In this chapter we explore how real or perceived national humiliation of the Palestinian people by Israeli policies, and often by Israeli individuals, has given rise to desperation and uncontrollable rage. Terrorist leaders have learned to harness this sense of outrage to encourage youth to murder Israeli civilians, creating a vicious cycle of atrocities on both sides.
As we will see in the pages that follow, Palestinians are engulfed in an epidemic of despair, to the degree that mothers proclaim on television that they are joyful that their sons and daughters have committed murder-suicide. On a per capita basis, Israelis and Palestinians have suffered multiple September 11–scale attacks. The effects of trauma on the general population are visible on both sides, drawing increasing attention from the medical community. But murder-suicide is not just an expression of individual hopelessness. In most cases, terrorist groups with clear political aims organize and facilitate the suicide bombings. We also learn in this chapter how terrorist groups use charities not only to garner support for their movement, but also to buy the quiescence of mothers, whose children have donated their lives to murder Israeli women and children.
Hamas and the other terrorist groups explored in this chapter use religion to justify their aspirations for political power and to recover Palestinian territory from Israeli occupation.1 Part of this land is sacred to Muslims but also to Jews and Christians, as we will see in chapter 4. To achieve their ends, some of which are accepted as legitimate by much of the world, Hamas and the other terrorist groups discussed in this chapter are committing atrocities against Israeli citizens, oftentimes injuring or killing innocent Palestenians as well. The terrorist leaders deliberately inculcate the idea that “martyrdom operations” are sacred acts, worthy of both earthly and heavenly rewards. Mainstream Islamic scholars are increasingly voicing their view that suicide-bombing attacks against civilians are not acts of martyrdom but suicide and murder, both of which are forbidden by Islamic law.2
In the summer of 1999, the commander of Jordan’s Special Forces invites me to Amman to visit Jordan’s prisons, where he tells me he will arrange for me to interview incarcerated terrorists. I decide to take him up on his offer and fly to Amman in late July of that year. The day after I arrive, an official from the prison authority calls up to my room early in the morning, awakening me. She informs me that she has come to take me to visit some prisons. I rush to dress—a long skirt, long sleeves, a scarf—and hurry downstairs. A white Mercedes with police lights escorts us on the highway, forcing slow-moving vehicles out of our way. We visit Al Jweda jail, including the women’s division. I meet murderers, prostitutes, and drug pushers. My guides tell me that a number of the women are living in the jail solely for their own protection—because they have been raped or have purportedly committed adultery, and authorities fear that they are vulnerable to “honor killings,” murders perpetrated by male relatives to protect the family’s “honor.” The officials confirm that in many cases perpetrators of honor killings get off scot-free. Some of the women that I meet in the jail were involved in car accidents. They have been incarcerated to protect them from the wrath of the victims’ families. I find there are no terrorists in Al Jweda jail, however.
Our next stop is Swaga, Jordan’s largest prison, an hour’s drive from Jweda. Security at Swaga is much tighter than at Jweda. The prison is surrounded by high walls and barbed-wire fences.
The manager of Swaga meets me with great fanfare, as though I were a visiting dignitary. He invites my guide and me to his office, where he serves us glasses of hot, sweet tea with cardamom. He then escorts us throughout the grounds, which are substantial. He shows us workshops where the prisoners learn woodworking, chemistry, sewing, and cooking. Midsummer in Jordan is punishingly hot, and submitting to the manager’s enthusiasm about his prison and his hospitality takes fortitude. Again, I meet many criminals, but no terrorists. When I ask the manager where the terrorists are incarcerated, he tells me that no one is incarcerated at Swaga for political crimes. I am puzzled, but don’t want to offend my hosts, whom I have gradually come to realize are under the false impression that I am an authority on prisons.
The manager invites us back to his office for lunch. Several of his deputies join us. My hosts are excited because the best chef among the prisoners has prepared our meal. A whole roasted lamb lies on a bed of rice, surrounded by fresh herbs and pieces of the lamb’s liver. The rice is seasoned with cardamom, almonds, and dried fruits. My hosts encourage me to partake of the liver, a delicacy. They ask me about prisons in America. How are they different from those I’ve seen in Jordan? I tell them about drugs, weapons in the prison, homosexual rape, AIDS, fights among guards and prisoners, and occasional escapes. I tell them about what I observed on death row in Florida: metal-detecting equipment so sensitive that visitors have to remove their shoes. I tell them about fear and guards with guns. None of these, with the exception of rape, they tell me, occurs in Jordan. Not a single Jordanian prisoner has ever escaped.
The terrorists, I discover, are incarcerated in another prison, which is located far from Amman. It was built during the British mandate and is in bad shape. The prison officials tell me they can’t take me there, presumably because the conditions are not fit for foreign observers.
I am disappointed, but still hopeful that I can meet with leaders of Hamas, the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Some leaders of Hamas were living in Amman at the time. When I phone Ibrahim Ghosheh, chief spokesperson of Hamas, he demands to know my name. He refuses to meet with anyone named Stern, a Jewish name, and tells me that none of his colleagues will meet me either. I resolve to try talking with the Hamas leadership in Gaza instead, whom I will attempt to meet without revealing my name in advance.
I travel by bus to Jerusalem and from there by car to Gaza. Israelis have warned me that a car with Israeli license plates would be stoned, so I hire a taxi to take me to the border crossing at Erez. I walk on hot tarmac to the crossing reserved for Israelis and foreigners. At the checkpoint on the Palestinian side, two border guards stand behind a rickety desk. One of them politely requests my passport. When he sees that I am American, he smiles and says, “Welcome to my country.” He wants to be welcoming even though he has no country here, just an overcrowded city dotted with Israeli settlements and military outposts.
I have hired a young Palestinian woman named Amira to translate for me, and she meets me at the border.3 She is an undergraduate at a top-ranked American university, spending the summer with her mother in Gaza. An official with the Palestinian Authority (PA), Palestine’s interim self-government, has offered to give us a tour of the city.4 The PA was established in accordance with the Gaza-Jericho Agreement signed in Cairo on May 4, 1994. The official is General Osama al-Ali, introduced to me as Abu-Zeid (the name he uses with friends and family).
The general picks us up in an air-conditioned, black SUV. A tough-guy’s car. He drives with apparent pleasure, but safely, bureaucratically. He brings us to the office of the DCO—the joint Israeli-Palestinian command. The office is in a barrackslike building. A servant brings tea. The general begins a talk that I can see he has given before. He shows us a wall-sized map of the Gaza Strip, pointing out the Jewish settlements, and also the larger “settlement areas” encircling the settlements. Under the Oslo agreement these settlement enclaves would be governed by Israel even after the PA takes control over most of the Gaza Strip. He is especially angry that the Israelis are not complying with their part of the agreement, which in any case favors the Israelis, he tells us.
Abu-Zeid invites us back into the SUV and takes us for a drive. Two things irritate him intensely: military outposts of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the greenhouses on the settlements. He drives us past numerous military posts and greenhouses so that we get the picture. These IDF structures are not allowed under the Oslo Accords and they should be removed immediately, he tells us. The greenhouses use an unfairly large fraction of the region’s water supply. There are hundreds of them. Many of them have been built in the last few months, we are told, perhaps in anticipation of a peace treaty.
