http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/03/27/1017206115677.html

Secular bombers are driven by
desperation

By David Bernstein
March 28 2002

Until two or three months ago, suicide bombings in the Middle East
were exclusively the preserve of Islamic fundamentalists. They
saw themselves as "mujahideen" in the the most fundamental
sense - fighters for the glory of Islam who, as the simplistic
Western caricature would have it, would be rewarded for their
insane devotion with a fast track to Paradise and the embrace of
72 lustful virgins.

This, it would appear, is no longer the case. Credit for several of
the most recent suicide missions against Israelis has been claimed
not by the fanatical Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas and Islamic
Jihad but by a militant offshoot of Yasser Arafat's own
mainstream Fatah: the al-Aksa martyrs brigades.

These ostensibly secular young men - and, it now seems, young
women as well - don't comfortably fit the old stereotype. (Nor, it
might be recalled, did the suicide pilots and their comrades who
carried out the September 11 attacks on America.) Their ghastly
modus operandi may have been borrowed from their
fundamentalist compatriots, but their motivation is vastly
different.

What drives them, it seems, is not the irrational, twisted religious
dogma of Hamas, but the entirely comprehensible desperation and
anger born of more than three decades of Israeli occupation.


It matters little to them that this hopelessness is at least as
much the fault of their own short-sighted, bloody-minded leaders
as it is of their Israeli occupiers. What they see, especially in the
past 18months, is the ruthless application of overwhelming Israeli
force that has left more than 1000 Palestinians dead - many of
them young people like themselves.

Earlier in the present intifada, they would have numbered among
the young men and women who defied death by throwing stones
and petrol bombs at heavily armed soldiers and tanks. That had
been the pattern throughout the first intifada in the late 1980s,
when scores of young Palestinian stone-throwers were killed in
futile confrontations with Israeli troops.

Now, however, the pattern has changed. Rather than dying
heroically but futilely in absurdly unequal confrontations that left
the Israeli occupiers virtually unscathed, they began to carry out
hit-and-run shootings against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the
West Bank and Gaza. They were still sustaining heavy casualties as
Israel retaliated with ever increasing force - but, unlike in the
past, so were the Israelis.

It was only a matter of time before the secular Palestinian
resistance would up the ante still further.

The Palestinians would have seen how suicide bombings carried out
by Hamas and Islamic Jihad had killed scores of Israelis, causing
havoc in Israeli cities and sapping Israeli morale. They would have
seen, too, that while each Palestinian victim is hailed as a hero and
a martyr, his or her death generating as much celebration and
hope as sorrow and anger, each Israeli death is greeted as a
national tragedy, dredging up memories of pogroms and the
spectre of another Holocaust.

Israel, the Palestinians were learning, was psychologically ill
equipped for a sustained war of attrition with heavy casualties. So
suicide missions, designed to cause as many Israeli casualties as
possible, were adopted, for the first time, by the leaders
of the Palestinian secular
resistance.

Moreover, there appears to be scores of young Palestinians
desperate enough or angry enough to don an explosive vest, or
arm themselves with an assault rifle and hand grenades, and go to
an Israeli settlement or city and kill as many Israelis as they can
before they themselves are killed. Forget Hamas and the 72 houris
in Islamic Paradise: they know they are hitting their enemy where
he is most vulnerable, and optimising their sacrifice.

It is difficult not to be sickened by the fact that, for the most
part, they deliberately target Israeli civilians. And it is all too easy
to express horror at the moral nihilism of this strategy, to
despise the ethics of the leaders who are sending their young
people on these missions, and, as many Israelis are doing, to
question the value their enemy places on the sanctity of human
life.

Israelis constantly point to this as the qualitative moral difference
between the Palestinian "terrorists" and themselves, claiming to
primarily go after military targets, with any civilian casualties
unfortunate victims of unintended "collateral damage". Even if
true, this distinction is dangerously simplistic. The sheer number
of Palestinian "collateral" victims in the present intifada - more
than 1000 - would suggest that while it is highly unlikely Israel
does deliberately target innocent civilians, it seems to be less than
fastidious in selecting its targets.

It also ignores the vast disparity in the military means available to
the two sides in pursuing their respective political objectives. If
the Palestinians had scores of helicopter gunships, battle tanks
and F-16 fighters with which to wage their struggle against the
Israeli occupation, and still insisted on terrorism as a preferred
modus operandi, this kind of moral censure would have far greater
validity.

As matters stand, terrorism - including suicide bombing attacks
on civilian targets - is the only truly effective weapon in the
Palestinian military arsenal against an overwhelmingly powerful
opponent. It is a weapon of last resort - and far more effective
than the stones these same young Palestinians were throwing at
Israeli soldiers at the start of the intifada.

It will not win them the war, any more than the helicopter gunships
and F-16s will win the war for Israel. Ultimately, when they have
done bleeding, both sides will have to lay down their arms and
somehow learn to live together.

It will then be the time for both sides to make their moral
reckoning - for Palestinians and Israelis alike to weep not only for
their own dead, but for their complicity in the deaths of all the
innocents slain so senselessly in the pizza parlours and
discotheques of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and in the refugee camps
and towns of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Melbourne journalist and author David Bernstein is a former
Middle East reporter for The Jerusalem Post.
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