THE SCOUT
I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court, and I do not introduce myself to you by my name or age, I introduce myself with my actions … I see you all in this court today angry, and it is the same anger that [is] in my heart and the hearts of the Palestinian people … Where are your hearts when you kill children in Rafah, Jenin and Ramallah, Where is the sense!?
—Ahlam at-Tamimi, 20051
AHLAM
Ahlam at-Tamimi smiled angelically as she recalled the events of the afternoon of August 9, 2001, when twenty-two-year-old Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri went to the Sbarro pizzeria at the intersection of Jerusalem’s King George and Jaffa streets. In Al Masri’s guitar case was a fifteen-pound improvised explosive device, which master bomb maker Abdullah Barghouti had packed with nails, screws, nuts, and bolts to maximize the carnage. This trip to the Sbarro pizzeria was not a maiden trip for Ahlam. The twenty-year-old from the village of Nebi Saleh had reconnoitered the street days earlier, studying the neighborhood to ascertain when and where a bomb might do the most damage. Ahlam claims that she chose the Sbarro after seeing the crowds of people who crammed into the restaurant at lunchtime.2 Israel assassinated Jamal and Omar Mansour and six other people in Nablus on July 31, 2001; the next day, Hamas set in motion their act of revenge. The attack had taken just nine days to plan.
Ahlam pointed out the busy intersection to Al Masri. There were four stoplights and people crisscrossed the street in all directions. It was one of the busiest intersections in all of West Jerusalem, the Jewish part of the city. She first suggested detonating the bomb in the middle of the street, perhaps as a bus was stopped at the traffic light, so he could kill all the passengers inside in addition to the pedestrians. But he opted instead to enter the pizzeria.
Al Masri bore an innocent expression as he walked into the Sbarro and sat down at a table. It was 2:00 P.M. and the two-story restaurant was packed with families and young children eating their midafternoon snack. When the bomb exploded, 15 civilians were killed instantly and another 130 wounded. Half a dozen strollers lay charred on the street where mothers had left them while they ate lunch. When rescuers ran into the restaurant, the blistered bodies were still smoking, so hot that they could not be touched. The first wave of good Samaritans ran in and wrapped the pizzeria’s checkered tablecloths around the victims’ hair and clothes. Everyone in the restaurant and several passersby had been struck by shards of flying glass when the windows were shattered. Streaks of blood ran down people’s arms, legs, and torsos.
According to The Independent’s Robert Fisk, who arrived on the scene soon after the blast, one woman lay in a heap, a chair leg run through her,3 and another lay outside with her brains gushing out of her head. A small child was so mutilated by the bomb that the eyes had been blasted out of his head. Amid the acrid smoke and broken glass, rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble. Jens Palme, a German photographer from Stern magazine, counted ten dead in two minutes.4
Many people observing Israel-Palestine today assume that its inhabitants have been killing each other since Biblical times. In fact, this is not at all the case. Jews and Arabs got on well for centuries even as Jews were being persecuted in Christian Europe in inquisitions, witch hunts, blood libels, and pogroms. In the golden age of Islam in Spain, both Muslim and Jewish philosophy and science were celebrated. Jews, like Christians and Zoroastrians, were honored as “people of the book” (ahl al Kitab), their prophets recognized and respected by centuries of Islamic rulers.
The Islamic world was largely insulated from the religious anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages and the so-called “scientific” anti-Semitism that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Europe penetrated the Middle East in both positive and negative ways, influencing political thought and technological progress. When violence erupted between the Muslim and Jewish communities it was often the result of European instigation.
The story of the current Palestinian-Israeli conflict starts with the Jewish diaspora in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While religious Zionism (love for the Holy Land) was enshrined in the Jewish faith from the beginning, the desire to create a political entity in the Holy Land developed much later. Various movements in the late nineteenth century began to agitate for a Jewish homeland. One of these, the Lovers of Zion, emerged in 1882 during the Russian pogroms and encouraged emigration to the Holy Land. At the time, Palestine was a neglected backwater of the Ottoman Empire,5 a narrow strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea and characterized by swamps, disease, and deserts. While there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the region since Roman times, it consisted mainly of religious scholars.6 Small Jewish settlements at Hebron, Tzfat, Tiberius, and Jerusalem were notably poor if not destitute.
In 1894 a seminal event in France would have reverberations throughout the Jewish diaspora. A young Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of spying for Germany. He was found guilty, publicly stripped of his rank, and sent to Devil’s Island. But Dreyfus was innocent, and new evidence that implicated the real conspirator, Ferdinand Esterhazy, was covered up by French intelligence. Dreyfus’s religion had made him the ideal scapegoat.
French writer Émile Zola wrote an open letter in the newspaper L’Aurore accusing the government of anti-Semitism and suppressing evidence. Most of the French intelligentsia took one side or the other. The home of liberty, equality, and fraternity witnessed some of the ugliest anti-Semitic propaganda from the literati. In attendance at Dreyfus’s second trial was the Paris correspondent for the Austrian New Free Press, Theodore Herzl. A journalist long assimilated into Austrian culture, Herzl found himself shocked and dismayed by the racist epithets he read and the rallies he witnessed in Paris where many chanted “Death to the Jews!” For Herzl this was an epiphany: if Jews were discriminated against in the home of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, they would never be safe until they had their own homeland.
Herzl quickly wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), which became the basis for political Zionism, in 1896. The next year the first Zionist congress met in Basel, Switzerland, to discuss how and where to create a Jewish state. In the sixth congress in 1903 suggestions mooted for potential sites included Uganda, Kenya, or somewhere in British East Africa. But the majority held fast to the idea that the Jewish state would have to be in the biblical Kingdom of Israel.
Zionist groups and their supporters approached the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II about forming a chartered company to develop the area. Europeans used charter companies to establish economic and political domination over the developing world; South Africa and Rhodesia began as chartered companies, as did the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo. While the sultan refused to sanction large-scale Jewish immigration to the area, he permitted several waves of immigration with the hope that European settlement would provide hard currency and strong trading links, both of which the Ottoman Empire needed badly.
Life was extremely difficult for the first colonists. With little infrastructure and the constant threat of disease, many quickly returned to Europe. The handful who survived were a hearty bunch of settlers whose socialist philosophy impacted their daily lives. They brought in eucalyptus trees to soak up the brackish swamps and create a bulwark against the spread of malaria. They introduced irrigation to make the desert bloom. In the early years, the colonists and the local Arab population cooperated and their children often played together. Moshe Dayan, the man who would grow up to conquer the Sinai and the West Bank in 1967, remembered as a child playing with his Arab neighbors and learning to speak Arabic, unaware that their different ethnicities would one day pit friend against friend and divide the land along confessional and religious lines.7
As the numbers of Europeans increased, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) bought more and more land, often from absentee landlords who resided in faraway urban centers like Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. The tenant farmers (fellahin) had little to no contact with the landowners who had consolidated the small independent farms into large estates. Tension between the settlers and the expelled farmers was made worse because many of the new settlers believed that only Jewish labor should be employed on the farm. The two communities no longer benefited mutually from one another and gradually separated along ethnic and religious lines.
The situation came to a head when the Ottomans sided with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I and the Triple Entente began to plan for the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The foreign ministers of the three European states in the Triple Entente, Mark Sykes of Great Britain, Georges Picot of France, and Sergey Sazonov of Russia, secretly met and drafted the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. In it, they envisioned a division of the Middle East between direct and indirect spheres of influence through a mandate system, which allowed European domination until such time as the colonies had matured and “were able to stand alone.”8 Britain was allocated what is now Jordan, southern Iraq, and Haifa, to provide access to a Mediterranean port. France would control southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. The czar would control Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and Armenia.9 The Holy Land remained a sticking point as both France and Britain wanted the area, so it was agreed that the issue would be settled at some future date; one possibility was internationalizing the region, like the “free city of Danzig” (now Gdansk) in Poland.