Israelis build settlements where there is water. The settlement next to the Khan Younis refugee camp, for example, is built above the coastal aquifer. The six thousand settlers in the Gaza Strip use 70 percent of Gaza’s water resources, which is available to them at subsidized prices.5 Although Palestinians living in Gaza don’t have enough potable water, some of the water is shipped to Israel through a pipeline built in 1994.6 “The settlers could not survive without subsidized water and Palestinian labor,” Abu-Zeid scoffs. “And they treat Palestinian workers unfairly. They expose the workers to unsafe levels of dangerous pesticides, and the workers often end up with damaged lungs. They hire five hundred workers on one day and twenty the next. The workers have no job security.” He wants to put a stop to this, he says. If he could find a way to prevent the Palestinian laborers from working in the greenhouses, it would force the settlers to shut them down, he muses. The settlers have also tried bringing in migrant workers from Thailand. He wants to stop this as well.
As we drive around the city, Abu-Zeid points out buildings that he has erected next to Israeli military outposts, with the main goal of annoying the IDF. “They provoke me with their outposts, I provoke them with my buildings,” he says. Why don’t you set up security outposts right next to the IDF’s? I ask. “We are the rabbit,” he says. “They are the elephant. The rabbit will not be able to strangle the elephant no matter how hard he tries.”
Gaza Strip is known as one of the most overcrowded places on earth. It is a small area—around twice the size of Washington, D.C. Three-quarters of the 1.2 million Palestinians living in the 147-square-mile area are refugees, half of them living in camps. Under the Oslo accords Israel retains 42 percent of the land, most of it reserved for the six thousand settlers (0.5 percent of the Gazan population).7 Still, we pass huge tracts of privately held open land, owned by wealthy Palestinians, seemingly neglected. Most of the land is littered with garbage and junked cars.
Later, we walk through the city. The sidewalks are uneven and covered with garbage. Mingled smells—of sewage, sweat, spices, and rotting meat—assault us as we walk. There is an inescapable feeling of depression here, of utter humiliation and despair. The city itself looks much like other third-world cities around the world. But something is missing. There is none of the unabashed consumerism or entrepreneurial spirit you often feel in the third world. It’s as though the smog was made of despair.
The settlers live in a different world, which a passerby can glimpse through chain-linked fences and barbed-wire entanglements. A world with pristine white villas, gardens, and manicured lawns. The settlers burn the ancient olive groves to make room for their lawns and pools and consume, on average, five times as much water as their Palestinian neighbors. The passage from one world to the other is dizzying. For Gazans, a world of relentlessly humiliating occupation by a vastly superior military power. For settlers, a southern-California-style oasis, kept up by Palestinian laborers.
Tawfiq Abu-Ghazaleh, a renowned Palestinian lawyer, has invited us to lunch. He tells us that both Jews and Palestinians are profoundly hurt as a result of the difficulty of achieving peace. His wife interrupts him to reject this view. “The hurt is on our side,” she says. “Until you have been forced out of your own home, until you have watched the police beat your own child, you can never understand the Palestinians’ pain.” Later I discover that her son fell while being chased by Israeli soldiers during the first Intifada (uprising). He fell so hard that he broke his leg and was unable to move. A friend dragged him home. He had already been accepted to Northeastern University in Boston and had to travel to Massachusetts in a wheelchair.
Since the occupation began, Palestinians have been entirely at the mercy of the Israeli Civil Administration “in every sphere of economic life,” respected Israeli reporters Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, explain. “Each requirement for a permit, grant, or dispensation entailed an exhausting wrestle with a crabbed bureaucracy of mostly indifferent but sometimes hostile clerks and officials—a veritable juggernaut of four hundred Jewish mandarins managing thousands of Arab minions bereft of all authority.”8 A Palestinian student told me that it was at border crossings where she first experienced humilitation at the age of nine, while traveling with her parents and two siblings to Gaza. “Our trip from Amman to Gaza through the Allenby Bridge border crossing should have taken us no longer than three hours. Instead, it would last more than twenty hours,” she said. “I will never forget those days, that seemed all the more difficult for a nine-year-old child. The toilets that were piled to the roof with excrement. The endless lines of other travelers and children, waiting for the unwelcoming and belligerent faces of their occupiers to place a simple stamp in their travel document giving them approval to return to their home; or to arbitrarily interrogate them; imprison them; or deny them entry. The strip searches.”9
Hamas leaders recognize that poverty and hopelessness increase support for them. “Hardship always brings people back to God. It is like sickness,” Sheik Younis al-Astal, another Hamas leader, explains. “[A] believer should never be afraid of being poor but of being rich. When you become rich, you think only of things. This kills your soul. Islam distinguishes us in that it prepares people to die for the sake of Allah. They are always ready to die for Allah.”10 Hopelessness, deprivation, envy, and humiliation make death, and paradise, seem more appealing. “Look around and see how we live here,” an elderly resident of Jenin told a visiting reporter. “Then maybe you will understand why there are always volunteers for martyrdom. Every good Muslim understands that it’s better to die fighting than to live without hope.”11
Since the Second Intifada began in late September 2000, the economic situation in Gaza has worsened significantly. Since then, unemployment has risen 11 percent, to about 40 percent. The United Nations estimates that one in three Palestinians lives on less than $2.10 a day; an estimated two-thirds live below the poverty line. UNRWA,12 the UN organization in charge of providing relief and works assistance to Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, reports that the population of Palestinian refugees is growing at 3.1 percent annually.13 Half the population is under age fifteen.
After lunch, Amira and I go to see Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader who is also head of the Society of Engineers in Gaza. He knows only that I am a visitor from Harvard University. He studied engineering at the University of Colorado and is completely comfortable—even excited—to talk with an American. When I give him my card, he seems entirely unfazed by my name. Perhaps he is more accustomed to talking with Jews than his counterparts in Amman.
“The Palestinian issue must be understood from its origins,” he says. “It started when Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in 1917 or even before, and continued when the Jews evicted Palestinians from their homes in 1948. The Jews took advantage of the hospitality of Palestinian people and settled here under encouragement of the British mandate. They developed their own army in 1948. They forced the Palestinians from their homes to neighboring Arab countries. This is the starting point of the problem. The six hundred thousand Palestinians who were evacuated have become four and a half million refugees today.
“In 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] established the Palestinian struggle. Those of us inside Gaza and the West Bank remained docile until 1987, when the [first] Intifada arose. It was the culmination of Palestinian frustration and suffering. You must understand: we were living under occupation. Occupation is prohibited under international law,” Abu Shanab asserts, with the tone of a teacher accustomed to the frustrations of attempting to instruct mentally disadvantaged students.14
It is not just a matter of law, Abu Shanab says, but also of religion. “It is a duty for Muslims to struggle against occupation. It is our duty to defend the land for the sake of God. For Jews, the issue is the ‘Promised Land.’ For us, it is not a question of something promised—it is our land. We believe it is a natural law that power deters power. Without power there is no deterrence. We believe in talks, but to carry out talks we must be armed with power.”
Do you see any psychological differences between those who join the military wing and those who don’t? I ask Abu Shanab.
“They are more religious than typical. Often they are angry—they may have seen someone being hurt. It’s also a question of the general atmosphere they live in.”
