop settlement in the West Bank, is the author of a halakhic article dealing with the concept of mesirut hanefesh (self-sacrifice) during war, entitled ‘Suicide for the Sake of Heaven’, cited by Nadav Shragai in Ha’aretz in December 2004. ‘In every war,’ he writes, ‘situations arise in which a person must knowingly place himself in a situation where his death is certain, and anyone who volunteers for such an operation is a holy hero […] It is permitted to carry out an action that causes death, as people in the outposts in Sinai did in the Yom Kippur War and in other wars in which they fought the enemy to the death, even though they could have saved themselves, or as the holy person Dr Baruch Goldstein did in Hebron, but it appears that even a more certain death, such as blowing oneself up with a hand grenade together with the enemies – a case in which death is certain – is also without a doubt permitted and a commandment.’ On 25 February 1994, Baruch Goldstein shot and killed twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at a Hebron mosque before being killed by other potential victims at the site. In his article on extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, John Shepherd cites the rabbi at Goldstein’s funeral, who eulogised him as a ‘holy martyr […] from now on our intercessor in heaven […] he heard the cry of the land of Israel, which is being stolen from us day after day by the Muslims […] The Jews will inherit the land not by any peace agreement but only by shedding blood.’ After the funeral, the army provided a guard of honour at the tomb. Attorney Naftali Wertzberger, who regularly represents Kach members and hilltop residents who fall foul of the law, refers to him as a shaheed or martyr for the cause. Goldstein’s grave at Hebron, visited today by Jews from all round the world, is a shrine.
How, then, should you write about suicide bombing? To consider this question and its difficulties, we might pass from Christopher Reuter, who has written a history, to Barbara Victor, whose Army of Roses – Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers reads more like a novel or short-story collection (she is a novelist, as well as a journalist with more than twenty years of experience in the Middle East, and the author of a study of Hanan Ashrawi). As the subtitle suggests, her desire is to enter the world of the women suicide bombers, and to tell their stories. Empathy here is in no short supply. ‘She tries to understand, even to feel’ (the words of Christopher Dickey, Newsweek Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, who writes the foreword). For many in the West, the female suicide bomber is the most inhuman, since she violates the woman’s role as the bearer of life. Victor’s aim is to redeem her: ‘This book tells the story of the women who died for reasons that go beyond the liberation of Palestine.’
Above all she narrates, uncovering the most private, indeed frequently humiliating, details of these women’s lives – six at the time of Victor’s book, more since. On 4 October 2003, Hanadi Jaradat blew herself up at Maxim’s restaurant in Haifa on the eve of Yom Kippur killing nineteen Israelis and injuring many others. From a privileged Palestinian family, on the verge of opening her own law practice in Jenin, Jaradat had been the witness to the killing by the Israeli army of her cousin Salah and her brother Fahdi, when they were sitting together in a café the previous May. Without preamble, the soldiers drew up alongside them and shot them. According to Victor, a bomb-laden car that Fahdi was to drive into Haifa the next day was parked only a few feet away. Jaradat fled but ‘ran directly into the arms of Yasser Obeidi, one of the most wanted men in the West Bank’, a twenty-nine-year-old married man and the military commander of Islamic Jihad in Jenin (Literally into his arms? Was he standing on the street corner? This sounds like something out of the film Notting Hill). A very different account by Kevin Toolis in the Observer states that she was in fact in Jordan shopping for Fahdi’s wedding when he was killed but returned to Jenin to identify him in the morgue. Victor’s story – as may already be clear – is a story of romance, passion and cynical intrigue. In her version, Jaradat is cruelly manipulated by Obeidi who persuades her to become a martyr – ‘he became her lover, mentor and one-way ticket to Paradise’, where they would find ‘eternal happiness as man and wife’. The source for this narrative is not given. In fact, as it emerges, there are conflicting stories as to how and why Jaradat ended her life. For the Palestinians, it was to avenge the deaths of her cousin and brother. For the Israelis, she was a woman depressed at her lack of marriage prospects at the age of twenty-nine: ‘Allegedly she intimidated men because of her good looks and education.’
This gives the issue of empathy a new twist. The Israeli reading of Jaradat’s motives should warn us that, whether what it attributes to her is true or false, personalising the female martyr can be a way of denying the abuses of the army – in addition to the killing of her brother and cousin, Hanadi’s father had been denied permission to attend a hospital in Haifa for his illness – and of silencing the Palestinian political case. In November 2006, a picture of the latest woman suicide bomber was on the front page of Ha’aretz, Fatima Al-Nejar, described as a fifty-seven-year-old mother of nine – in fact she is sixty-eight – with no mention of the fact that one of her grandsons had been killed in the conflict. Rory McCarthy of the Guardian interviewed her family: ‘“Some people say she must have been depressed”, says her daughter Fathiya, “But it wasn’t true, she was a religious woman. She did this to fight the Israelis and get them out of our land.”’ Here the distinction between suicide and martyrdom becomes crucial. According to Islam, it is a sin to commit suicide. Your life belongs to God and is only his to dispose of. Martyrdom is, however, something else. ‘If a martyr wants to kill himself because he’s sick of being alive, that’s suicide. But if he wants to sacrifice his soul in order to defeat the enemy and for God’s sake – well, then he’s a martyr’, explained the late Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, second-in-command of Hamas until he was killed by the Israelis in 2003. (As Reuter stresses throughout, this also shows Islam as requiring interpretation.)