Britain found itself in the uneasy position of fighting the war on two fronts, in Europe and in Asia. The dramatic loss to the Ottomans at Gallipoli meant that Britain needed local allies who could distract Turkish forces and make them fight a two-front war. Out of Cairo in 1915, the British high commissioner, Henry McMahon, exchanged a series of letters with Hussein bin ‘Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in which he promised Hussein control of Arab lands in exchange for a revolt against the Turks. The Arab Bureau sent Captain T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia) to contact the Hashemi family and investigate whether the Arab tribes could be convinced to blow up the Hedjaz Railway that ferried Ottoman troops from the western to the eastern Mediterranean.10 As Lawrence consulted Sharif Hussein, the keeper of the keys of the Islamic holy places at Mecca and Medina, the India Office of the Crown pursued closer relations with a young upstart religious leader, Abdul Aziz bin Abdur Rahman al Saud, best known as ibn Saud. The Hashemis and al Sauds were sworn enemies and the British negotiated with each family separately to hedge their bets as to who would prevail in Arabia.
The background to why Britain issued the Balfour Declaration is as complex as the Middle Eastern conflict itself. A mixture of good reasons and faulty assumptions led the British government to preemptively issue a declaration in support of Zionist aspirations in Palestine. This was done quickly, before a similar statement of support could be issued by the Central Powers. Britain hoped to get the United States into the war and the Russians back in. According to historian James Gelvin:
Two of Wilson’s closest advisors, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, were avid Zionists. How better to shore up an uncertain ally than by endorsing Zionist aims? The British adopted similar thinking when it came to the Russians, who were in the midst of their revolution. Several of the most prominent revolutionaries, including Leon Trotsky, were of Jewish descent. Why not see if they could be persuaded to keep Russia in the war by appealing to their latent Jewishness and giving them another reason to continue the fight?11
In London in November 1917, British foreign minister Lord Arthur Balfour issued his famous statement in a letter addressed to Baron Rothschild, a leader of Britain’s Jewish community. The wording of the declaration was deliberately vague, and the French and English versions differed in specificity. The English read:
His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.12
When the Russian monarchy fell to the Bolsheviks in 1917, one of the first things V. I. Lenin did was make public all of the secret agreements negotiated by the czar. Among the documents released was the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Britain’s Arab allies were triply confused. Sharif Hussein had understood that Britain had promised Palestine to him as part of a greater Arab homeland, although the McMahon-Hussein correspondence avoided any mention of Palestine and excluded “portions of Syria” lying to the west of “the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” Meanwhile, the Balfour Declaration promised the Holy Land to the Jews, while the Sykes–Picot Agreement implied that it would fall under British or French colonial control.
In 1920, the Allied Supreme Council offered Great Britain a mandate for Palestine. Prince Faisal—Sharif Hussein’s son—was given control over a new entity called Iraq (three Ottoman sanjaks or provinces that had been unnaturally fused together). His brother Abdullah was installed as king of Trans-Jordan and ibn Saud took over the Arabian Peninsula in 1924. The Middle East state system was thus born with new borders devised by British planners who were now assured that they could ship their oil from the Gulf to the Mediterranean without ever touching French-controlled soil.
In 1920, the Jewish population comprised roughly 8 percent of Palestine; nevertheless, the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the new entity’s mandate, in both the preamble and as article 6 of the text. Several Arab leaders, such as Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, virulently opposed Jewish immigration. In protest, the Palestinian Arab population refused to participate in the mandate administration.13
Knowing that the Arabs would inevitably refuse any cooperation with the British colonial authorities, the Jewish community in Palestine, known as the Yishuv, accepted any concessions the British were willing to offer. As immigration increased, so did Arab opposition, leading to a series of riots from 1922 to 1929. The British responded by issuing several White Papers beginning in 1922, and began to scale down the number of Jews permitted to immigrate. Nevertheless, in the years between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population in the Holy Land more than doubled, from 175,000 or 17 percent of the population to 370,000 or 27 percent.14 As a result of the growing hostility between the communities and Arab opposition to both the Yishuv and the British Colonial Office, the Arab Higher Committee called for boycotts and trade embargoes.
The Palestinian Arab revolt of 1936 had three key demands: prohibit future Jewish immigration; prohibit the transfer of Arab land to Jews; and establish a national government responsible to a representative council.15 The uprising was initially directed against the British and the Jews and included attacks against infrastructure, transportation, and Jewish settlements, neighborhoods, and individuals. The struggle quickly turned into an exercise in self-destruction as Palestinians began killing each other in large numbers, each side accusing the other of collaborating with the British. The Yishuv took a series of defensive actions. The first was to create parallel institutions so that any economic interaction with the Palestinians was unnecessary for Jewish survival. They established the port of Tel Aviv so as not to rely on Jaffa for trade and many Jews offered Britain their assistance in quelling the revolt in hopes of receiving training and weapons for the inevitable clash between the two communities. By the time order was restored in March 1939, more than 5,000 Arabs, 400 Jews, and 200 Brits had been killed.16
The final British White Paper, issued in 1939 and known as the MacDonald White Paper after the British colonial secretary at the time, stopped Jewish immigration precisely at a time when a safe haven was most needed, as the political situation worsened in Nazi Germany. European Jews began to enter Palestine illegally and the Jewish community planned for an eventual bid for independence from Britain. The leader of the Yishuv, David Ben Gurion, decided that the best Zionist strategy was to fight the war in Europe as if there was no problem with the British in Palestine and fight the British in Palestine as if there was no war in Europe.
In the aftermath of World War II and the discovery of what Hitler’s “Final Solution” really entailed, world public opinion shifted in favor of Jewish settlement in Palestine and many refugees held in deportation camps were repatriated to Palestine. Palestinian Arab leaders worried about the massive influx of Jewish refugees and opted once again for a violent response. Riots broke out in Jerusalem, and Palestinian irregular forces cut off food, water, and fuel supplies to the city during the long siege that followed. There was strife throughout the country, with massacres taking place at Gush Etzion (by Palestinians) and in Deir Yassin (by Jews). Arab Palestinians began leaving their towns and villages in droves to escape the fighting.17
By 1947, Britain could no longer tolerate the cost of empire in either lives or treasure. World War II had bankrupted the nation and one by one all of its colonial possessions were becoming independent: Sri Lanka; the “jewel in the crown,” India; and, eventually, Palestine. The British brought the Palestinian issue to the fledgling United Nations. In a surprising move, the U.N. voted in favor of partition.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself to be independent and British troops left immediately. The following day the new state was invaded simultaneously by all of its neighbors: Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Israel emerged victorious from the war and with decidedly more territory than had been proposed by the 1947 Partition Plan. Resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly recognized the state of Israel. In 1948 and 1949, the U.N. arranged a series of ceasefires to end hostilities. Several armistice agreements were signed but never ratified to become formal peace agreements. The Arab states refused to recognize the existence of the state of Israel and considered the 1948 war to be a great catastrophe; while Israelis call it the War of Independence, Arabs know it as al Naqbah (the disaster). Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians went or were forced into exile. The Palestinian areas that remained under Arab control in the West Bank were annexed to the Kingdom of Jordan and the Gaza Strip found itself under Egyptian administrative control.
The origin of the Palestinian refugee problem has long been a subject of intense debate among Israeli scholars and even among Palestinians. Estimates for the number of Palestinian Arab refugees who fled or were forced out of their homes during the fighting vary from 520,000 (Israeli sources) to 726,000 (U.N. sources) to more than 800,000 (Arab sources). Since 1987, when an Israeli freedom-of-information act allowed the war records to be released, many of the accusations Palestinians have leveled over the years about Israelis’ deliberate ethnic cleansing campaigns have turned out to be true. Israeli revisionist scholars like Benny Morris, Illan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim have detailed the creation of the refugee problem by emphasizing the deliberate campaigns to clear Palestinians from strategic areas around Jerusalem and Lydda (Lod).18 Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to reside in temporary housing, a refugee problem that has still not been fully addressed. With every war that Israel and Palestine fought, culminating in Israel’s greatest victory in the Six Day War of 1967, the refugee crisis worsened and the Palestinian population tended increasingly to radicalization and the pull of violence.
