Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (47 page)

More than 10 percent of the settlers reported a willingness to participate in violent attacks against Palestinians, and 6.4 percent were willing to participate in violent attacks against Israelis. While only a minority was willing to participate in violent attacks, extrapolating the findings to a total population of some 250,000 settlers indicates the seriousness of the issue. For, if we assume an adult population of 100,000, more than 10,000 maybe willing to engage in violent attacks against Palestinians in the event of forced evacuation, and more than 6,000 to attack other Israelis under the same conditions. Every unit increase in a person’s score on a scale of “conservative values” (loyalty to community, sanctity of values, purity of purpose) doubled the odds of participating in violent action.

These findings paint the picture of parochially altruistic political actors rebelling to advance a cause. It appears that choices people make in violent intergroup conflicts, from whether to accept a compromise to whether individuals commit themselves to violent collective action, are bound by moral duty to collective interests: to the belligerent defense of the “sacred values” of a cause against all odds.

SACRED VALUES

Sacred values often have their basis in religion, but such transcendent core secular values as a belief in the importance of individual morality, fairness, reciprocity, and collective identity (“justice for my people”) can also be sacred values. These values will often trump the economic thinking of the marketplace or considerations of realpolitik. Rational choice involves selecting and ordering the best means for achieving given goals in the future. The further down the line a goal is, the less its real value here and now, and the less committed a person is to implement the means to realize it. But sacred values upset these calculations.

In many cases, sacred values are concerned with sustaining tradition for posterity. In other cases, the future takes on a transcendent value, the dream of what ought to be rather than what is, as in the fight for liberty or justice. Sometimes sacred values take on aspects of both tendencies: say, to regain the freedom that should have been or the dream of a righteous caliphate. In all of these cases, there’s no discounting of the future. In fact theopposite: On the basis of sacred values, people may purposely choose to live and act now for a remote end and to value the traditions of a distant past more than the trappings of the present or probable future.

Devotion to some core values may represent universal responses to long-term evolutionary strategies that go beyond short-term individual calculations of self-interest but that advance individual interests in the aggregate and long run.
²⁵
This may include devotion to children,
²⁶
to community,
²⁷
or even to a sense of fairness.
²⁸
Other such values are clearly specific to particular societies and historical contingencies, such as the sacred status of cows in Hindu culture or the sacred status of Jerusalem in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Sometimes, as with sacred cows
²⁹
or sacred forests,
³⁰
what is seen as inherently sacred in the present may have a more instrumental origin, representing the accumulated material wisdom of generations who resisted individual urges to gain an immediate advantage of meat or firewood for the long-term benefits of renewable sources of energy and sustenance.

Matters of principle, or “sacred honor,” are enforced to a degree far out of proportion to any individual or immediate material payoff when they are seen as defining “who we are.” Revenge, “even if it kills me,” between whole communities that mobilize to redress insult or shame to a single member go far beyond individual tit-for-tat,
³¹
and may become the most important duties in life. This is because such behavior defines and defends what it means to be, say, a Southern gentleman,
³²
a Solomon Islander,
³³
or an Arab tribesman.
³⁴
The Israeli army has risked the lives of many soldiers to save one as a matter of “sacred duty,” as have certain elite U.S. military units.
³⁵

Of course, sincere displays of willingness to avenge at all costs can have the long-term payoff of thwarting aggressive actions by stronger but less committed foes. Likewise, a willingness to sacrifice for buddies can help create greater esprit de corps that maylead to a more formidable fighting force. But these acts far exceed the effort required for any short-term payoff and offer no immediate guarantee for long-term success.

Seemingly intractable political conflicts—in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Kashmir, and beyond—and the extreme behaviors often associated with these conflicts, such as suicide bombings, are often motivated by sacred values. Nevertheless, there are also significant historical instances in which sacred values have motivated peacemaking, a theme that Egypt’s Anwar Sadat expressed in his autobiography,
In Search of Identity.
He recounted that the October 1973 war allowed Egypt to recover “pride and self-confidence,” which freed him to think about the “psychological barrier” that was a “huge wall of suspicion, fear, hate and misunderstanding that has for so long existed between Israel and the Arabs.” Based on his own experience in jail, he felt that “change should take place first at the deeper and perhaps more subtle level than the conscious level…. We had been accustomed … to regard Israel as ‘taboo,’ an entity whose emotional associations simply prevented anyone from approaching it.” He ultimately decided on a personal visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and to the Israeli Knesset “in fulfillment of my claim that I would be willing to go anywhere in search of peace…. I regarded my mission in Israel as truly sacred.”
³⁶

Appeals to sacred values, then, can be powerful motivation for making both war and peace. The issue for conflict resolvers is to determine how sacred values appeal to war and how they can be reframed to appeal to peace, which is discussed in the next part of the book.

While overwhelming military production and technological superiority is America’s preferred path to victory in frontal wars fought in Clausewitzian terms of advancing policy through power, others fight against greater odds inspired by their cause, including revolutionaryand guerrilla movements and jihadis. One reason resource-deficient revolutionary movements can compete with much larger armies and police is willingness to delay gratification and accept material sacrifice for a greater cause. Consider the founding of the United States. Without calculating the probability of success, a few poorly equipped rebels knowingly took on the world’s mightiest empire. The Declaration of Independence concluded with the words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Now that is hardly just an expression of politics by other means.