This line of questioning reminds Abu Shanab of a theory he has developed about the correlation between militants’ personalities and the weapons they choose. “While I was in prison, I tried to figure out whether there is any particular personality type that gets involved in various kinds of military operations. I found that those who use knives tend to have nervous personalities. Usually they become violent as a direct reaction to an incident. The person who uses a gun is well trained. The person who explodes a bomb does not need a lot of training—he just needs to have a moment of courage.”
I am surprised that Abu Shanab is speaking so openly. He seems to have forgotten that he is talking to an American who will scrutinize his every word for clues. He has told me, in effect, that while in prison, he realized that suicide bombers are a cost-effective weapon.
A suicide bomber should be someone in whom the organization invests only minimal training—the minimum required to get the job done. Some operations, like the September 11 attacks, are complex. The leaders would have to be reliable experts. But for an ordinary suicide-bombing attack in an Israeli shopping mall, all that is required is a bomb, a detonator, and a moment of what Abu Shanab calls courage. “Courage” is the scarce resource. Hamas’s job, then, is to find youth with the capacity to feel this “courage,” and then to find ways to nurture it. This requires understanding the psychology of Palestinian youth, and the variety of spiritual, emotional, and financial incentives that will make them willing to be martyr-murderers.
“This is the genius of the Intifada,” he says. “People acquire the courage to carry out attacks from having seen something terrible—some kind of atrocity. Islam says an eye for an eye. We believe in retaliation. When someone is killed in jihad, it is a joyful day.”
Who are the combatants in your dispute with Israel?
“There are no civilians in Israel because every citizen is required to serve in the army,” he replies. “We are at war with Israel. Americans are helping Israelis…” He seems suddenly to remember that he is speaking to an American. He tells me, smiling, “We distinguish between the American government and the American people.”
Would the Israelis’ withdrawal to the June 4, 1967, borders, i.e., those existing prior to the 1967 war, satisfy Hamas? I ask.
“If the Israelis withdraw to the 1967 borders, we would consider that a truce, not the end of the war.”
How do you feel about globalization? I ask Abu Shanab.
“Globalization is just a new colonial system. It is America’s attempt to dominate the rest of the world economically rather than militarily. It will worsen the gap between rich and poor. America is trying to spread its consumer culture. These values are not good for human beings. The problem with pursuing capitalism as an end in itself is that the name of the game is the dollar. In the West, money really does talk. This is bad for the human being. It leads to disaster for communities.”
Why are you involved in the political wing of Hamas, rather than the military wing? I ask. “In 1989 I was put in prison for directing the Intifada. I was in Ashqelon prison for eight years, so I didn’t have a chance to be in the Qassam brigades [the military wing of Hamas]. But I think every Palestinian should serve as a soldier.”15
The most important element of Hamas’s success is its social welfare activities, he says. “We started getting involved in charity before Hezbollah did. Our obligation as Muslims is comprehensive. This is the meaning of the phrase ‘Islam is the solution.’ The PA doesn’t understand this. They don’t provide social welfare. They are completely corrupt. Our discipline and lack of corruption are part of our appeal.” Arafat’s officials are widely reported to be running illegal import-export businesses, demanding kickbacks, and pocketing money sent as foreign aid.
“Even before Hamas came into being, in 1976, there were two organizations that were engaged in social welfare functions: al-Jam’iya al-Islamiyah and al-Mujjama’. In those days the priority was to work on social, educational, and welfare programs. After 1980, there were three such organizations, including the Islamic Benevolence Society. They had no connection with politics, even during the occupation. I founded Jam’iya al-Islamiyah, but I cut my connection with them when Hamas was first established. That happened on fourteen December 1987, during the Intifada.”
Charitable giving is an important aspect of Islam. Zakat, the obligatory giving of alms to the poor, is one of the five pillars of Islam. The word zakat means both “purification” and “growth.” Islam teaches that by providing alms to the needy, one purifies one’s possessions. Radical Islamist groups use the concepts of benevolence and self-sacrifice to spread their movements in regions where the government has failed to provide social welfare, especially for the poor.
Later, I learn that Islamists are hardly the originators of the idea of using charitable works to recruit adherents. Early Christians also employed this technique, with enviable success in terms of conversions. For example, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, beginning in 165, a plague swept over the Roman Empire.16 The Christians ministered to the sick and dying, both Christians and pagans, including by preparing the dead for burial at great risk to their own lives. The Romans were highly suspicious of the Christians’ motives. They believed that the Christians engaged in good works only to spread their religion, a policy that the Romans were dismayed to discover was highly effective. Two centuries later the emperor Julian attempted to institute pagan charities that would rival the Christian ones. Sociologist Rodney Stark explains that by Julian’s day, in the fourth century, the Romans could no longer compete with the Christians in terms of providing social welfare. The seeds for this successful policy can be found in the doctrine itself, which emphasizes charity.17
Although the Christians did not practice the combination of martyrdom and murder that has become so common in Palestine, there is something to be learned about the role of martyrdom—and the way the Church encouraged it—from the period when the Christian movement was perceived as a dangerous threat to the ruling Roman elite. Elaine Pagels writes that the Christian movement challenged converts to put their allegiance to fellow Christians before any other commitment, including not only the corrupt Roman elite, but even their families.18 Perpetua, perhaps the most famous Christian martyr, wrote in her diary that the governor beat her father with a rod to try to persuade her to deny her beliefs in order to save her life. She felt sorry for her father, she wrote, as though she herself had been beaten, but refused to deny her faith, despite the pain it would cause her father.19 Similarly, Hamas encourages suicide bombers in training to focus on the ummah, the Muslim community, not the demands of corrupt Muslim rulers or the emotional loss of their parents. Hamas attempts to soften the blow for families, however, by providing financial assistance to those left behind.
Early Christian martyrs, like Palestinian suicide bombers, received many rewards for their sacrifices, including material, emotional, and spiritual ones. In the period leading up to a martyr’s death, fellow Christians would often shower the martyr designate with gifts of food and clothing as well as attention. The martyr was promised not only eternal life in the next world, but also posthumous fame in this one. The letters of Ignatius, for example, make clear that he was “reaching for glory,” in the words of sociologist Rodney Stark, “both here and beyond. He expected to be remembered through the ages and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, ‘in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.’ ”20 Christians would hold celebrations dramatizing the martyr designate’s forthcoming test of faith. These celebrations served several functions, perhaps the most important of which was to establish a kind of social contract between the martyr designate and fellow Christians, to minimize the risk that he would recant at the last moment. Videotapes taken of suicide bombers would seem to fulfill a similar role, publicizing the shaheed’s commitment to sacrifice his life for the purported good of the community.
Like contemporary suicide-bombing campaigns, which receive wide coverage in the press, Christian martyrdom was a kind of theater—always in public, always with the aim of demonstrating faith and recruiting new followers. A witness to Perpetua’s murder wrote: “On the day before, when they had their last meal, which is called the free banquet, they celebrated not a banquet but rather a love feast. They spoke to the mob with the same steadfastness, warned them of God’s judgment, stressing the joy they would have in their suffering, and ridiculing the curiosity of those that came to see them. Saturus said: ‘Will not tomorrow be enough for you? Why are you so eager to see something that you dislike? Our friends today will be our enemies on the morrow. But take careful note of what we look like so that you will recognize us on the day.’ Thus everyone would depart from the prison in amazement, and many of them began to believe. The day of their victory dawned, and they marched from the prison to the amphitheater joyfully as though they were going to heaven, with calm faces, trembling, if at all, with joy rather than fear. Perpetua went along with shining countenance and calm step, as the beloved of God, as a wife of Christ, putting down everyone’s stare by her own intense gaze.”