Before 1967, competing Arab governments used the Palestinian refugees in their bid for leadership of the Arab World. The Arab countries were sharply divided between those with monarchies and those with revolutionary regimes. The crisis within the Arab world resulted in a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, as well as hostile accusations within the Arab League. In 1964 President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt took the initiative and established the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). It was soon recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, even though its leader, a lawyer named Ahmed Shukairi, was little more than an Egyptian puppet. Several other Arab countries established their own Palestinian groups. Far from the manipulation of Arab leaders, another group, Fatah (Harikat al Tahrir al Watini al Falistini; the acronym, read backwards, meant the Palestinian National Liberation Movement), had been founded in 1954 in the Persian Gulf, where many educated Palestinian engineers and teachers had gone to earn a living. Unlike the other organizations, this group was created by the members of the Palestinian diaspora and remained in the background of the Palestinian movement until after the defeat of 1967. At the Battle of Karameh in March 1968, Fatah fedayeen (guerrilla fighters) were able to repel Israeli forces back across the Jordan River. This small victory in the wake of the agonizing 1967 defeat propelled Fatah to prominence.19 The group’s leader, a young engineer named Yasser Arafat, became the chairman of the PLO in 1969 and launched a new era of armed struggle.
The Palestinian militant groups began to use acts of terrorism to great effect. Arafat created a virtual “state within the state” inside Jordan. As the militias took and did as they pleased in their host country, tension mounted between the Palestinians and the Jordanian monarch, King Hussein bin Talal. Fedayeen raids distressed King Hussein because the Israeli air force responded to every Palestinian incursion with strikes against Jordanian targets. On September 1, 1970, the king narrowly dodged several attempts on his life. Three airplane hijackings on September 6 were the last straw. The king declared martial law and began to eliminate Palestinian officers from the military. The clashes developed into an all-out civil war between Jordanian forces and the Palestinian militias. The neighboring Arab states that had promised to provide air cover to the PLO reneged as the Jordanian air force strafed columns of fleeing Palestinian refugees en route to Lebanon and Syria. The Palestinians were outgunned by the well-equipped Jordanian forces and more than 3,500 of them died in the melee. The events are known as Black September.
The PLO and its leadership left Jordan for Lebanon. Once again Arafat carved out a state within a state, in the southern part of the country. The refugees’ presence exacerbated the fragile sectarian balance within Lebanon and led to the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). After Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the PLO fled once again, this time to Tunisia. For many Palestinians who resided in the Occupied Territories there was a discernible gap between the jet-setting lifestyles of their leaders and the horrors of their everyday existence. According to Dan Fisher of the LA Times: “The youth lost hope that Israel would ever give them their rights. They felt the Arab countries were unable to accomplish anything. They felt that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has failed to achieve a thing.”20
By 1987, the disconnect between the Palestinian people and its formal leadership had reached a breaking point. A whole generation of young people had grown up knowing nothing but the Israeli occupation and felt little or no solidarity with the leadership in Tunis. In December Palestinians launched their first intifada, a “shaking off” of Israeli control. The First Intifada (1987–93) began as an uncontrolled, unplanned explosion of Palestinian frustrations. It started within the Occupied Territories but was soon co-opted by the leadership in Tunis. It also marked a shift in world opinion as Israeli forces increasingly lost sympathy by shooting at children throwing rocks and killing scores of civilians daily. The event that most shifted public opinion was the burial alive of four young Palestinian protesters on February 5, 1988, in the West Bank village of Salim. The Israeli army had ordered them to lie facedown on the ground and then bulldozed dirt over them.21 Once Israel lost the moral high ground in its fight against terrorism, what people would consider an acceptable response changed dramatically.
While the PLO dominated Palestinian resistance in the 1960s and 1970s, a rival group was emerging from the Society of Muslim Brothers. In Israel’s infinite wisdom, it assumed that any challenge to the PLO’s leadership was positive and so it pursued a dual strategy of benign neglect and even encouragement of rivals to the organization. Likud, the Israeli right-wing governing party, had watched Arafat’s transformation from a revolutionary leader to the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people, recognized by the Arab League and the U.N. General Assembly in 1974. In response, the party’s strategy was to promote an Islamic alternative. According to Arab-American journalist Ray Hanania: “In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel’s control over the occupied territories.”22
Between 1967 and 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza tripled from two hundred to six hundred, all with Israeli government sanction. In trying to undercut the PLO, Israel’s leaders, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, created the Village Leagues, local councils composed of Palestinians willing to cooperate with the Israelis. In return, the Israelis put the group’s members on their payroll and allowed them to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.23 The Village Leagues were dominated by Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin and his followers within the Al Mujamma’ Al Islami (Islamic Center). The organization that emerged from them in 1988 became known as Hamas, an acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” It was Hamas that would claim credit for the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001.
JUSTIFYING MASS MURDER
As Ahlam at-Tamimi sat answering questions, she was the embodiment of serenity. She wore no makeup and her thick dark hair was neatly tucked under a beige hijab. She wore an earth-toned silk scarf and a long brown jilbab (a long, baggy overgarment). Ahlam both personified and led the Hamas women in HaSharon prison, but she had come to represent much more: she was a symbol of the Palestinian resistance and the new feminine face of Hamas.
Ahlam had done more than just accompany the suicide bomber Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri to the Sbarro pizzeria. Together they had caused one of the most infamous and deadly terror attacks in Israel’s history. Ahlam provided the intelligence and was pivotal in planning the operation, choosing the target, and accompanying the bomber. She claims that blowing up the pizzeria was her idea. This was not Ahlam’s first mission as a terrorist. On June 30, 2001, a little more than a month before the pizzeria bombing, she had placed an explosive device disguised as a can of beer in a garbage bin at a Jerusalem grocery store on King George Street, then tried to detonate it at a distance using a timer. Security personnel detected the can before it could explode and it caused no damage. Having failed at her first attempt, Ahlam needed to up the ante with the next operation.
Hamas and Ahlam learned some valuable lessons from the failure that June. The first lesson was, use a suicide bomber rather than a timed device. A suicide bomber is a weapon with a brain that can change directions or make adjustments as the situation requires. Because there is no need to plan for the perpetrator’s escape route, the hardest part is reaching the target. The suicide bomber is deadlier than other forms of terrorist attacks because of his or her ability to switch targets midmission or, if the detonator fails, to find an alternative way of activating the explosive. Timed devices, although they allow the attacker to survive another day and conduct more operations in the future, are more likely to fail or be discovered.
Part of the lethality of a suicide attack comes from the actual explosive, whose bursting fireball kills anyone near the bomber on impact. Additional casualties result from projectile materials—such as nails, screws, or ball bearings—added to the weapon, all of which tear into the flesh of bystanders. Hamas had also learned that a bomb is even more deadly when it explodes in an enclosed space. As the explosive burns, it gobbles up oxygen: in a confined area, the explosion causes the space to implode under the pressure of the disappearing oxygen. Knowing this, the bomber tries to find a spot away from the doors and windows, which might allow oxygen to fill the vacuum created when the bomb goes off. This is what made Israeli buses attractive targets to Palestinian terrorist groups: during summer all the windows are closed (when the air-conditioning is on) and in winter they’re still closed (when the heat is on). And this is probably why Al Masri entered the restaurant rather than explode on the street. That hot day in August, most of the Sbarro customers were crammed into the restaurant, which was air-conditioned, rather than sitting outside in the blazing sun. Fortunately, the building that housed the pizzeria had been recently retrofitted to improve its structural integrity. If not for these improvements, the ceiling might have collapsed, doubling the death toll.
