http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=88134
Robert Fisk: What drives a bomber to kill the innocent child?
'A battleship or Israeli tank is one thing: a three-year-old waiting for his
mother to cut his pizza is quite another'
11 August 2001
I once asked the head of the Lebanese Hizbollah if he could explain to me how
the mind of a suicide bomber works. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was dressed in his
black turban and robes. He had formerly been the Hizbollah's military commander
in southern Lebanon and from his legions had emerged the first Arab suicide
bombers who would - after more than a decade and a half - sap the morale of
Israel's retreating army. Explain to me as a Westerner, I told Nasrallah, how a
man can immolate himself.
"Imagine you are in a sauna," Nasrallah replied. "It is very hot but you know
that in the next room there is air conditioning, an armchair, classical music
and a cocktail." There was a pause as the Hizbollah leader moved his hand
swiftly upwards, as if opening a door. "So you pass easily into the next room."
I will not forget the smile he then visited upon me. "That," he said, "is how I
would explain the mind of the martyr to a Westerner."
Nasrallah enjoyed metaphors, similes; like the Hizbollah's "martyr" posters
which so often show the dead in paradise, surrounded by rivers and tulips and
weeping willows. Is that where the suicide bombers really believe they are
going, I used to ask myself? To the rivers of honey and the trees and - yes, of
course - the virgins?
The idea that sacrifice is a noble ideal - and let us, for a moment, put aside
the iniquity of murdering children in a Jerusalem pizzeria - is common to
western as well as eastern society. Our First World War calvaries in France are
covered with commemorations to men who supposedly "laid down their lives" or
"gave their lives" for their country - even though most died in appalling
agony, praying only that they would live.
When, years after our conversation, Nasrallah's own son was killed in a
suicidal assault on an Israeli army position in southern Lebanon, the Hizbollah
leader insisted that he receive not condolences but congratulations.
Nasrallah appeared on Lebanese television, laughing and smiling, beaming with
delight as he spoke to wellwishers on the phone. His son's young fiancee also
expressed her pride in her dead husband-to-be. But she did not smile.
If the idea of self-sacrifice is thus comprehensible, it is clearly not a
natural phenomenon. In a normal society, in a community whose people feel they
are treated equally and with justice, we regard suicide as a tragic aberration,
a death produced - in the coroner's eloquent lexicon - when "the balance of the
mind is disturbed". But what happens when the balance of a whole society's mind
has been disturbed? Walking through the wreckage of the Sabra and Chatila
Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut a few weeks ago - the same camps in which
up to 2,000 civilians were massacred in 1982 and for which, on page 103 of its
report, the Israeli Kahan Commission held Ariel Sharon "personally responsible"
- I could only wonder at the stability of the survivors who still lived there
amid the concrete huts and the garbage and the football-sized rats. If I lived
here, I remember thinking, I would commit suicide.
And that, of course, is the point. When a society is dispossessed, when the
injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the "enemy" is all-powerful,
when one's own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, "two-legged
beasts", then the mind moves beyond reason. It becomes fascinated in two
senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief
will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United
States was turning Beirut into a Nato base in 1983, Iranian Revolutionary
Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American
presence. I wrote at the time - perhaps being tongue-in-cheek - that this was
likely to be a titanic battle: US technology versus God. Who would win? Then on
23 October, 1983, a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into
the US Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in
six seconds. I later interviewed one of the few surviving marines to have seen
the bomber. "All I can remember," he told me, "is that the guy was smiling."
I spent months studying the suiciders of Lebanon. They were mostly single men,
occasionally women, often the victims of Israeli torture or the relatives of
family members who had been killed in battle with Israel. They would often
receive their orders while at prayer in the "masjid" or mosque in their south
Lebanese villages. The imam would be told to use a certain phrase in his sermon
- a reference to roses or gardens or water or a kind of tree. The cleric would
not understand the purpose of these words but in his congregation a young man
would know that his day of "martyrdom" had now arrived.
In Gaza, even before the 1993 Oslo agreement, I discovered an almost identical
phenomenon. As in Lebanon, the would-be "martyr" would spend his last night
reading the Koran. He would never say goodbye to his parents. But he would
embrace his mother and father and tell them not to cry if he were one day to
die. Then he would set off to collect his explosives. Five minutes before he
set off from the West Bank town of Tulkarem last week, a young Hamas member
went through this very ritual. Five minutes later, an Israeli missile struck
the car he was driving. But scarcely a week later - at two o'clock on Thursday
afternoon - another suicider reached the doors of the pizzeria on the corner of
Jaffa Street and King George's Street in West Jerusalem.
Yet there's a terrible difference with the suicide bombers of Palestine.
However frightening, the Japanese 'kamikaze' pilots attacked battleships and
aircraft carriers, not hospitals. The Lebanese largely followed this pattern:
they usually went for military targets. I was puzzled why the Lebanese should
have been queuing to watch Pearl Harbor when it opened in Beirut last month -
until I saw the young men studying the cinema stills of equally young Japanese
pilots tying their "martyrdom" bandannas around their foreheads. In similar
fashion, the Hizbollah targeted the Israeli army and its militia allies. The
Palestinians learned from all this. But more and more, their suicide bombers
have targeted Israeli civilians. A battleship or an Israeli tank is one thing;
a three year-old waiting for his mother to cut his pizza for him is quite
another.
I called a Palestinian friend yesterday morning to ask about this, to ask how
young Palestinian men - in Lebanon as well as Ramallah - could rejoice in the
streets at the pizzeria massacre. She expressed her abhorrence at what happened
- she was genuine in this - but tried to explain that the Palestinians had
suffered so many civilian casualties since the "intifada" began that
Palestinians found joy in any suffering inflicted on their enemy. There was a
feeling that "they should suffer too"; which, of course - and the principle
applies, though not the historical parallel - is exactly how Air Marshal Sir
Arthur Harris explained his area-bombing policy against German civilians.
But I go back to my own first reaction when I reached the Sbarro pizza house.
Unforgivable. What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the
Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on earth,
recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin?
Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own
people's tragedy. His was not an act of "mindless terror", the words Israeli
spokesmen use. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed,
dispossessed, tortured and killed in terrible numbers. The pressure cooker of
the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.