Perpetua “screamed as she was struck on the bone; then she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator, and guided it to her throat. It was as though so great a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not be dispatched unless she herself were willing.”21 Christian martyrs’ refusal to back down was seen as an important testament to the power of Christian faith and the appeal of the sect, and thus an important recruitment tool for the Christian movement.22 The Roman officials realized that the Christians’ “inflammatory views, accompanied by passionate religious fervor, could catch fire among the disaffected and the restless, especially among subject nations and slaves. Thus Rome showed no toleration for these dangerous Christians,” Pagels explains.23 The martyrs provoked the Romans to react in a way that increased the Christians’ appeal to the public at large.
Hamas provokes Israel to overreact for the same reason: to mobilize support. Martyrdom (including suicide bombing) is a cheap form of psychological warfare.
To be clear, I do not mean to suggest a moral equivalence between the Christian martyrs and suicide bombers. In my view, murder-martyrdom raises far more serious ethical and legal concerns; while suicide may be forbidden by most religions, murdering innocents is forbidden by all. But the example of Christian martyrdom helps to elucidate how organizations can provide spiritual, financial, and emotional incentives to persuade individuals that it is rational to sacrifice their lives for the good of a religious organization.
I want to learn about how the Palestinian Authority (PA) views Hamas. Amira arranges for me to meet with Brigadier General Nizar Ammar of the Palestinian General Security organization. The offices are in the Saraya security compound, where the Palestinian Authority’s prison is also located. An aide leads us through seemingly endless, grime-encrusted hallways. The general’s office is similarly dingy, as if he intends to broadcast the message “We are overworked, underpaid, with few resources,” even though the general perception of the PA on the streets of Gaza is that the officials are all on the take, funneling moneys meant for the Palestinian people to their private bank accounts. The walls are stained and the windows blackened with dust.
Amira seems even more distressed by the filth than I am. She periodically wrings her hands with an antibiotic lotion. Last summer, she tells me, she got sick when she visited Gaza. The septic system in Gaza is barely functional. In some places, raw sewage is dumped directly on the sand dunes with no treatment. Soaking pits and septic tanks frequently over-flow onto the streets and into people’s homes.24 The water makes everyone sick, Amira tells me. The general himself seems utterly oblivious of his surroundings, however. He greets us energetically. I scrutinize his face, looking for clues about how he feels talking to the two of us. Amira is a beautiful young woman, raised in privilege in Saudi Arabia, now completing an expensive American education. I am an American academic and former government official, now teaching counterterrorism at Harvard. Undoubtedly he will feel obligated to give us a particular impression, but what will it be?
The general tells us that Fatah (a precursor of the PLO) emerged out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded by an Egyptian school-teacher named Hassan al-Banna in 1928. Hassan al-Banna was strongly influenced by revolutionary totalitarian movements from the far left as well as the far right, including glorification of the military and a fascination with violence, a cult of martyrdom, and the Russian revolutionaries’ idea of the “propaganda of the deed.”25 By the late 1930s, revolutionary junior officers in the Egyptian army, including those affiliated with the Brotherhood, had established links with Nazi Germany. Although the Brotherhood had started out as a charitable and cultural organization, it soon had a paramilitary wing, which took on fascistlike slogans and practices. From the very beginning, one of its explicit goals was to counter liberal democratic principles.26
Banna was assassinated in 1949, and Sayyid Qutb—considered by many to be the father of modern Islamist extremism—became the Brotherhoods’ chief spokesperson (and its liaison with the communists). Qutb was an early advocate of Islamic holy war as a legitimate response to regimes that claim to be Islamic but whose implementation of Islamic law is found wanting. Like Banna, Qutb was not an Islamic scholar by training. He worked as an inspector of schools and published literary criticism. In 1948 he left Egypt to study education in the United States. He found Americans’ materialism and the freedoms that American men gave their wives deeply distressing, and he returned to Egypt in 1951 with profoundly anti-Western as well as anticapitalist views. Qutb described Americans as “violent by nature” and “having little respect for human life.” In his eyes, American churches were “not places of worship as much as entertainment centers and playgrounds for sexes.” When an American female college student told him that the sexual issue “was not ethical, but merely biological,” he concluded that Americans were “primitive in their sexual life.”27
Qutb was most critical of Arab leaders, whom he described as arrogant, corrupt, Westernized princes and autocrats. He considered them the equivalent of Jahili Arabs, who practiced paganism prior to the birth of Muhammad and the revelation of the Koran. Qutb became convinced that the most important enemies of Islam were the secular leaders of the Arab world and advocated that a jihad be waged against them. He found support for his views in the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, a thirteenth-century theologian and jurist who wrote that jihad against Muslim unbelievers was a legitimate means for protecting the purity of the faith. Qutb described internal jihad as a necessary component of the permanent revolution of the Islamic movement.28
After the Egyptian revolution of 1952–54, the military government, which promoted secularism, became the Brotherhood’s chief enemy. President Gamal Abdel Nasser suppressed the Brotherhood in 1954, and many of its members went into exile in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Morocco, from where they established a network of adherents in religious schools and universities.29 Qutb was imprisoned and, in 1966, executed. But an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, murdered President Anwar Sadat, who had initially courted the Brotherhood as a counter to the Communists.30 The Muslim Brotherhood and the writings of Qutb inspired not only Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group responsible for Sadat’s murder, but many of the Islamist terrorist groups active today. Al Qaeda and Hamas are perhaps the most prominent examples. As we will see in chapter 9, Egypt’s strong anti-Islamist policies induced the Egyptian Islamic Jihad to focus on international targets, including, most famously, the first World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and, after it merged with Al Qaeda, the September 11 strikes.
Some Islamic scholars argue that the Islamism these groups promote has more to do with totalitarianism than with Islam.31 Islamist terror is “first and foremost an ideological and moral challenge to liberal democracy,” the historians Boroumand and Boroumand argue. It is an eminently modern practice “thoroughly at odds with Islamic traditions and ethics,” they claim.32 The problem is that the Islamists are able to persuade their followers that they are preaching Islam, even if they are reading the texts selectively. All religious terrorists engage in hermeneutics (interpreting texts), as we shall see. But Islamists seem to be able to spread their message to a larger group of followers, in part because of the organizational tools they employ.
Palestinians living in Gaza at the time of the first Intifada talk about the social pressure to participate, even for youth not living in the camps. It was just what everyone did, one young man told me.33 Interviewees in a study overseen by psychiatrist Jerrold Post also talked about social pressure, and the feeling that they would be ostracized if they didn’t participate in the violence.34 One said a friend recruited him to join Hamas, but that joining was just “the normal thing to do, as all young people were enlisting. With my Islamic leanings and the social pressure from the Islamic center, it is only natural that I joined in Hamas activities in the camp.”35 Another reported, “My entire spiritual, cultural, and social world revolved around the movement, and it was natural for me to join Hamas…. All the religious men in the area joined Hamas.”36
In 1991, Hamas carried out its first act of terrorism inside Israel, an attack on a Tel Aviv bus. In December 1992, Israel deported 415 members of various Islamic organizations, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to the Lebanese no-man’s-land on the border of Israel and Lebanon, where they remained until 1993.37
“This was a big mistake on Israel’s part, because Hamas started cooperating with Hezbollah,” General Ammar recalls, referring to the Shia organization established in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon war. Hezbollah attempted to adopt Iranian revolutionary doctrine into Lebanon. Since its inception, Hezbollah fought the Israeli occupation of a self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon, and the group’s combination of guerrilla and terrorist tactics contributed much to Israel’s decision to withdraw its forces from Lebanon in May 2000.