Earlier on the day of the bombing, Ahlam rendezvoused with Al Masri and his lethal guitar case at an intercity taxi stand in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The couple shared the ride with six other passengers going to Jerusalem. At the heavily manned Kalandiya checkpoint outside Ramallah, they briefly separated, and Al Masri passed through security on foot without his guitar case. Ahlam rested the case on her lap in the backseat of the vehicle and watched Al Masri cross to the other side while pretending not to know him. Both wore Western-style clothes, mimicking young Israelis rather than conservative Palestinians. She was in tight blue jeans and a sexy halter top. He had shaven off his beard and his chest and body hair, following the Islamic tradition of preparation for a martyrdom operation, but rather than shave his head as well, he had taken the suggestion of their Hamas handler Hassan, and had dyed his hair platinum blond so he would look more like an Israeli. To complete the look of a hipster, Al Masri sported dark sunglasses, blue jeans, and a T-shirt. No one would give the young “Israeli” couple walking through downtown Jerusalem a second glance.
Hassan had given Al Masri 100 Israeli shekels (about $27) for the cab fare, and had instructed them not to talk to each other until they had cleared the checkpoints. When they did speak, it was only in English. Ahlam carried a camera so that she could pass for a tourist. After the pair successfully traversed Kalandiya, they switched taxis at the Aram checkpoint and continued on toward Jerusalem. The taxi dropped them off at the Damascus Gate near the walls of the old city and Ahlam and Al Masri continued on foot toward the city center. They arrived at the intersection of King George and Jaffa streets. Ahlam says, “I did not want to blow up that day,” so she had asked Al Masri to wait fifteen minutes before detonating the bomb. She wanted to be far from the blast area.
With her head start, Ahlam raced back to the Palestine TV studio where she was a news presenter for the Palestine Authority. She changed into a cream-colored cotton turtleneck and chocolate brown safari jacket for the broadcast. With her long dark hair and tawny lipstick matching her outfit, she was extremely telegenic, the picture of a modern Palestinian woman. Her on-air persona looked nothing like the woman she became later in HaSharon prison. She composed herself and reported the event in which she had played such an intrinsic part. She recalls that it was hard to keep a straight face. “A suicide action took place on Jaffa Street at the Sbarro restaurant,” she told viewers. “The result: fifteen dead.”24
Within hours, several Palestinian groups had claimed responsibility for the attack. The Islamic Jihad, based in Damascus, faxed several news agencies, including Agence France Presse in Beirut, and claimed that the bomber was Hussein Omar Abu Naaseh. Hours later they corrected their mistake, this time claiming that the bomber was Hussein Omar Abu Amsha. Finally, after several hours of confusion and competing claims of responsibility, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the Islamic Jihad’s secretary general, told a Gulf television station that there had been a mistake: Hussein Abu Amsha was indeed on a suicide mission, but he was not the Sbarro bomber. Shallah explained: “Our fighter Hussein Abu Amsha was en route to carry out a martyrdom operation and when the explosion [in Jerusalem] happened our brothers thought it was him … Abu Amsha is now a potential martyr.”25 Shallah had blown Amsha’s cover, alerting the Israelis to his name, destination, and intent, and so rendering him virtually useless.
Hamas also claimed responsibility for the attack, identifying the bomber correctly as twenty-two-year-old Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri, from Aqaba in the Jenin district of the West Bank. Following the standard operating procedure after a suicide strike, Hamas representatives distributed a pre-attack photo of a bearded Al Masri holding an M16 assault rifle and a copy of an illuminated Qur’an26 in his left hand with explosives strapped around his waist. His green Hamas headband matched the flag behind him and proclaimed in Arabic, La ilaha il Allah (“There is no God but God”).
Reactions within the Al Masri family varied from joy to sorrow. Al Masri’s older brother, Iyad, expressed unadulterated pride, calling the operation unique because of its quality and success. Izzedine had always spoken of martyrdom and now Palestinians everywhere would hold their heads up high.27 Their father, Suheil, said that he was filled with both pride and sadness. “When I heard about the operation in Jerusalem, I did not doubt that my son did this,” he said. “I will weep for him all of my life.” And then he added, “I hope that many others follow him.”28 Yet to Barbara Victor, a journalist who interviewed him a few years after the attack, Suheil said that the operation had made him sick to his stomach and “had destroyed him and his family.”29 Another brother, Salahaddin, considered Al Masri a hero, but their mother, Umm Iyad, disagreed. Izzedine was never active politically, unlike the other little boys growing up during the First Intifada. He never threw stones at the Israelis and had not joined any of the militant organizations operating in Jenin. Umm Iyad had never seen anybody from Hamas in the house, and besides, the Al Masri family would not have wanted them there! While many groups had tried to claim Al Masri as their own, Umm Iyad argued that he did not belong to any of them. She even said he would have to have been mentally unbalanced to commit such an atrocity.30
Al Masri’s mother probably did not know of his activities. Would-be suicide bombers rarely inform their parents of their plans. The terrorist groups deliberately keep the family in the dark for fear that they might try to change the bomber’s mind. Procedure dictates that the group isolate the bombers in a safe house for several days before the attack, during which time a minder will sit with them, pray with them, and help them through the various purification rituals. The isolation is intended to focus the bomber’s thoughts and instill the clarity required to commit a suicide operation. Despite warnings to keep his mission secret, a few days before the attack, Al Masri asked his very pregnant sister, Hala, whether she would name her unborn child after him if he died a martyr. But since he had no previous record of extremism or political activism, his sister assumed he was kidding.31
While the organizers of terrorist operations deliberately keep children away from their parents, they will not go against a family’s wishes. Terrorist leaders immediately cancel an attack if a bomber’s family learns about the operation. They assume that the family will try to prevent the operation, and might even contact the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) or even the Israeli authorities. “Azam [Fatah] thought that the mothers were the pivot of family opposition, and thought that a mother who supported her son’s suicide was insane.”32
Some parents will feign pride at the martyrdom of their children for the cameras and the community but mourn quietly when the cameras and reporters leave. Mothers are expected to ululate with joy rather than shed tears when their children become martyrs. The women in HaSharon prison say that being the parent of a martyr is life’s biggest reward. It is a huge honor for the family. Al Manar television regularly parades women before the cameras to endorse their children’s martyrdom. When Umm Nidal’s son told her that he wanted to be a martyr for the Islamic Jihad she stated on camera, “May Allah give you the strength and courage. I hope you will become a martyr for Allah. May Allah be thanked, my boy has died for eternal life.”33 Otherwise known as Mariam Farhat, Umm Nidal is also featured in her son’s last will and testament video. The video has had a huge impact on other would-be bombers. In Beer Sheba jail, one failed female bomber recalls: “I saw with my own eyes a mother who said good-bye to her son a suicide bomber, and gave him the weapon to perform his action. I dream of being like her. When I have a child I will strap the bomb on him myself.”34
Farhat capitalized on her son’s fame as a suicide bomber. She ran for election on the Hamas ticket in 2006 and won, and is infamous in Gaza for having sent three of her six sons on suicide missions. But Farhat is likely an exception to the rule. Most parents are not happy when they lose a child, and mourn the loss in private. It is considered unnatural when a parent buries a child and reverses the normal order of life. But Palestinian society has placed a high value on martyrdom, and the relatives of martyrs reap great rewards, especially respect in the community.
In contrast to the ambivalent and contradictory reactions in the Al Masri home, the attack was heralded in the Arab press with great fanfare. Editorials in the Arab world promote such activity: “We should bless every Palestinian man or woman who goes calmly to carry out a martyrdom operation, in order to receive a reward in the Hereafter, sacrificing her life for her religion and her homeland and knowing that she will never return from this operation.”35
In Palestinian areas, suicide bombers are called martyrs—shahids—and considered heroes. Hundreds of people attend their funerals and their families receive congratulations rather than condolences. In the village of Aqaba, Palestinian children point to Izzedine Al Masri’s house, saying, “Shahid, shahid, this way!” The shahids’ names are memorialized on street signs, in public parks, and even in youth camps. The glossy pre-mission photos of the bombers are reproduced as twelve-by-sixteen-inch posters that Palestinian children put up on their bedroom walls. According to some sources, the amount of space a bomber gets on a poster depends on how many Israelis he or she has killed. Al Masri did not have to share the space: his was one of the deadliest attacks in Israel’s history, at the time second only to the Islamic Jihad’s attack at the Dolphinarium disco on the Tel Aviv waterfront two months earlier, in which 21 Russian-Israeli teenagers had died and 120 had been injured. Just weeks after the pizzeria bombing, An-Najah University in Nablus mounted an exhibition to commemorate the second anniversary of the Al ‘Aqsa Intifada that included a diorama of the attack, replete with fake bodies, blood, and gore.