In Victor’s analysis, the only possible explanation for the woman suicide bomber is that she is sick of life; the back cover refers to their ‘blighted inner lives’. Wada Idris, the first woman suicide bomber, was in despair after being divorced for diagnosed infertility; Darine Abu Aisha was determined to avoid the fate of marriage; Zina, accomplice of Izzedine Masri who detonated himself in Sbarro’s Pizzeria in Jerusalem in August 2002, interviewed by Victor in prison, had her illegitimate child taken away from her: ‘Without exception, every woman and young girl who attempted to or succeeded in blowing herself up had been marginalised by Palestinian society.’ Victor is protesting the place of women in the Muslim world. She also sees herself as fighting a ‘misguided feminist movement’: ‘We die in equal numbers to the men.’ The problem is that the more she generalises her analysis to all women in the culture, the more its power to explain individual cases starts to decline: if life is unbearable for women under Islam, then why this one woman? Slowly and painstakingly, Victor has turned these women from martyrs into suicides. Some, such as Ayat al-Akhras, are described as taking their destiny into their own hands – she acted in order to redeem her father who had been accused of collaborating with the Israelis and to save her family from disgrace (challenging the gender division, this is exactly the motivation attributed to Said, one of the two characters on a suicide mission in Paradise Now). But the overall message is clear. Not one of these women is truly the political agent of her own life.
Why, we might also ask, should there be only one motive? Is a political act degraded by being drawn from the deepest wellsprings of an individual life? Does a personal story forfeit its quality as personal if it finds its way, through the complex detours of history, to a political act? ‘This story has no moral, it is not a parable, no lesson can be drawn from it’, writes Shulamith Hareven in her 1993 essay ‘Portrait of a Terrorist’, about Mohammed Abu-Nasser, not a suicide bomber, but, in his own words, a hablan or saboteur – he refuses the word mehabel or terrorist of her title – jailed for twenty years after throwing a grenade at a queue of soldiers in Jericho (he was told how noble it was to sacrifice yourself for the cause). Hareven befriended him in the 1980s after they were introduced by El-Sarraj who was treating him after he had come out of jail. His family had been exiled in 1948, his father killed by the Israelis, he had entered Bir Zeit University, returning to a life of militancy when it was shut down by the Israeli authorities and El-Sarraj and his wife left Gaza temporarily for England. He was finally shot by the IDF in a street. ‘Each man and his circumstances. His case does not teach us very much, except that maybe there is no such thing as a single motive, the motive of eternal hatred of Israel, as the more paranoid among us would like to believe; rather there is a cluster of motives.’ Nasser was a child of Gibalia refugee camp in Gaza, ‘in whose life all windows were barred’.
This is far cry from Army of Roses, where empathy starts to look like a cover for prejudice. The Palestinian Zina – anonymous by family request – has, writes Victor, ‘a history of problems’. Whereas Israeli Malki Roth, killed by the Sbarro bomb Zina played her part in planting, was a ‘well-balanced, wholesome teenager’. Rachel Levy, killed in March 2002 by Ayat al-Akhras in a grocery store in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Kiryat Yovel, was finally, after the family returned to Israel from California, adjusting to the ‘rhythms of teenage life’. In fact these young Israeli women are living in, and acutely suffering from, a society that encourages them to be blind. Rachel Levy’s mother never discussed the political situation with her children; it was too terrifying. Rachel would come home and turn off the television: ‘She just didn’t want to know.’ These are dangerous and frightened lives. In a letter to God written for the Jewish New Year, Malki Roth ended with the hope ‘that I’ll be alive and that the Messiah should come’.
Although Palestinian suffering under occupation has a central place in Army of Roses, at moments Victor comes close to an idealisation of Israel not far from the myth that the nation continues to promote about itself. More simply, the Israelis are better people. Faced with loss, they do not commit suicide, or kill, but care for their families, carry on with the business of living. The violence of the state is pushed aside. Life continues. Suicide bombing, on the other hand, involves abandoning limits ‘as we understand them with the democratic mind’. Is it finally empathy at all if you enter a person’s – a whole culture’s – mind, only to make such a clean and confident exit?
One way of underscoring the precarious nature of such distinctions is to look back in time. Towards the end of Galoot (Exile), the remarkable documentary of Israeli filmmaker Asher Tlalim, Ariella Atzmon, former lecturer in philosophy and education, recalls her life as the daughter of militant Jewish nationalists who arrived in Palestine in the late 1930s. She was named after Arie Itzhaki, who made bombs in his cellar. He blew himself up, crying ‘Death to the British’ as he was about to be arrested, on the day she was born. As a child she sang songs to Shlomi Ben Yosef, member of Etzel, or Irgun, the pre-state paramilitary organisation which carried out attacks on Arab marketplaces. He became a martyr when he was executed by the British after a failed attack on an Arab bus (Ben-Gurion believed that Etzel wanted him hanged). ‘She will sit and weep, this woman who mourns for her son, so dear, so great.’ We did not want peace, she says. The Palestinians will want peace when they have a country.
For years Israeli secret service analysts and social scientists have been trying to build up a typical profile of the suicide ‘assassin’, only to conclude that there isn’t one. The further you reach into the depths of the mind, the harder it is to generalise. Finally you might be forced to conclude that your desire to solve the problem is creating it, that burrowing into the psyche of the enemy, far from an attempt to dignify them with understanding, is a form of evasive action designed to blind you to the responsibility for their dilemma that is staring you in the face. One thing nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is the story of people driven to extremes. ‘Children who have seen so much inhumanity’, states El-Sarraj, ‘inevitably come out with inhuman responses.’ We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, in a world of rampant inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.