Israel’s deportation of the 415 Islamists “utterly transformed Hamas,” the general continues. Hezbollah and the Iranian revolutionary guards taught Hamas members to carry out suicide-bombing campaigns during this period of exile. “Leaders like Dr. Rantissi and Dr. Zahar emerged during that period. They recruited intellectuals and academics for other leadership positions, following the pattern the PLO had used in 1965.”
During the period of exile, the PLO was preparing to renounce terrorism, and Hamas became a more professional terrorist organization. As a result, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority began to curb Hamas’s unrelenting militancy. Once the PA started cracking down, Hamas divided itself into several wings—a political wing, a charitable organization, and the military wing. “But the difference between the wings is often a fiction,” the general explains. “We learned through interrogations that some of the people involved in operations inside Israel had been in the political wing only forty-eight hours before the operation. This is a big problem for the PA interrogators because people jump between the political and military wings at a moment’s notice.
“This is how it works,” he tells us, seemingly more comfortable now. “Say Mohammed Deif [head of Hamas’s military wing] is planning an operation in Tel Aviv. He plans all aspects of the operation—he transports the explosives and specifies the target. But he needs two volunteers to carry explosives to the target. He calls the person in charge of Hamas at the university, and that person calls the head of the student union, or someone familiar with the students, and they will select two student volunteers. Usually they are troubled youths. Forty-eight hours before the initiation of the operation, the two youths would be sent to meet with Mohammed Deif.”
The central leadership is not located in Gaza or the West Bank. Khaled Mashaal, the man whom the Mossad tried to poison and whose life was saved by the late King Hussein, is the overall leader. Mousa Abu Marzook, who had moved to the United States but was deported to Jordan in May 1997, is now based in Damascus. They send the funding and provide overall direction from their safe houses elsewhere in the Middle East.
Where do they get the money? I ask. “There are tens of channels,” the general tells us. “Some money comes from Palestinians living in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, or the United States.”
A large fraction of Hamas’s money comes from Muslim charities in the West, including the United States. The Holy Land Foundation, for example, the largest Muslim charity in America, is a significant contributor, according to the U.S. government.38 About 60 percent of Hamas’s budget goes to social welfare—schools, libraries, youth clubs, athletic teams, mosques, orphanages, and clinics, which are spread throughout the territories.39 Running charities that actually support the poor is a great cover for fund-raising for terrorism; but charitable giving is also a critically important aspect of Hamas’s appeal.
The charitable wing, known as Dawa, plays a significant role in increasing support for the other two wings. It offers apartments to students at reduced rates. It provides families of suicide bombers lifetime annuities. The bombers are recruited in Hamas classrooms and in Hamas sports clubs. A Hamas activist explains, “These guys kill Israelis, but they also secure their families from poverty.”40
Iran is the only government that funds Hamas directly, the general tells us. Emad al-Alami, a senior Hamas official, provides the link between Hamas and Iran.41 The Iranians fund a variety of Islamic organizations, especially military wings. “In the beginning they considered Palestinian Islamic Jihad the most important Palestinian organization, but they have started funding Hamas as well. Now they support both,” the general says. Iran reportedly provides $20–$30 million a year to Hamas.42 “Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States also support Hamas,” the general continues. “But it is not government support. Nongovernment organizations provide the money so that governments can’t be blamed. But the governments know what is going on; the governments oversee the money. Money comes in from Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait. When Sheik Yassin visited the Gulf, he collected millions of dollars for Hamas,” he tells us.
Here is how it works. The Saudi government administers a foundation that provides funds to the families of suicide bombers. The Saudi embassy in Washington issued a press release in January 2001 claiming that the Saudi Committee for Support for the Al-Quds Intifada, chaired and administered by Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, distributed $33 million in support of wounded and handicapped Palestinians and to “the families of 2,281 prisoners and 358 martyrs.” The press release also reported that the committee “pledged a sum of SR 20,000 ($5,333) cash to each family that has suffered from martyrdom.”43
I want to know the Palestinian Authority’s view of who becomes a suicide bomber. What makes suicide bombing an appealing tactic to Hamas? How does the organization mold the beliefs and actions of recruits, and how do they keep them from changing their mind before detonating the bomb? How does Hamas identify a likely candidate? The general recounts for me, tick by tick, the profile of the typical Palestinian suicide bomber prior to the Second Intifada, and before Mohammad Atta’s September 11, 2001, attack:
Young, often a teenager.
He is mentally immature.
There is pressure on him to work.
He can’t find a job.
He has no options, and there is no social safety net to help him.
He would try to work for the PA but he doesn’t get a job because he has no connections.
He tries to get into Arafat’s army, but again, he doesn’t have the right connections. He doesn’t have “vitamin W.” (Vitamin W is an expression for wasta in Arabic, which refers to political, social, and personal connections.)
He has no girlfriend or fiancée.
On the days he’s off, he has no money to go to the disco and pick up girls (even if it were acceptable).
No means for him to enjoy life in any way.
Life has no meaning but pain.
Marriage is not an option—it’s expensive and he can’t even take care of his own family.
He feels he has lost everything.
The only way out is to find refuge in God.
He goes to the local mosque.
It’s not like in the United States where they just go to church on Sundays. He begins going to the mosque five times a day—even for the 4 A.M. prayers. (An average devout Muslim will not attend the early-morning prayer.)
Hamas members are there and notice him looking anxious, worried, and depressed and that he’s coming every day. It’s a small society here—people tend to know each other. They will ask about him, discover his situation.
Gradually they will begin to recruit him.
They talk to him about the afterlife and tell him that paradise awaits him if he dies in the jihad. They explain to him that if he volunteers for a suicide bombing, his family name will be held in the highest respect. He’ll be remembered as a shaheed (martyr, a hero). He’ll become a martyr and Hamas will give his family about $5,000, wheat flour, sugar, other staples, and clothing. The most important thing is that his family’s status will be raised significantly—they too will be treated as heroes. The condition for all this: he is not allowed to tell anyone.
They will take him away from home forty-eight hours before the operation so there is no chance for him to reconsider. During this period he will write his last letters and sign his will, making it difficult to turn back.