Israel’s secret service agency, the Shabak, arrested Ahlam on September 14, 2001, and charged her with extending logistical support to the Hamas cell responsible for the Sbarro bombing, along with Muhammed Wail Daghlas, another Hamas activist. Using a smuggled cell phone, Daghlas told the television program Nightline that militant groups “have to send a message that Israeli children are not safe if they continue killing [Palestinian] children.”36
At Birzeit University, where Ahlam had been a communications and journalism major, students understood the attack as revenge for the humiliating checkpoints, harsh living conditions, and killing of Palestinian civilians. Sara Helm of the Sunday Times interviewed some of Ahlam’s fellow students at Birzeit after the attack. They suggested to her that, because Ahlam was reporting on all the suffering at the TV station every day, she felt the pain of the occupation more deeply than others. Mia, the gentlest of girls, bright-eyed in denim dungarees and pink T-shirt, said that “you had to understand how Palestinians were made to feel like animals in order to understand their support for a suicide operation. The Israeli military cages them up.” Palestinians feel that Israel has stolen their land. “They have made me feel that when I die, I too want to hurt the person who has hurt me and my family.” And the Jewish children? “Yes, the children too,” said Mia. “Because the children of the Jews will be the soldiers of the future. They are the ones who will kill us.”37
An Egyptian newspaper, Al Masa’a, published an editorial that endorsed the killing of Israeli civilians, including children, during martyrdom operations. The editor explained that he would not question the legitimacy of such operations against Israel because the suicide attacks were a powerful weapon used by the Palestinians against an enemy with no morality or religion, an enemy who has deadly weapons prohibited by international law and is not deterred from using them against the defenseless Palestinian people. “Even if during [a martyrdom operation] civilians or children are killed—the blame does not fall upon the Palestinians, but upon those who forced them to turn to this modus operandi.”38
Many people connect the phenomenon of suicide bombing with the ideas of French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his study of altruistic suicide, in which the person embedded within society is convinced that his or her death is the only possible contribution he or she can make. But in most cases of suicide terrorism, altruism does not readily apply. According to Hamas theologian Dr. Azzam Tamimi (no relation to Ahlam), it is the belief in paradise rather than altruism that plays a key role in martyrdom operations. Nor does the bomber feel guilt for his or her action. By giving his or her own life as part of the sacrifice, the bomber’s martyrdom wipes out the moral wrong of killing civilians. This hardly compares to self-immolating Buddhist monks, hunger strikers, or prisoners of conscience, whose own suffering is intended to make a political statement without harming others. Suicide terror is murder in which the perpetrator justifies his or her action by a theological loophole so that he or she can enter paradise.
According to this loose interpretation of Islamic law, the act of self-sacrifice provides the rationale for the killing of innocents, which otherwise is strictly prohibited by the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH [peace be upon him]). Verse 5:32 of the Qur’an echoes Genesis chapter 4: “If any one slew a person—unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people: and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” This justification is widely accepted in Palestine even if it violates both the spirit and letter of orthodox Islamic law.
Umm Anas (her nom de guerre), an eighteen-year-old female Islamic Jihad operative in Gaza interviewed by the BBC, echoes the justifications for killing civilians, including children. For her, all Jews, including the children, have violated Palestinian land as a result of the Occupation. While she acknowledges that children are technically (and according to the Qur’an) civilians, they will one day grow up to be soldiers. For Umm Anas, martyrdom permits the Palestinians to level the playing field. Ahlam concurs. The Israeli side is twice as powerful as the Palestinian side, she says. There is no balance of power between the two, so Palestinians need to defend their lands using any means at their disposal. She considers herself to be a daughter of the Palestinian people defending Palestinian lands. She will use any means necessary.39 This is why terrorist leaders such as the Islamic Jihad’s Abdullah ash-Shami routinely claim that suicide bombing is the only Palestinian option: “We have no bombs, tanks, missiles, planes, or helicopters.”40 Martyrs or human bombs allow the Palestinians to capitalize on their comparative advantage in numbers: in the absence of high-tech weapons or nuclear arms, the Palestinians have many people willing to die for the cause. Umm Anas sums up the trade-off: “Jews are scared when we just throw stones. Imagine what happens when body parts fly at them.”41
Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the current secretary-general and leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, was the first terrorist leader to deploy suicide bombers effectively to leverage an overwhelming military force. The 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks was the deadliest terrorist attack against Americans before September 11, 2001, and helped compel the Americans to leave Lebanon. Asked to explain what goes through the martyr’s mind prior to an operation, and why someone like Umm Anas would consider dying to be a gift from God, Nasrallah employs a metaphor to describe the euphoria felt by the would-be shahid. Martyrdom provides a huge relief, he explains: “Imagine you are in a sauna and it is very hot, but you know that in the next room there is air-conditioning, an armchair, classical music, and a cocktail. So you pass easily into the next room. That is how I would explain martyrdom to a Westerner.”42
For Ahlam, martyrdom is a beautiful thing—not for her, for her accomplice. “If there was a poor man and you gave him a lot of money, that would make him very happy, and you would be happy for giving him the life that he wanted so much. I gave this bomber the life he wanted so much. I was amazed by his enthusiasm for this operation and his eagerness to pass into the next world.”43
Most individuals who plan operations are unlikely ever to volunteer for martyrdom themselves. According to interviews conducted by Tel Aviv University psychologist Ariel Merari, several organizers said that they were reluctant to kill themselves in a martyrdom attack. They explained to him how difficult it would be for them to carry out the operations that they had planned. “If one is destined to organize [suicide attacks] others are destined to perform martyrdom operations. A recurrent theme in the explanations was that their role as organizers was more important than that of the bomber.”44 Yasser, a Hamas organizer, said that he wouldn’t be willing to die himself. Presumably, knowing that you are sending others to make the utmost sacrifice, a sacrifice you would be reluctant to make yourself, must generate psychological distress, unless you are utterly cynical and manipulative.45
If the Palestinians have worked out their own elaborate justifications for killing civilians, so have the Israelis—the logic of oppression and terror again playing itself out. According to Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli chief of staff, Israel is at war with an enemy that has no qualms about killing children. That is why Israelis “shoot first and ask questions later.” For Ya’alon, Palestinians need to pay the price for their war.46 Israeli Air Force general Dan Halutz, another former chief of staff, was a key figure behind then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policy of targeted killings of suspected terrorists. Halutz gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he declared that targeted killing was the most important method Israel had at its disposal in its fight against terrorism.47 From the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000 through June 30, 2008, there were more than 521 deaths from Israeli targeted assassinations, including 233 bystanders, 20 women, and 71 children. Entire families were wiped out with the dropping of a bomb, including women, children, the sick, and the elderly.
A July 2002 incident in Gaza showed how lethal targeted assassinations can be. Halutz ordered an Israeli F-16 to drop a 1,000-kilogram (approximately one-ton) bomb on an apartment block in Gaza City where Salah Shehadeh, the leader of the Izzedine Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing responsible for suicide operations, lived with his wife and children. Ya’alon knew Shehadeh’s family was there. The bomb killed Shehadeh, his wife and young daughter, and sixteen others, of whom fifteen were civilians and nine were children under the age of eleven, including a two-month old baby.48 Two neighboring homes were also destroyed and thirty-two others damaged.
Asked later by an interviewer from Haaretz newspaper whether he felt any remorse about the incident, which was condemned around the world, Halutz answered: “If you insist on wanting to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you. I feel a slight bump to the plane when the bomb releases. A second later it passes. That is what I feel.”49 Israelis celebrated Halutz as a hero, while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon roundly praised the killing of Shehadeh as an unqualified and complete success. Sharon then promoted Halutz to chief of staff.
