Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (48 page)

Erez Crossing, from Israel into the Gaza Strip.

“Let them go back to New York and Russia.” He snorted. “Those born in Palestine may stay as long as they submit to Muslim rule and law.”

Gray and mirthless men will select a target for the martyrdom-seeking youth and find others. They cajole the youths and stroke their minds but do not brainwash them any more than our leaders do those of our soldiers.

An earnest young man of twenty cleared a seat for me from the rubble and garbage. “I choose to be a martyr because my life is dear to me, my family, and my people. We must show Israelis that Palestinian lives aren’t cheap.”

The humorless graybeard told the youth to go along to the mosque to pray.

“No,” the youth said, politely but firmly, “I must explain something to the foreigner.”

The graybeard shook his head—and walked across the plaza of children as if through a graveyard.

The youth was as compassionate in manner as anyone I’d interviewed in my anthropological sojourns. He wanted to be an electrical engineer. He so reminded me of my own son that I just lost it and had to turn away for a moment. He was tall and lean, and so he seemed taller, with wide shoulders and lips that women would one day appreciate if he gave them a chance, but he probably wouldn’t. He had an intelligent, ascetic face. Except not quite. It was a look lifted by a twisted purpose that so many here take for nobility.

The young man obviously saw the turmoil in my own countenance and tried in his own way to console me with the resigned certainty of someone already within earshot of eternity:

“Ma’
leish
—never mind—I won’t just give up my life. Our leaders don’t think once or twice, but ten, even a hundred times if it’s worth it. If they can do a roadside bombing, they won’t use me. I’ll be saved for a big operation.”

This young man could contemplate the costs and benefits of aroadside versus suicide bombing within the group’s moral frame, though it was beyond doubt that sometime soon he must die to kill.

“And what would make you and others stop thinking about becoming martyrs?” I asked him.

He smiled ruefully and said, “When Palestine is again Muslim.”

Although only a few kilometers from the First World nation of Israel, Gaza has degenerated from its place in the developing Second World, as I knew it back in the 1960s and 1970s, to Third World now. You can tell Third World countries by the fact that there are no signs of buildings or roads ever being fixed. There is garbage, especially mounds of plastic, everywhere save in the many empty public garbage cans. In such places, the adverse effects of global warming on the human landscape may never match those produced by plastic. And garbage prefers company: Just toss some anywhere and it soon attracts more. This seems to happen most when people are hungry or out of hope: The gold heirlooms that are a Palestinian woman’s most precious possession are being sold off here at the price of their melted bulk weight, more each year, as the garbage piles up.

Yet not far from the border crossing, at Bayt Lahiyah, there was a new spic-and-span apartment complex being built with money from the Arab Emirates, rising out of the filth and waste. Israeli bulldozers and tanks had flattened all of the homes just in front of the complex, and people just sat by their makeshift tents, some bent over with their heads in their hands or just swaying back and forth. A little boy kicking a frayed and deflated soccer ball showed me where a bullet had scarred his back as he bent over to throw a stone at a tank (it would have gone through his skull had he been standing up). I asked if he was looking forward to living in the new apartments. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about until I pointed; then his father said
“bukrah fil mishmish”
—tomorrow’s apricots (something like “when pigs fly and chickens grow teeth”). “We will go on living in filth and dirt.”

I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the likelihood that the Palestinian Authority and their wealthy backers in the Emirates had already allotted the apartments to their own cronies (a standard practice) or whether this man was referring to prospects for peace. In any event, the little boy said he wanted to die a
shaheed,
killing Israelis. The father, closing his eyes and with a deep sigh, waved his boy away. “If only they would leave us in peace,” he said.

JERUSALEM, NOVEMBER 30, 2004

I was watching an Israeli television talk show. The host was interviewing a soldier who shot and killed a thirteen-year-old Palestinian girl.

“She was a
mehabelet
[terrorist],” the soldier said. He played to the audience: “Anyone who helps a terrorist is a terrorist.”

“But maybe she wasn’t helping terrorists,” the show’s host suggested. “She had schoolbooks, maybe she was just on her way to school. Maybe you’re telling us this to justify to us and to yourself what happened.”

“No, there’s no way she was going to school.” The soldier’s tone was self-assured and castigating. “The school was more than five hundred meters away.”

The talk-show audience apparently applauded. I asked an Israeli woman who was watching the show—someone I know as a generous, loving, and kind woman with teenage children of her own—what she made of this.

“I blame their parents,” she replied. “They let their children risk their lives. Sometimes our soldiers have no choice.”

“No choice except to blow the brains out of a kid who has no weapons on her but books?”

“You never know. Suicide bombers will try everything. It’s terrible. But what can you do?”

“And your daughter … can’t you even imagine your own daughter making a mistake? Would she deserve to die?”

She didn’t answer directly, I sensed, because too much empathy might fatally weaken her resistance to the enemy. But I saw that she was struggling not to have to struggle with it.

“If only they would leave us in peace,” she moaned.

AT THE ENTRY TO NABLUS, WEST BANK

I was standing with my driver from Jerusalem as we waited for the guards at the Hawara checkpoint to verify my permission from the West Bank Military Coordinator, General Mishlev, to let us through. It was hot and everything seemed to move sluggishly in between the soldiers’ irregular commands to stop or go. Two young men were walking up a long passage of concrete and barbed wire toward the guard post, supporting an old woman between them. She was shriveled and bent and shrouded in black. The crowd at the checkpoint made way for the trio to reach the guard post, where machine guns were readied behind thick concrete emplacements on either side.