Ariel Merari, a leading Israeli authority on suicide terrorism, visited Harvard during the 1999–2000 academic year. In a lecture he gave to my class at my request, he added some detail to the general’s assessment. In interviews he conducted, he found that despite their coming disproportionately from refugee camps, suicide bombers tended to be of average economic status. More than half had spent time in Israeli prisons.44 The most important factor is the organization: almost nobody does this as an individual; candidates are almost always trained.45 An organization provides logistics and planning. After the prospective shaheed is recruited, he will be referred to as a “living martyr.” In the last days before the operation, he writes letters to family and friends, explaining his decision and his expectation of paradise. Often, audio- or videotapes are made of the candidate to be used as his final farewell. Photographs are taken of him in heroic positions, and the photos are then used to make recruitment posters and calendars to be disseminated after the shaheed’s death. Sometimes additional footage is spliced to farewell videos to make them more effective recruiting advertisements. The idea, Ariel Merari and other experts on suicide bombing explain, is to create points of no return, to make it nearly impossible for the candidate to back out of his commitment. Once these tapes and photos are made, it would be humiliating to change one’s mind out of fear.46
After the al Aqsa Intifada of 2000 and the September 11 attack of 2001, it has become clear that developing a single profile of suicide bombers is nearly impossible. Candidates are not necessarily poor; they may in fact be wealthy. Nor are they necessarily uneducated. Women are now getting involved. Women have been responsible for over a third of the suicide bombings carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and over two-thirds of those perpetrated by the Kurdish Workers’ Party PKK.47 Butuntil recently, female suicide bombers were considered rare among Muslims.48 Hamas no longer needs to recruit suicide bombers; they are swamped with volunteers requiring little indoctrination.49
Islam explicitly forbids suicide (intihar). The Koran instructs Muslims, “And do not kill yourself, for God is indeed merciful to you.” In another verse the Koran states, “And do not throw yourself into destruction with your own hands.” There is also a widely accepted tradition (hadith) that warns Muslims, “Whoever kills himself with a knife will be in hell forever, stabbing himself in the stomach; whoever kills himself by drinking poison will eternally drink poison in the hellfire; and whoever kills himself by falling off a mountain will forever fall in the fire of hell.”50 But terrorist leaders have for some time been arguing that suicide-bombing attacks are not suicides but acts of martyrdom (istishhad). Although God punishes the suicide, he rewards the martyr. The Koran states: “Think not of those who are slain in the cause of God as dead. Nay, they are live in the presence of the Lord and are granted gifts from him” (3, 169).51
Soldiers are trained to risk their lives for their country; but a suicide bomber goes into the operation assuming not that he might die, but that he will die. The more training a soldier receives, the more skilled he is at avoiding death, whereas the opposite is true for a suicide bomber. When such a person makes a cost-benefit analysis about the value of his life versus the value of his death, he attaches greater value to death—both for his country and for himself. This suggests that something is terribly wrong—either with him, his training, or with his situation.
Ordinary suicide has been shown to spread through social contagion, especially among youth.52 Studies have shown that a teenager whose friend or relative attempts or commits suicide is more likely to attempt or commit suicide himself.53 Not surprisingly, ordinary suicide is more common among youths who are depressed or exposed to intense social stress. Suicide bombing is different from ordinary suicide: it entails a willingness not only to die, but also to kill others. Often, an organization takes charge of planning the suicide operation, and the terrorist may be on call for weeks or, in the case of the leaders of the September 11 attacks, years.54 But suicide bombing has some things in common with ordinary suicide.
The situation in Gaza suggests that suicide-murder can also be spread through social contagion, that at some tipping point a cult of suicide-murder takes hold among youth. Once this happens, the role of the organization appears to be less critical; the bombing takes on a momentum of its own. “Martyrdom operations” have become part of the popular culture in Gaza and the West Bank.55 For example, on the streets of Gaza, children play a game called shuhada, which includes a mock funeral for a suicide bomber. Teenage rock groups praise martyrs in their songs. Asked to name their heroes, young Palestinians are likely to include suicide bombers on the list.56
Suicide seems to spread more readily in subcultures heavily exposed to violence. In the United States, the local rate of suicide tends to be correlated with the local homicide rate, especially among youths.57 Easy access to weapons plays a role. Teenagers are more likely to commit suicide if a gun is kept in their home. One study shows that youths who commit suicide are thirty-two times more likely to have lived in a house with a loaded gun than matched controls in the same community.58 High school shooters, who are often suicide-murderers, are likely to have guns in their homes, and many spend a lot of time playing violent video games and watching violent films, again suggesting that exposure to violence is a risk factor.59
Although some Palestinian parents claim to be pleased when their children donate their lives to jihad, Palestinian mental health workers report that parents are seeking advice about how to prevent their children from martyring themselves.60 A backlash began after three Palestinian students from Sheikh Radwan refugee camp, one fourteen years old and two fifteen, set out on a suicide mission against a settlement armed only with knives and makeshift bombs, trying to infiltrate the settlement. IDF troops guarding the settlement shot and killed them.61 Shortly after that incident, a seventeen-year-old girl ran away, leaving her parents a note saying that she was going to blow herself up in Israel. But her father requested help from both Palestinian and Israeli security officials, who found the girl and returned her to her parents. Dr. Mahmud Sehawail, general director of the Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture in Ramallah, explained that Israeli solders had killed the girl’s cousin and she wanted “revenge,” and that she required psychiatric treatment for anger and depression.62 Dr. Elia Awaad, director of mental health at the Palestine Red Crescent in Beit Sahur, said, “It’s horrible what has been happening, but a suicide bomber acts because of accumulated trauma, going back generations, in some cases back to 1948.”63 Mark Juergensmeyer sees suicide bombing as a means to “dehumiliate” the deeply humiliated and traumatized. “They become involved in terrorism not only to belittle their enemies but also to provide themselves with a sense of power,” he argues.64
The organizations that recruit suicide bombers encourage youth to donate their lives, and their parents’ quiescence, in a variety of ways. The parents are showered with gifts and attention, including substantial financial rewards offered by a variety of charities. They hold celebrations for the shaheed to celebrate his purported marriage in paradise. Death notices in Palestinian papers often take the form of wedding announcements. For example, a notice in Al-Istiqlal, the Palestinian Authority paper, read: “With great pride, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad marries the member of its military wing…the martyr and hero Yasser Al-Adhami, to the ‘black-eyed’ [virgins].”65 A suicide bomber’s will, published in Al Risala, the Hamas newspaper, urged his mother to “call out in joy” and “distribute sweets” because “a wedding to ‘the black-eyed’ awaits your son in Paradise.” Al-Hutari had carried out a suicide bombing outside a disco in Tel Aviv, killing twenty-three people, most of them teenage girls.