As Osama Hamdan, the ranking Hamas politburo member for external affairs, put it to me in Damascus: “George Washington was fighting the strongest military in the world, beyond all reason. That’s what we’re doing. Exactly.”
³⁷

At least, that’s what he thinks. But thinking it can be enough to make it a real force.

Part VI
“THE MOTHER OF ALL PROBLEMS”—PALESTINE, THE WORLD’S SYMBOLIC KNOT

A man once jumped from the top floor of a burning house in which many members of his family had already perished. He managed to save his life; but as he was falling to the ground, he hit a person standing down below and broke that person’s legs and arms. The jumping man had no choice; yet to the man with the broken limbs he was the cause of his misfortune.

If both behaved rationally, they would not become enemies. The man who escaped from the blazing house, having recovered, would have tried to help and console the other sufferer; and the latter might have realized that he was the victim of circumstances over which neither of them had control.

But look what happens when these people behave irrationally. The injured man blames the other for his misery and swears to make him pay for it. The other one, afraid of the crippled man’s revenge, insults him, kicks him and beats him up whenever they meet. The kicked man again swears revenge and is again punched and punished. The bitter enmity, so whimsical at first, hardens and comes to overshadow the whole existence of both men and to poison their minds.

—ISAAC DEUTSCHER, “ON THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR,”
NEW LEFT REVIEW,
JULY-AUGUST 1967

CHAPTER 20
MARTYRDOM 101

QUESTION: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF JIHAD? Jihad is one of Islam’s dignified principles. These principles value reciprocal treatment: Who kills you, kill him. We fight for dignity
[karáma],
nation
[watan],
religion
[din],
and Al Aqsa. In the Koran, the book of Al-Tauba, verse 111, tells us that Allah brings souls to Paradise killing the enemy and getting killed—that is the high principle of jihad
[mabada samia fil jihad].

Allah asks that we be good with everyone who does not raise a hand against us, especially the People of the Book
[ahl kitab],
Christians and Jews, we can live side by side with them, share our food with them, marry their women [if they convert to Islam], and keep their holy places safe.

But others are not as tolerant. France will not allow our women to wear their veils in school. There are commands from the Prophet and the Muslim leaders to not kill women and children, and to not uproot trees. But the Israelis kill our children and uproot our trees.

QUESTION: CAN THERE EVER BE PEACE WITH ISRAEL? There could be a provisional truce
[hudna,
after the ten-year cease-fire between the Prophet and the Quraish tribe, which allowed Mohammed and his followers to regroup and eventually conquer the Quraish]. But never real peace
[salaam].
Israel’s withdrawal to the borders of 1967 is the minimum we can accept, along with the return of the refugees; then leave the matter tohistory. But I don’t think they will withdraw from our land, or pull back the settlements.

We will live and see: If they withdraw to the 1967 borders and bring back the refugees, that would be good; otherwise we will continue fighting them. Israel is like the Crusaders or the Mongols and other invaders who came here and were expelled. In the end, Israel also will be expelled.

—SHEIKH HAMED AL-BETAWI, HAMAS SPIRITUAL GUIDE,
JUDGE OF THE PALESTINE SHARIA COURT, PREACHER AT
JERUSALEM’S AL AQSA MOSQUE (AUTHOR INTERVIEW,
NABLUS, SEPTEMBER 20 04)

J
abaliyah Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip, September 2004. I had an appointment with some families and friends of suicide bombers in Jabaliyah refugee camp, a dusty maze of low concrete structures that is home to more than 100,000 Palestinians. Jabaliyah is the most densely populated part of the Gaza Strip, and the Gaza Strip, with nearly 1.5 million people piled up in an area the size of, say, Gilpin County, Colorado (population less than 5,000), is one of the most densely populated dives on earth. The strip’s name has the same origin as the English word “gauze.” But nothing here ever seems to stop the hope from hemorrhaging. In Jabaliyah talk of pushing Jews into the sea has staged a comeback.

There was an awful heaviness and quiet in Jabaliyah, especially in the afternoons, still balmy at summer’s end. Suddenly, like a battering ram that has breached the dungeon’s walls, the children burst from the school. They brought, for a moment, life and a lightness of heart to the still and silent square, as they flew in every direction, chirping in search of play.

A senior Hamas organizer in Jabaliyah frowned when I smiled at the children running home from school across the plaza. “Why do you smile?” he asked in accusation, confirming his own seriousness. “We can’t smile until we take back our life from the Israelis. When you see our children you should weep because the best hope for them now is to become martyrs.” His suffering soul demanded that I find shame in joy.

“So all should become martyrs?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not all our people are heroes, but our youth are running to martyrdom. With so many we must carefully select, case by case, who has courage and purity of heart.”

I wanted to know if he would accept a two-state solution.

“Never,” he snapped. “All of Palestine must be Muslim.”

“And the Jews?”