For Israelis, the problem is that they are not fighting another state with an army, but terrorists who embed themselves among civilians. The terrorists place their children in harm’s way by using civilians as human shields. They attack Israel anticipating that it will respond violently. The Israeli military response kills even more civilians, especially children. The children’s deaths increase the Palestinian public’s outrage against Israel and motivate people to join terrorist organizations and volunteer to be suicide bombers. The deliberate provocation not only ramps up support for the terrorist groups but also makes their propaganda against the enemy resonate in the hearts and minds of every Palestinian.
The Israelis consider the deaths of Palestinian children as “collateral damage.” They have done little to limit the number of unintended victims of their counter-terror policies. Israel is unwilling to take the steps to ensure that children are not killed by accident, especially if this increases the danger posed to its soldiers on the ground. Officially, the country has implemented rules of engagement regarding the use of targeted assassination. The military is supposed to adhere to six iron-clad conditions: “that arrest is otherwise impossible; that targets are strictly combatants; that senior cabinet members approve each attack; that civilian casualties are minimized; that operations are limited to areas not under Israeli control; and that targets are identified as a future threat. Unlike prison sentences, targeted killing cannot be meted out as punishment for past behavior. In 2002, a military panel established that targeting cannot be for revenge, but only for deterrence.”50 The fact that such rules of engagement exist means nothing to the Palestinian civilians bearing the brunt of bombing campaigns. The Palestinian terrorist organizations’ response appears to be to deliberately target Israeli women and children. This in turn outrages Israelis further and ramps up the next counter-terror measure, creating a bloody call-and-response cycle on both sides.
What both sides fail to grasp is how the cycles of violence persist and worsen over time. A demonstrable culture of martyrdom and a longing for death have evolved within Palestinian society. According to Eyad Serraj, a psychiatrist who treats Palestinians suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, at least 25 percent of young people in Gaza aspire to a martyr’s death. Some refuse to go to school because they fear not seeing their parents again because of the possibility that they will be arrested or killed, or will not find their house when they come home, because the Israelis have destroyed it. “In the First Intifada, the danger was limited to the places where soldiers and stone-throwers clashed. Now death comes from the skies and anyone anywhere can be hit. This has created a state of chronic panic.”51
The pattern of violence makes the conflict multigenerational. Children who are brought up in this environment seek death and their parents will not dissuade them from following their dream. Palestinians live in the fear that they can die at any moment from aerial bombardment or a stray bullet. Becoming a bomber might in some ways be empowering, because at least a bomber chooses the time and place of his or her death. When failed female bomber Shefa’a Al Qudsi was asked whether she would discourage her daughter, Diana, from following in her footsteps and becoming a martyr, she said that she would teach Diana that education is the most important thing in life. But since children can be shot coming home from school, the best and the brightest Palestinian children become martyrs, whether or not they want to be. So if Diana wanted to become a “living martyr,” Shefa’a would not stop her.52
Suicide attacks have simultaneously radicalized Israeli viewpoints and hardened their political positions. Israel’s heavy-handed military tactics, checkpoint abuses, targeted killings, and collective punishment are all justified in the name of security. Human rights abuses and the systematic humiliation of Palestinians are either ignored or tolerated by a population consumed by fear. In the end, it is the civilians on both sides of the conflict who pay the price. Within a month of Shehadeh’s targeted assassination, the Izzedine Al Qassam Brigades he once headed perpetrated several more attacks against Israelis, in Safad at Meiroun’s crossroads and near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. This began yet another new cycle of violence with escalation on both sides.
THE WOMEN OF HASHARON PRISON
Ahlam at-Tamimi remains in HaSharon prison, a sprawling, multistory concrete structure surrounded by tall palm trees, razor wire, guard dogs, and towers outside of Tel Aviv in the Plain of Sharon. The prison houses 106 other female security prisoners, 58 of them linked to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other Islamist-inspired groups, and 48 from the secular movement Fatah. The women range in age from seventeen to thirty. Like Ahlam, many are serving life sentences with no chance of parole. According to Hamas’s leadership, the Israelis are holding around 12,000 prisoners of both sexes, including 400 children (people under the age of eighteen). Other reports claim 360 children, including 200 awaiting trial and another 145 serving various prison terms.53
The women at HaSharon are kept in a virtual labyrinth, behind seven iron doors and gates at the ends of long corridors to which few people are allowed access. To reach the cells, one must climb and descend one flight of stairs after another, up, down, and around, like something out of an M.C. Escher drawing. Ahlam claims that the women of HaSharon have made the prison a beautiful place, an ersatz Garden of Eden. They have painted murals of roses and flowers and babies on the white walls and brought vibrant color to the gray and blue concrete jail.
Ahlam is located in Ward 11 with other Hamasawis (Hamas supporters) and several women from the Islamic Jihad. In some interviews, Ahlam refers to herself in the third person when she describes how “Ahlam brought jihad to the people” or says, “Since Ahlam entered prison, the Palestinians have become acquainted with the hidden aspect of Ahlam’s personality. The idea of jihad and its agenda.”54 She can be extremely curt. When former New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to HaSharon prison in 2007 to talk with failed bombers, Ahlam brushed her aside: “We don’t like America because of the war in Iraq and your support for the Zionists and Jews,” she declared, and abruptly turned away.55 She also monitors what all the other women say and feeds them pre-approved responses during interviews: “Say how many children you have, how they live, how they saw blood and murder,” she tells Kahira Sa’adi, another inmate, during an interview, as she listens to ensure that Hamas propaganda is properly disseminated.
While in prison, Ahlam married her cousin Nizar, who is incarcerated at another secure facility for acts of terrorism. Ahlam herself has become a celebrity. She has starred in documentaries, been the subject of poems, and been heralded in the Palestinian press and international media. Mutawakil Taha, head of the Palestinian Writer’s Union and a former deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority, wrote a book honoring her and her husband, Nizar, Ahlam ibn al Nabi, in which he describes the couple as heroes. Two years after publication of the book, on April 7, 2008, al Quds newspaper quoted Taha saying how proud he was of the two prisoners, Nizar and Ahlam at-Tamimi. In the al Quds interview, Taha explained: “I feel that the prisoners are martyrs in potential, and that we should bond with them without question or accounting. We should bond to the prisoners unconditionally as we bond to the martyrs and the homeland.”56
Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz’s special correspondent for Arab affairs, claims that the lives of female suicide terrorists are no less tragic than those of male suicide bombers, yet the media accords these women more sympathy and treats them with kid gloves.57 In fact, when women perpetrate acts of terrorism, they draw eight times the media attention given to men. Many of the terrorist organizations are aware of this and exploit women accordingly. Some of the Palestinian groups deliberately select more attractive and telegenic operatives precisely for this reason. Looking at a police lineup of female Palestinian suicide bombers (both successful and preempted) you would be struck by how attractive many of them are. The groups are seeking that reaction, followed by the obvious question, What could make such a pretty girl do that? There must be something seriously wrong.