Islamic scholars argue that the tradition makes clear that seventy-two virgins are the reward for every believer who is admitted to paradise, not only martyrs. But terrorist organizations emphasize that the seventy-two virgins are a special reward for martyrdom. Hamas leader Isma’il Abu Shanab explained to Agence France Presse, “Anyone who dies a martyr’s death has a reward. If the martyr dreams of ‘the black-eyed,’ he’ll get [them].” Although many Islamic scholars claim that the tradition is not entirely clear on whether getting married to the “black-eyed” entails having sex with them, suicide bombers seem to believe that it does. A sixteen-year-old Hamas youth leader told a visiting American reporter, “I know my life is poor compared to Europe and America, but I have something awaiting me that makes all my suffering worthwhile…. Most boys can’t stop thinking about the virgins.”66 The Israeli Defense Forces report that one of the suicide bombers whose attack they managed to prevent had wrapped toilet paper around his genitals, apparently to protect them for later use in paradise.67 In a review of the Egyptian press, the respected Egyptian journalist Hasanain Kurum wrote that the late author and reporter Muhammad Galal Al-Kushk caused a scandal when he wrote that “the men in paradise have sexual relations not only with…the ‘black-eyed’ but also with the serving boys,” and that “a believer’s penis is eternally erect.”68
The evening after our interviews with Abu Shanab and the general, I consider staying in a hotel. Amira, my translator, invites me to stay with her family in their apartment in Gaza City. This strikes me as safer, so I take her up on her offer. We stop by the apartment in midafternoon. Amira’s mother, who is a doctor, offers to make some calls for me. She offers to phone Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantissi, the spokesperson for Hamas in Gaza. He is a pediatrician and known to her circle of friends. She will make me appointments for tomorrow, she says. In the meantime, she prepares an extraordinary meal. Cucumbers and zucchini stuffed with ground meat. Chicken stewed with cinnamon, cloves, and cumin. Rice with dried fruits. Afterward, Amira and I walk to a hotel on the beach. The broken sidewalks are cooler now. Amira points out the movie theater that Hamas tried to shut down. The large square where students hold demonstrations. The liquor stores whose windows Hamas operatives have shattered.
When we return, I discover that Amira and I are to share a bed. The combination of sleeping with a person whom I don’t know, the singing of the muezzin in a neighboring mosque, and the crowing of an enthusiastic, insomniac rooster keep me up most of the night.
The next morning, Amira and I visit Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantissi, one of the founders of Hamas and a member of its executive committee, who is under house arrest at his home in Gaza. There appear to be security personnel in every part of the house—on the front porch, in the foyer, in every room we can see. Many are wearing civilian clothes, but they have handguns. We are directed to a sitting room. An unidentified person—Rantissi’s bodyguard? His servant?—brings us soft drinks and tea. After ten minutes, a young man brings us to Dr. Rantissi’s office. Rantissi sits behind a desk, apparently entirely unaffected by the security officials stationed throughout his home. Posters of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the brilliant gold Dome of the Rock hang on the wall behind him.
Dr. Rantissi is not as friendly as my other Palestinian interlocutors were. He waits for me to ask questions, which I find intimidating, especially on so little sleep.
What is your view of globalization? I ask.
“The West offers the rest of the world a very valuable civilization. The Prophet said that we should take [the] best that other tribes have to offer, and leave the worst.”
What is the best? I ask. “Technological advances, democracy, the information revolution, the industrial revolution, and elections—these are things that should be absorbed by Islam,” he says, in that order. “But dancing, drinking, seductive behavior—these are forbidden by Islam. There should be no inappropriate mixing of sexes. Women are very highly regarded in Islam, and these things adversely affect them.” He then adds, as if sensing that an educated American woman might not appreciate this kind of chivalry, “In Islam the man must support the woman. Even if she has a higher salary, even if she is a millionaire, he has to support their children.”
Why are you involved in the political wing rather than the military wing? I ask.
He tells us that he considers himself a mujaheed even if he doesn’t bear arms. “The political and military wings both are struggling. That is the meaning of jihad.”
He tells us that after he had been imprisoned for two months, the Israeli High Court passed a resolution to release him. But the Mossad and the CIA did not want him released. Why? I ask. “I refused to recognize the state of Israel. Palestinians’ rights cannot be returned on the negotiating table. They will only be returned through war. When the Germans occupied France during World War II, the French people did not hesitate to fight Germany. We don’t like war. If it were possible to solve our problems without it, that would be better. But clearly war is our only option. You can’t forget that there are generations of Palestinians that have been dispossessed for fifty years. A large part of our people are still under occupation—the worst form of slavery. The Jews have killed thousands of our people. They did not spare women and children. They declared themselves a state. The Israelis are also preparing for war. Why do they need those F-16s if they are really in favor of peace? They are for war.
“We are living in a time when we are at a weak point. It is very hard for us. But history and religion tell us that the stronger does not always remain strong. When we become strong, we’ll tell the world that this land is our land. The world will not find this unusual because they already heard Jews make this claim.”
As a pediatrician, are you bothered that your organization kills Israeli children? I ask.
Dr. Rantissi responds angrily, “Our religion condemns killing women, children, and civilians. The intention is to kill combatants. When children are killed it’s collateral damage,” he says, using the language used by the American military in explaining the loss of civilian life in war and by Israelis when they kill Palestinian children.
He thinks for a moment, then continues with a different line of argument. “All Israelis are combatants because they all participate in the army. All Israelis are the children of those who threw us off our homeland. If the Jew considers Israel to be his homeland because he was exiled two thousand years ago, then we will use the same logic: we were exiled half a century ago. It is our land.”
The Jews killed over two thousand people during the first Intifada, he exaggerates, “and the vast majority of them were children.69 They have killed tens of hundreds, mostly in mosques. They forced us to resist.”
That evening we return to Jerusalem. Amira is not really supposed to be in Jerusalem at night, but she stays in my room at my hotel.
On a Saturday morning, Amira and I get up early to go visit the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, beneath which many believe the remains of the first two Jewish temples are buried. We walk down Nablus Road to Damascus Gate and make our way toward the hill known as the Temple Mount to Jews, the Noble Sanctuary or al-haram al-sharif to Muslims. At first we try going through the Jewish quarter, as instructed by the hotel. Tourists are required to pass through a metal detector to get into the Jewish quarter on Saturdays, and it turns out that Palestinians are not allowed through that gate at all. Amira could easily pass for an Israeli or an American if she took off her hijab (head scarf), but she doesn’t. I argue with the guards, explaining that Amira is a student at a U.S. university and that we are together. They refuse to grant her access. We decide to try walking through the gate they have directed her to—the gate for Muslims. A Jewish soldier looks me in the eye and asks whether I am a Muslim. When I say no, he refuses me entry. I am forced to walk around. Amira waits for me near the Dome. While she is waiting for me she does something that for her is utterly unprecedented—she talks to an Israeli soldier. By the time I reach her, the two of them have been chatting for ten minutes. I watch her question him and am surprised to see her unconsciously mimicking the line of questioning she had translated for me when I was interviewing one of the leaders of Hamas. “Have you ever killed anyone?” she asks the soldier.
“No,” he answers.
“Do you think you could?” He answers that he thinks he could but only in self-defense.
The Dome is extraordinarily beautiful, lined with soft mosaics and stained glass. In the center is “the rock”—a cave in which the prophet Muhammad is believed to have prayed, alongside earlier prophets, including Abraham and Jesus Christ. A guard urges everyone—including me—to leave the cave quickly to give others a chance to look. I want to stay here to see if I am susceptible to the power of this stone. I pretend to be in such a deep trance that I don’t notice him shooing me out. Eventually he gives up on me and concentrates on talking to beautiful Amira. Some of the visitors pray here.
As we are leaving, the Israeli soldier beckons to Amira. The two of us walk toward him, surprised. He asks her about her plans for the week. Could he come pick her up some evening and take her out? he asks. She tells him she is busy.
The following week the Israeli government grants me permission to interview a senior Hamas operative. I hire a car to take me to the prison at Ramla, where I meet with Hassan Salameh—perhaps the most important Hamas leader in an Israeli jail. In January 1996, Yahya Ayyash, known as the Engineer, was murdered with a booby-trapped mobile telephone. Following Ayyash’s assassination, Hamas embarked on a retaliatory suicide campaign, which became the deadliest series of suicide bombings that Israel had known up to that point, causing over sixty deaths. Salameh, Ayyash’s deputy, was responsible for organizing that campaign. He planned many successful suicide bombing attacks.
