Bombshell (17 page)

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.”
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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.”
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In Palestinian areas, suicide bombers are called martyrs—
shahid
s
—
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
shahid
s' 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.