Between 2002 and 2009, ninety-six Palestinian women attempted suicide attacks, though just eight were successful. Most of the women were preempted or caught before their attack could be completed, and a handful changed their minds at the last moment. Most of the attempts were conducted during the height of the Second Intifada, before the Israelis erected the security fence (known by some as the Apartheid Wall) to separate themselves from the Palestinians. According to Israeli counter-terrorism expert Anat Berko, Palestinian women are increasingly involved in all levels of terrorist activity, everything from scouting targets and smuggling guns and explosives to being suicide bombers. Berko claims that now that there is a sufficient number of successful and unsuccessful operatives, a profile of Palestinian female suicide bombers seems to be emerging. “The male suicide bombers tend to be introverts, the women less so. The women are older and better educated than their male counterparts. Whereas the men are usually in their late teens and early twenties with scant education, studies carried out by Shin Bet [the Israeli security agency] on sixty-seven women recruited to become suicide bombers from 2002 to 2005 found that 33 percent were college graduates and an additional 39 percent had finished high school.”58
The terrorist organizations doubly exploit the women. They deliberately use women to avoid detection and catch the enemy off guard, knowing that the bombers will later become an issue for the Israelis with international human rights organizations. Several of the women, like Noor Al Hashlamoon, have given birth in the prison. The Israelis permit children up to two years old to stay with their mothers while incarcerated, and there are a half dozen babies and toddlers at HaSharon. Yusuf az-Zaqq, at one year and three months, is their youngest prisoner. The long-term imprisonment of children violates international law and puts Israel in an uncomfortable position when Hamas tries to negotiate for their release (for example, during prisoner exchanges). For critics, the women are mere pawns. The terrorist organizations consider the women strong and clever enough to coordinate and execute suicide attacks, but once convicted “they morph into delicate, fragile creatures deserving early release by dint of their femininity.”59
In an interview with Al Jazeera television, the Shi’a cleric and spiritual head of Hezbollah, Grand Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on July 4, 2010, explained: “It is true that Islam has not asked women to carry out jihad, but it permits them to take part if the necessities of defensive war dictate that women should carry out any regular military operations, or suicide operations … We believe that the women who carry out suicide bombings are martyrs who are creating a new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women [emphasis added].”60
The women in HaSharon prison tend to provide a laundry list of reasons for their involvement in terrorist activities. The death of family members is most often cited as the straw that broke the camel’s back. To understand their motivations, it is important to differentiate between the structural conditions that affect the population as a whole (like the injustices of the Occupation) and the reasons specific to the individual bomber. One study suggests nationalism is the essential motivation. “There is no religious reason that in itself drives a man to carry out a suicide operation. Religion reinforces and helps the nationalist motivation. It is a political drive with religious backing.”61 This observation is congruent with the would-be martyrs’ descriptions of their motivations for undertaking suicide missions.
WAFA AL BIS
In discussions with the journalist Judith Miller, one bomber confessed that two of her cousins had been killed and her brother jailed. The army invaded her city and demolished houses there. A war raged inside her: Shouldn’t she do something? “The Israelis were killing us like rats and nobody was doing anything, not the Arabs, nobody. And I thought: No one will help us. I must make these dogs know how we feel. Even bullets that miss make noise.”62
Miller discovered how difficult it is to assess the underlying motivations of female suicide bombers when she spoke with Wafa Al Bis, another inmate. Born into wretched poverty in Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, one of twelve children, Al Bis had much of her body and fingertips burned in a freak cooking accident at home the year before her failed mission. She did not like the feel of the suicide pack or the outfit she was expected to wear. She told her handlers that the pants were too tight and the explosive pack too heavy. She felt uncomfortable. Her handlers assured her that they could get her other clothes. Wafa hedged and wondered to herself why she was doing this. Why was she at the checkpoint? She claimed that she was there because she had been coaxed—no, coerced—into becoming a martyr by Abul Khair, an older man from the Abu Riesh Brigade63 (an offshoot of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade). She wished that she had never met him. During her interview, her eyes welled up with tears and she explained that when she looked into the mirror she did not recognize the reflection that stared back at her.64 Al Bis claimed that she had no choice in the matter and had been coerced, but then she was forced to recant her story when the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade aired her pre-attack last-will-and-testament video.
The issue of coercion is often neglected in discussions about terrorism. There is an assumption that most suicide bombers want to perpetrate the act. This is complicated by journalistic accounts after the fact, when the operative has become a hero in the community. Many interviews with the families and friends of the bombers can be misleading because there is a great deal of community pressure to support what their son or daughter or friend has just done. Because there is such a disconnect between the families’ public and private faces, the grieving process is largely misunderstood and statements such as “I wish I had more than one daughter to give to the cause” create the impression that life is cheap for Palestinians and that the parents do not care whether their children become martyrs. This pressure explains the seemingly contradictory statements given to reporters by Al Masri’s family as well as Al Bis’s changing story.
The twenty-one-year-old Al Bis had used a special medical entry visa at the heavily fortified Erez Crossing (the main transit point between Israel and Gaza) on her way to blow up Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, where she had been treated for her second- and third-degree burns. It is difficult to fathom why she would attack the very doctors and nurses who had cared for her for six months. At one point, she told foreign journalists that the explosives had been planted on her without her knowledge and that she never really wanted to become a suicide bomber. Her father, Samir, agreed that his daughter had to have been coerced to carry out the mission. Although he remained in a state of shock after her arrest on June 6, 2005, he refused to believe that his daughter would blow herself up willingly. Al Bis’s cousin, Wael, acts as the family spokesperson. He claims that Samir still believes that Al Bis was exploited by someone because of her injuries and fragile mental state. Samir says that it is not fair “that the whole Palestinian population should be punished for what she has tried to do. The Palestinians don’t have to pay for her actions.”65
All of these protestations of innocence, however, contradict what Al Bis herself said after she was arrested. In a press conference organized by the Israeli authorities on June 21, Al Bis, looking casual in flowery red flip-flops, a gray tracksuit, and a white cotton shirt, announced to the world that she did not regret what she had done and stressed that her decision to become a martyr had had nothing to do with her burns. She screamed at the reporters:
My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death. I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated … I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews … yes, even babies! You, too, kill our babies. Do you remember the Doura child?66
However, at the same press conference Al Bis begged for mercy because she did not actually kill anyone. The claim she sometimes makes, that she was forced to become a suicide bomber, is contradicted by videotapes from Israeli security cameras, which show her trying to penetrate two sets of metal barriers at the Erez checkpoint. As she waddled toward the metal turnstiles, the Israeli guards commanded her to stop. There was something wrong with the way she carried herself and her bulky clothing did not suit the hot June afternoon. Through the loudspeaker, the guards demanded that Al Bis take off her outer garments. While the surveillance cameras recorded her every move, she began to slowly disrobe, removing her black headscarf, gown, black button-down shirt, and various other pieces of clothing until she was left with only beige chinos and a white T-shirt. Al Bis visibly flinched as she tried to detonate the twenty-pound explosive device hidden inside her pants. When there was no explosion, she repeatedly pushed the plunger in her pocket. She started to pace and scream in frustration like a caged animal and pulled out the detonator to check the wiring. The surveillance cameras record her screams and her hands clawing at her face and neck. The images capture her horror at the realization that the mission has failed.
It was extremely difficult for Al Bis’s mother to watch the surveillance tapes of her daughter’s failed operation. However, she agrees with the statements Al Bis made after her arrest, in which she claimed that it had been her dream since she was a little girl to be a martyr.67
Leftist Israeli journalist Amira Hass was highly critical of what she saw as the financial and material incentives for dispatchers to exploit weak and vulnerable women such as Wafa Al Bis. Many of the Palestinian old guard in Israeli jails were also horrified by the terrorist organizations’ indecent exploitation of vulnerable people, including women, who are considered defective by societal norms. Because of her physical deformity, Al Bis was not going to fetch a good bride price and had no value on the marriage market. It was thus easy to incite her to join the terrorists. She might also have been persuaded that by becoming a martyr she could enter paradise a new woman, without all her scars and burns. The bastardized message they gave her was that she would be miraculously transformed in heaven into a beautiful girl. Her burns would be healed and she would be more attractive in death than she had ever been in life. The recruiters often tell women that in paradise they will be queens. No matter how old or grotesque they may be in this world, they will become the fairest of the seventy-two virgins that await each jihad warrior in the next.68 For Al Bis, this might have seemed like her best chance of feeling normal again.
In most cases, it is difficult to ascertain whether there has been real coercion or whether such pleas are part of a bid for merciful treatment. There is a huge incentive for failed bombers to lie and declare that they were coerced, hoping that the justice system will moderate their sentences accordingly. Israel’s judicial policy does not factor in regret, even for bombers who change their minds at the last minute and refuse to carry out their mission. As a matter of policy, most bombers get at least one life sentence, even if they were preempted and no one died. If there is “blood on their hands,” a term that the Israelis use for bombers or those who aided them in a successful bombing in which Israelis have died, they will often get multiple life sentences with years added on for good measure.