Hassan Salameh is twenty-eight years old. I ask him why he joined Hamas. He joined during the Intifada because he was attracted to the idea of fighting the Israeli government and he liked the way members of Hamas thought, the way they acted. “Many young people joined at that time,” he tells me.
I ask whether part of his motivation was religious. “Yes, but not exclusively,” he tells me. The most important motivation was the Israeli occupation; he saw Palestinians were oppressed and wanted to take action.
I ask whether he would ever consider carrying out a suicide bombing himself, or whether he sees himself exclusively as an organizer of suicide attacks. “The latter,” he tells me. “This is an organization. Every person has his own role.” This is fairly typical; terrorist leaders generally think of themselves as playing a different role from those they recruit as human bombs.
I ask whether he feels any remorse about the lives of the young men that were lost when they carried out suicide attacks against the Israelis. “The terrible things that have happened to the Palestinian people are far bigger and far stronger than feeling sorry or guilty,” he tells me. “As a Palestinian, I feel that my people and I have been murdered in the soul by the Israeli occupation. This feeling stays with me in every situation. There is a big difference between murder and killing to defend his country—attacks against Israelis, even against Israeli citizens, are the latter kind of killing, not murder. All religions allow people the right to kill in self-defense, or to defend their land. Land has been taken from us with violence, and we have the right to take it back. You must understand the difference between Hassan the person and Hassan the Palestinian. I was born in a refugee camp near Gaza. The jail I am now incarcerated in is situated on what was our land.”
He had one year of college prior to the Intifada, and that was the end of his education. His parents had essentially no education. His father had three wives and twenty-five children. The older children worked to help support the family. Everyone in the family worked as tailors. He is in solitary confinement and says that he is lonely. It is inhumane, he says. But he believes he is in jail because God decided he had to be here. Religion gives me a feeling of peace, he tells me. He spends his time reading the Koran and watching the news. The officers treat him pretty well because they want him to be quiet. They mostly give him whatever he wants, he claims. A few weeks ago he decided to go on a hunger strike to protest his solitary confinement and didn’t eat for twenty-one days. A doctor was sent in to examine him every day. He lost ten kilograms. Four days ago he started eating again. You do not look emaciated, I tell him. He tells me he was fat when he began his hunger strike. He started eating again because they reached an agreement, the nature of which he does not reveal.
If you are let out of prison, will you continue to do the same thing? I ask him.
“I can’t say,” he says. “It’s in God’s hands.”
I want to hear the Israeli counterterrorism office’s perspective on how Hamas works. I hire a taxi to take me to the offices of the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. What a change from Gaza. In Gaza you feel humiliation, confusion, and desperation. Here you feel power, certainty, and determination. A part of me feels at home in this setting, but coming here immediately after spending time in Gaza is disorienting. I heard only partial truths in Gaza. But the truth is not what counts for terrorists or for those who come to support them. It is perception and pain, not truth, that leads to terrorism.
In the counterterrorism office I meet with a leading expert on Hamas.70 He tells me, “Hamas’s raison d’être is the symbiotic relationship with the Palestinian people. They believe they have to change the behavior of the people prior to an Islamic revolution, but at the same time they have to persuade the Palestinian people that only they should be vested with the authority to lead. Hamas has a very good public image, and that is critical to its success.”
What are the principal challenges Hamas faces today? I ask.
“For one thing, sources of authority.” He describes how the founders of Hamas, including Abu Shanab and Dr. Rantissi, the engineer and pediatrician, respectively, I interviewed in Gaza, as well as Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, are from poor refugee camps. “They feel a duty to the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian problem is the issue that drives them. Living in poverty in refugee camps is what gave the original leaders legitimacy,” the expert says. “But in 1989, we arrested the founders of Hamas: Zahar, Abu Shanab, Rantissi, and Yassin. After that, new leaders emerged: Musa Abu Marzook, Ibrahim Ghosheh, and Khaled Mashaal.” These new leaders, he adds, never lived in Gaza or the West Bank. “Their authority does not stem from their having lived in Gaza, but from their money. What gives Marzook and the others authority and power is money from the Gulf states.”
How does Israel attempt to solve the problem? I ask.
“The PA has an interest in keeping Palestinians in refugee camps. They remain in camps with no rights; they are not citizens. This is the best way to keep the problem going. This problem can only be solved with money. It can only be solved by providing the refugees with real housing and good jobs. Collective punishment and closures after attacks is bad because it hurts people economically. The solution is to build infrastructure, create an industrial zone, and give them the opportunity to work.
“In 1996, after the Ashqelon attacks, we asked permission to search Islamic schools in Ramallah. All the walls were covered with posters about the jihad. We found a videocassette of six-year-old children marching, saying, ‘O my God, please take my life—I’m going to be a shaheed.’ What should we do? Close the school? That would be a disaster. And we cannot give money to the PA to improve the schooling system because they are corrupt. We cannot close down the charitable organization because it would be counterproductive—it would only increase support for Hamas. Jordan is the only country that knows how to deal with terrorist organizations. It brought the Muslim Brotherhood into its government and coopted them.”
How does Hamas attract its followers? I want to know.
“We have been researching the charitable and political wings of Hamas. In some places we found pornographic movies in their houses. Some of them are not so religious. Some of them join Hamas because it’s the best way to express themselves.
“One of the biggest issues is the gap between rich and poor. This gives Hamas two ways to attract followers. The first is economic. That’s easy. Hamas tells families, ‘We’ll take your children to school. Then we’ll take them to the club and we’ll provide assistance with their homework. The children can join the Islamic sports club and it’s free. Our bus will take the children. We’ll pay their scholarship. And we’ll find a job for you. Every Friday you should come to the mosque and we’ll give you food and every month we’ll give you fifty dinar [that’s a lot—around one-quarter the average monthly salary].’ After six to seven months of this, many families decide to join Hamas. Plus, everyone sees that the PA is corrupt, they are not providing essential services. Hamas looks very good in comparison.
“Second, the failures of modern, open societies make Hamas attractive. The failures of modern society are like a disease, like AIDS: people everywhere have the feeling that the only way to protect their families is to go back to tradition, to religion. Parents send their children to religious schools to protect them. Identity today is based in general on religion and culture, not nation-states. Hamas uses religion for political purposes. They use religion to achieve political objectives.”
People all over the world feel wistful about an earlier, simpler time, and some of them turn to religious revivalism to help inoculate themselves and their children from some of the less appealing aspects of modernity and globalization. But I can’t help but wonder whether this expert, like the soldier who asked Amira for a date, has any inkling of the role of Israeli policy in all this. It is not just the violence; it is the pernicious effect of repeated, small humiliations that add up to a feeling of nearly unbearable despair and frustration, and a willingness on the part of some to do anything—even commit atrocities—in the belief that attacking the oppressor will restore their sense of dignity.
At this point I had a pretty good understanding about the role of humiliation and alienation at both personal and national levels as risk factors for terrorism. In the next chapter we explore the impact of a government policy to deliberately shift an ethno-religious mix, granting a new ethno-religious group numerical dominance in a region.