“Go back,” the Israeli soldier ordered. “No males allowed through.”

“But our mother is sick,” one of the men replied. “How can she get home?”

Taxis from Nablus cannot leave Nablus, and taxis from the outside cannot get in.

“Identity papers,” the soldier said to the two young men. “Papers.”

He examined the documents, very slowly:
“Beseder.”
Okay, he nodded. “Now go back to where you came from,” and waved the three away.

The young men saw me watching, and they probably overheard the guards talking about what to do with the American. They turned themselves and their mother toward me.

“Why do they treat us like animals?” she asked, her sons careful not to show any signs that the guards, who looked on with tense boredom, might have taken as threatening.

I related the incident to a friend who serves on an interservices committee that advises Israeli defense and government. Some weeks later, he told me, “I raised the issue of behavior at the checkpoints and [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon said, ‘Don’t you understand? I want them to feel humiliated, and we’ll keep doing that until they stop trying to kill us.’”

But the angry eyes of the old lady, her boys, and the crowd showed me they were far from cowed.

In fact, the relationship between humiliation and violence is not so simple. My studies with psychologist Jeremy Ginges suggest that humiliation in situations of political strife, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, does reduce feelings and propensity for violence, at least among people who feel humiliated. People who feel humiliated are generally more passive and demoralized than bristling for action. But the moral outrage and violence among those who are witness to the humiliation of others they care for may actually increase. Hamas militants nearly all stress that vengeance is for national—not personal—humiliation.

SOME FACTS AND FIGURES ABOUT SUICIDE ATTACKS

Almost every major Palestinian town is ringed by Israeli settlements, and every major passage in or out of town is blocked by guns, barbed wire, and concrete. Palestinians are convinced that Israeli Army checkpoints—where people often wait hours to no avail in shadeless no-man’s-lands or long tunnels—are meant to break their will and drive them from the land. The economy is practically lifeless, except for Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority’s patronage and above all the NGOs, which bring some activity.

The average time it takes to get by road from Hebron or Jenin to Palestine’s provisional capital, Ramallah (about forty miles), is four to six hours when roads are open (instead of the one hour it used to take), but roads are also often closed. What’s the damage? The West Bank, which had been agriculturally self-sufficient and a net exporter, can no longer get people to the fields and produce to the towns. Hundreds of thousands of people have now been jobless for several years. Bir Zeit University, located on the outskirts of Ramallah, was once Palestine’s premier national institution of learning. Now, having lost most of its commuting students and much of its faculty, it has basically been reduced to a community college. No Palestinian students are allowed to study in Israel, few have the means to study abroad and, if they do, there is no guarantee that they will be allowed back by Israel, which continues to control all entry points into Palestine.
¹

Khalil Shikaki, a Columbia University–trained political scientist and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, has data suggesting that popular support for suicide actions is positively correlated with the number of Israeli checkpoints that Palestinians have to regularly pass through to go about their daily business and the time needed to pass through them (this can involve spending hours at each of several checkpoints, any of which can be arbitrarily closed down at any time).

In 2005, our research group teamed up with Shikaki’s to conduct a random survey of 1,250 Palestinians from 120 locales in the West Bank and Gaza. We found that around 80 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings and believe that “Islam allows a bombing attack (which some call martyrdom attacks while others call suicide attacks) where the bomber kills himself with the aim of killing his enemies.” Fifty percent of the Palestinian population reported “joy” as their primary emotion upon hearing an announcement of a suicide bombing against Israelis, versus 12 percent who mentioned “pride” and 7 percent who cited revenge astheir main reaction (though brain scans suggest that getting even gives pleasure).
²
Nine percent said they felt “sadness” and 4 percent experienced “fear.”

I asked a Palestinian woman, a very generous, loving, and kind person who has worked with Israelis for years, what she thinks of this: “I know it is not a good thing to feel this way, but it’s human. I can’t help myself, either. When I hear of it, I think, ‘Is there no better way?’ But when I see the images on television I feel, ‘Good for them! Let them feel pain too.’”

But our research also clearly demonstrated that Palestinian support for suicide bombing is unrelated to a belief in the immutability of the conflict between Jews and Muslims, or some essential or inherent quality of Jews or Israelis. Ninety-one percent of those who said that Islam supported the actions of the suicide bomber believed that a Jewish child switched at birth and brought up by Muslims would grow up to be fully Muslim. And of those who believed that Islam sanctioned the suicide bomber, only 4 percent believed that it was the duty of Muslims to fight and kill non-Muslims.

What does predict a belief that Islam sanctions martyrs is a perceived sense of injustice. For example, we asked participants to choose between two reasons why it’s socially and religiously permissible to kill other people: because of what other people have done, or because of the contrary beliefs and religion of other people. Participants overwhelmingly believed the former, but this was slightly stronger for those who believed that Islam sanctioned suicide bombers than for those who did not.

In a previous survey, however, Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that the Palestinian population also expressed no hatred of liberty, freedom, or democracy, and could well embrace these if they had them.

Most Israelis who see surveys showing that most Palestinians don’t have Nazi-like attitudes toward Jews and express supportfor the values of an “open society” simply refuse to believe the surveys. And most Palestinians who see surveys that show most Israelis want peace, even if it means dismantling the settlements, also refuse to believe that this is true. That’s so even if both sets of surveys are from the same pollster (whether Israeli, Palestinian, or joint Israeli-Palestinian). This unremitting loop of mutual mistrust only helps to stoke the seemingly endless killing.