AHLAM
If misconceptions about Palestinian female bombers have proliferated, this is in part due to Barbara Victor’s depictions of them in her 2003 book Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers. According to Victor, Ahlam at-Tamimi (whom she refers to as Zina in the book) had a history of problems at home and at school. Victor writes: “Beginning when she was an adolescent Zina rebelled. She refused to wear the hijab and the jilbab (traditional modest Islamic clothing) and told her family of her intentions to become an international journalist and live far from home.”69 Victor writes that the relationship with her family was irreparably damaged when she refused to marry the man whom her family had chosen for her.70 Zina (Ahlam) was pressured by her family to become a suicide bomber to redeem the family’s honor after becoming pregnant out of wedlock by an Egyptian boyfriend she met at school in Jordan. They beat her to discover the identity of the father, and she had a baby in April 2001 in Jordan.
But this was not the case. Ahlam was politically mobilized to engage in violence against the Israeli occupation, not because she had had a child out of wedlock but because she had been radicalized and politicized by her activism in school. She certainly did not have a child four months before the attack (and two months prior to placing the explosive beer can in the market). It is clear from her newsreel that this was not a woman who had just given birth. Besides the fact that it is highly unlikely that a devout Muslim woman would admit such personal things to a foreign journalist, Victor’s version implies that Ahlam was in two places (Jordan and Palestine) at the same time. Ahlam left Jordan for Ramallah back in 1998, three years before the alleged pregnancy, although Victor claims she arrived in Ramallah only one month before placing the explosive beer can at the co-op supermarket.71 But Ahlam was a media personality on TV at that time, so there is a public record showing that she was actually in Palestine.
Like some researchers, Victor argues that all the Palestinian women involved in terrorism are attempting to right a previous wrong. The families of the first four Palestinian female bombers Victor interviewed claimed that their daughters had some personal secret or shame that becoming a martyr would fix. For Victor, women terrorists all require an act to clean the slate and allow them to reinvent themselves from a dishonorable existence to one that will be lauded by their community. While this set of conditions might apply to some bombers, not every female terrorist was mobilized because of a shameful event in her past, just as not every woman with a shameful event in her past is mobilized to become a terrorist.
In a 2006 interview with Israeli journalist Raanan Ben Zur, Ahlam explained that she would never recognize Israel’s existence. She would only consider discussion after Israel recognized that Palestine was Islamic land. She offers no personal reasons for her political engagement. After two years of trials, she was sentenced in October 2003 to 16 life sentences with an additional 15 years, for a total of 320 years. In HaSharon prison, where she sat for the interview, Ahlam displayed little emotion or regret. Does she feel remorse? Ahlam says, no, of course not. She does not regret her actions and no Palestinian prisoner would because they are defending themselves, so they have no regrets. “And why should we?” she asks. “Should we regret defending ourselves? Should we feel regret that Israel murdered one of ours and we murdered one of theirs?”72 Ahlam does not regret the deaths of all the children and feels that Israelis “should have returned to Poland, Russia, or the United States, to the countries their parents came from.”73
Talking to Ahlam is chilling. Her case provides a classic example of Hamas’s moral bankruptcy. When asked whether she was aware of the presence of women and children at the pizzeria, Ahlam says yes, she knew. Did she know how many children were killed? She says, “I think there were … three, maybe. I think three children were killed in this action.” She is told simply, eight. “Eight,” she repeats thoughtfully, “Eight.” A smile spreads across her lovely face; she shrugs and her eyes gleam. But this scene is to be repeated over and over again as Ahlam, in every interview, pretends to not actually know the number of people she helped kill. It’s an act, a show for the media. Terrorism would be nothing without the media attention and Ahlam relishes her fame.
Ahlam claims to have planned and orchestrated the Sbarro pizzeria attack. If she is correct, she is the exception to the rule. Most women involved in terrorist organizations are not leaders. Even when they are given a high profile in an organization’s publicity, the women rarely play more than a marginal role, either numerically or in organizational terms. Women are sacrificial lambs in places like Turkey, where women comprised 40 percent of all suicide bombers in the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), Sri Lanka, where women exceeded 25 percent of bombers in the LTTE, Chechnya, where they constitute 43 percent. They do not plan the operations they take part in. Often they have little say as to their targets, the timing, or the way in which the operations are conducted. Most are not even given thorough training. The mission itself requires little to no expertise or investment of either time or money. As one observer has noted: “Indeed, for many of the women, the contribution of a suicide mission to their national or religious struggle is precisely that: employment in the male-dominated domain of suicide bombing.”74
Palestinian organizations present a different picture. Palestinian women are acknowledged as the equal of men in the steadfastness of their opposition to the Occupation. This form of resistance, called Sumud, is a way for Palestinians to convey to their enemies that their opposition is not ephemeral. Sumud means outlasting the Israelis and eventually prevailing. The importance of women has become especially notable since Al ‘Aqsa Intifada. The increasing number of female bombers shows how proactive Palestinian women really are. Ahlam at-Tamimi is just one of a number of women who have become symbols of the new Palestinian woman and role models for other women and girls.
Women like suicide bomber Shefa’a Al Qudsi believe Palestinian women can do something more significant in the struggle. “Till Wafa, women had just helped jihad by making food. I thought: We can do more … My body would be a bridge to a better future that my daughter would walk over. Yes, I would die, but I would help give her a better life, a future without occupation. I was placing her fate in Allah’s hands.”75
Palestinian political prisoners are occasionally made to mix with HaSharon prison’s general population. When they do, Israeli criminals hurl insults at the political prisoners and beat them if they can. The guards do nothing to intervene. The women suffer from psychological problems, but are denied access to a psychiatrist. In addition, most women prisoners have skin diseases and other conditions because of the presence of vermin in the prison and neglect by the authorities. Ahlam at-Tamimi suffers from kidney stones and pain in her joints but Israeli authorities and the prison guards refuse to allow her medical treatment.76 She resorted to a hunger strike in order to return to HaSharon after she was transferred to the Moscobiya prison. The strike made her medical condition worse, though Israeli authorities finally allowed her access to care.
Human rights groups have lodged multiple complaints with the World Organization Against Torture (WOAT), saying that the female prisoners in Israel are being abused and sexually humiliated while in custody. According to the complaint, prison conditions do not meet the minimum required standards and the women are allegedly subjected to humiliating body searches in front of male guards. In a society in which modesty is highly prized and immodesty can be punished by death as part of the honor code, forcing Palestinian women to take off all of their clothes is the ultimate humiliation.
The report to the WOAT describes a typical search of a female prisoner, who happens to be one of Ahlam at-Tamimi’s prison mates. As Amneh reached her cell, she was asked to undress in front of Sireet and Asher and two other male guards behind the door. Because of the presence of men, she refused. She was then taken into a cell with five male and female guards. The guards beat her and sprayed her with large quantities of tear gas. She fell to the ground and the guards continued to beat her, inflicting injuries to her head and nose. They tied her feet and hands behind her back. Sireet strip-searched Amneh in the presence of the men, lifting her blouse and releasing her trouser buttons and inspecting her while she was lying on the ground. Amneh shouted and yelled all the while. After the episode, Amneh was put in solitary confinement for three weeks.77 In Palestine, under the strict Islamic honor code, this type of sexual humiliation would ruin a woman’s reputation and chances of getting married. While in this instance the Israelis apparently stopped short of actually raping their prisoner, this kind of attack easily inspires the women who are victimized to seek revenge against their tormentors.
Although the Israelis will never release her, Ahlam has become increasingly popular while incarcerated. She is a symbol of the resistance both in her role as the leader of the female prisoners at HaSharon and by the mere fact that Israeli prison officials have targeted her for especially harsh treatment and limited her contact with the outside world. Ahlam is one of several Hamas prisoners to have been subjected to a new policy of limiting communication between Hamas representatives and the international media. Perhaps this is a result of her newfound fame in films, magazines, poems, and literature and of the fact that she received the Al Quds Mark of Honor from Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority, in April 2008. In July 2009 she won general elections for Hamas’s prison leadership.