Unfortunately it's not only over the hill novelists who feel that way. A recent movie Paradise Now has brought out the "let's understand them" impulse in quite a few people. Recently the Baltimore Sun featured "The Painful road to Paradise by Michael Hill" The article starts with the dubious assertion:

Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad has a simple reason for making a film about suicide bombers. "I think it is a story that has not been told," he says.

Indeed.

In American media, it is rare that a suicide bomber has a name or a face. Those who do are the few who attack in the West, flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or setting off bombs on the London subway. Those who kill and die in other parts of the world usually remain anonymous.

The handful who do get identified are rarely depicted as anything other than one-dimensional figures. Any speculation on their motives begins and ends with fanaticism.

That is false. Whenever a Palestinian kills himself (or herself) in Israel and takes some Jews with him one of the games journalists play is figuring out how this boy/girl who had everything became radicalized. Usually they'll find that a cousin or someone close has suffered at the hands of Israel. It's, of course, a very unsatisfactory answer.

Usually the coverage of a terrorist attack in Israel, does not include a mention of the atmosphere of hate that is cultivated by the Palestinian Authority. And the terrorist is portrayed as helplessly trying to right an injustice that otherwise is out of his power to address.

Take for example, Hiba Daraghmeh. According to the New York Times (How 2 Took the Path of Suicide Bombers, May 30, 2003) :

To her peers and family, Hiba Daraghmeh was a self-confident path breaker.

In 10th grade she began veiling herself, except for her eyes, asserting a religious devotion that is rare here. She turned down two proposals of marriage, her father said, because she wanted to continue her studies and earn a doctorate in English.

On May 19 she blew herself apart outside a mall in the Israeli town of Afula, killing a security guard in his first day on the job, an Israeli Arab on his way to an electrical engineering class and an Israeli Jewish man, the police said. She wounded many more.

At 19, disguised as an Israeli woman in jeans and a T-shirt, she became the first Palestinian woman to blow herself up on behalf of an Islamist group, Islamic Jihad, which has unveiled her face on posters here claiming responsibility for the attack.

While her religiosity was emphasized, so was her wish to earn a doctorate in English. And what (apparently) motivated her to enlist as a suicide bomber?:

To explain this bombing, several versions of a similar story are being told here about how Israeli soldiers once forced Ms. Daraghmeh to lift her veil. Her father, Azem Said Daraghmeh, provided the most detailed account, saying that a year ago, Israel imposed a curfew on Tubas but made an exception for students who had exams.

Ms. Daraghmeh, veiled, was making her way to school with other students when soldiers stopped them and demanded to see her face, he said. ''The girls begged her,'' he said. ''She removed the veil. They saw her. She collapsed and started crying.''

But he said that despite that incident, he remained baffled. ''All her needs were provided for,'' he said. ''She did well in school. She was living with her family.''

The very premise of the Sun's article is shown to be false. (I only gave one example, but this isn't an uncommon approach.) The terrorists who chose to blow themselves up and kill others are usually not protrayed as "one dimensional figures" or fanatics.

However there is some useful information in the article:

Waleed Hazbun, a political science professor who studies the Middle East at the Johns Hopkins University, says that there has been a spate of recent research and books on these bombers.

"One of the findings is that they are not just crazed individuals," he says. "Some have a certain personal isolation; many are recruited by and feel a commitment to a certain cause.

"They are really tools within a political-military organization," Hazbun says. "They are part of a system that has targeted a particular political goal and adjusts its tactics very strategically. To think that they are just crazed, marginalized youth, that they are not thinking in terms of rational tactics and do not have a larger strategy, is wrong."

This is exactly right and this is the importance of the suicide bombers. They are tools manipulated for political gain. Trying to "understand" them or portray them as complex misses the true picture.

Palestinians, indulged with the fantasy that there is something exceptional about their claim to a homeland, perpetuate their grievances against Israel. They recruit young men (and to a lesser degree women) to kill Israelis after an intensive period of training and indoctrination. (After these young people have been subjected to years of some of the most vicious antisemitic propaganda ever broadcast through nearly every media and educational outlet.)

Yet Hill oblivious to this finds a criticism of the film:

"Daily images of the occupation, of the Israeli army oppressing people, we know those, we saw it already on television," Abu-Assad says. "I try to take you somewhere you don't know."

But for Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, who has seen the film, the absence of these images lessens its impact.

"What I think is missing ... is the essential background to why so many people would do this: the desperation resulting from nearly four decades of occupation and demeaning treatment," he says in an e-mail. "I do not think the film did a very good job of visually and viscerally showing this aspect, which is the most important thing you apprehend when you visit and talk to people."

This is, of course, Hill's preferred narrative. Suicide bombing (and terror generally) is an understandable response to unprecedented oppression. But what are sucide bombers really like?

Here's what happens according to "Arafat's suicide factory," by Daniel Pipes:

Convincing healthy individuals to blow themselves up is obviously not easy, but requires ideas and institutions. The process begins with the Palestinian Authority (PA) inculcating two things into its population, starting with the children: a hatred of Jews and a love of death. School curricula, camp activities, TV programming and religious indoctrination all portray Israelis in a Nazi-style way, as sub-human being worthy of killing; and then deprecate the instinct for self-preservation, telling impressionable young people that sacrificing their lives is the most noble of all goals.

The system works: Hassan reports that "hordes of young men" clamor to be sent to their own obliteration. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have established a process of selection based in the mosques, where "a notably zealous youth" ready for martyrdom gets noted by clerics who recommend him for selection.

And how does the training go? Nasra Hassan interviewed a former suicide terorist: (avalable here or here)

I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. “We were in a constant state of worship,” he said. “We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

“We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet — the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah ’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!”

And Ha'aretz featured an article a few years ago describing then Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer interviewing a couple of failed suicide bombers. Here's part of the exchange:

Ben-Eliezer: "You knew that you would kill innocent people - women and children. Do you hate the Jews that much?"

Stiti: "No, not at all. I don't hate Jews. That's not it. I just wanted to take part in my people's war of national liberation. It's a holy war for the liberation of occupied Palestine. That's what I was thinking all the time."

Ben-Eliezer: "But in the place you were supposed to blow yourself up, you would see with your own eyes the people whom you were about to kill. Did you ever ask yourself: Why them? What have they done? Why do they deserve to die?"

Stiti: "I wouldn't have seen that. We don't see them at all. What's before my eyes is [becoming] a shaheed. Everything is for the sake of the commandment. That's what I was told. The shaheed is on a very high level and everyone respects him. I wanted to participate in the liberation of my people, to fulfill the sacred commandment, to be a source of pride to my people and my friends."

Suicide terrorism is the logical final stop of a society trying to destroy another one. The enemy is made invisible and death is exalted above all else. The recruits may not start off all the same, but in the end they are motivated by a fanatical religious belief serving the purposes of cynical holy men advancing an abhorrent political agenda.

In a related note, Anne Applebaum, at least made an honest attempt to solve "The Puzzle of the suicide bomber". But she makes a mistake:

Even the cartoon image of the religious fanatic, the crazed young man convinced that he will be welcomed in heaven by a bevy of beautiful virgins, has fallen by the wayside. Rishawi is not the first woman to attempt to blow herself up: Ayat Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian girl, detonated an explosive belt at the entrance to a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002. Akhras was not only young and female, she also was relatively secular, on good terms with her family and engaged to be married.

Most suicide bombers are men. And if they weren't religious before undergoing their deadly preparations, religious indoctrination is a necessary component of the training. (I wonder - though I've been informed that there's no evidence of this - if Akhras was recruited as a way of punishing her father, a contractor who works on building Israeli homes in Yesha.) And I don't believe that female suicide bombers are denied that religious indoctrination.

It's find to try and understand the motivations of suicide terorists. Unfortunately it's all too easy to misunderstand them.

Technorati Tags: terrorism, Israel.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.