Read Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists Online
Authors: Scott Atran
Even Israelis who oppose the evident abuse and humiliation of the checkpoints countered that the checkpoints would stop on average at least one suicide bomber a day, and that Palestinians confuse cause (suicide bombing) with effect (extreme vigilance to stop it). On one level, the iron-fist policy seemed to work. In June 2004, I co-organized a NATO conference in Lisbon on suicide terrorism with Israeli psychologist and former chief hostage negotiator Ariel Merari. Isaac Ben Israel presented data showing suicide terrorism to be the deadliest form of attack during the Second Intifada, which began following Sharon’s September 2000 promenade on the Haram al-Sharif (the esplanade where the Al Aqsa Mosque is located, and also ancient Israel’s presumed holiest site) and the riots and killings that occurred as a result. Ben Israel is a retired Air Force general and top-notch physicist who runs a program in the history and philosophy of science at Tel Aviv University as well as his country’s space agency. (He would later take over Shimon Peres’s seat in Parliament, when that Nobel Peace Prize winner became president of Israel.) He found that up to mid-2004, some 527 suicide attacks were attempted; 132 of them were successful, killing 859 noncombatant civilians. But by mid-2004, the rate of terrorist attacks against civilians had dropped back to its pre-Intifada levels.
In April 2002, after Israel suffered 140 fatalities in one month (March) from suicide attacks, it launched a full-scale campaign against Hamas, including massive arrests of supporters and assassinations of leaders. Israeli troops entered the occupied areas givento the Palestinian Authority to expand intelligence coverage, tightened the chokehold on these areas through checkpoints, and began construction of the massive “fence” to separate these areas from Israel proper and some of the major Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The result was that, a year later, the number of “aborted” suicide missions had doubled, and the success rate of attacks had dropped precipitously.
Ben Israel explained to me that if one fourth to one third of any system is cut away or destroyed—molecules, information, army divisions, terrorist networks—the entire system either collapses (disintegrates toward “entropy,” or randomness) or is forced to become a different sort of system altogether (by “mutating”): “In a year, Hamas will stop suicide bombing or there will be no more Hamas,” he asserted. (Hamas called for a provisional halt to suicide attacks in December 2004 and did not claim another until February 2008, although initial denials from various leadership circles of Hamas indicated that there was no centrally organized planning to it, and the halt in bombings persisted into 2010.)
“I AM READY TO PAY THE PRICE”
The Nablus office complex where Sheikh Hamed al-Betawi directed various types of “community welfare” was plastered with posters of martyrs and packed with earnest young Hamas volunteers. Betawi is a spiritual leader of Hamas in the West Bank, judge of the Sharia Court of Palestine, head of the Palestine Ulema (Scholar’s League) and preacher at Al Aqsa Mosque (the Jerusalem mosque that is the third-holiest site in Islam). He is classic fire-and-brimstone: “Our people do not own airplanes and tanks, only human bombs. Those who undertake martyrdom actions are not hopeless or poor, but are the best of our people, educated, successful. They are intelligent, advanced in combat techniques for fighting enemy occupation.” Indeed, independent doctoral research by Basel Saleh
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atKansas State University and Claude Berrebi
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at Princeton indicate that most Hamas bombers had some college education and were economically better off than the surrounding population.
These are the prize souls that Hamas was striving to attract. Movements like Hamas look for signals of such character, such as a candidate’s investment in education. Groups that sponsor suicide terror go a step further: Through spectacular displays involving the sacrifice of their precious “human capital” (educated youth with better-than-average prospects), they also signal a costly commitment to their community, which the community honors by providing new volunteers and added funding.
“I say to you what I said to Israeli intelligence and to 400,000 people at the Haram al-Sharif [Jerusalem Temple Mount],” al-Betawi raged. “I am ready to pay the price. I was deported to Lebanon with al-Rantisi [cofounder of Hamas, assassinated by Israelis in 2004], and, God willing, I will be a martyr, too. I know Israeli prisons and so do five of my children, but they know from me that Muslims and their culture fear no privation or death.”
“And why,” I asked, “do you say you and others are willing to make such sacrifices?”
“Because this is sacred land
(‘ard al-muqadasah),
the holiest land in the world. That is why Palestine is the ‘Mother of the
World’s Problems.’”
“Who wants to be a martyr?” I asked him.
“Our martyrs are the purest of the pure,” Betawi said. “Learned often in mathematics or engineering, even the arts, they are not hopeless. They are full of personal possibilities. But they have even greater hope for their people.
“Yehia Ayash was an engineer when he led the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades [Hamas military wing]. Qais Adwan was president of the Student Council at Al-Najah University, which has twelve thousand students.
“Mohamed Al-Hanbali was a student at the College ofEngineering, and his father is a millionaire. His father said to him, ‘I will marry you to the most beautiful girls in Nablus.’ And his son replied, ‘No, Father, I will marry in heaven, my mission is to defend my people and my religion.’ His father was a friend of mine.
“Do you think that the person who leads the Student Council, responsible for twelve thousand students at Al-Najah University, is a stupid person? Of course not, he was very intelligent, for that reason he chose this path. The educated person has a greater motivation for carrying out the operations and for becoming a martyr.”
The one place in Nablus where young people easily express optimism in the future is Al-Najah University. More than half of the students belong to the Hamas Student Block, which had produced more suicide bombers than any other group in the country. They are not poor, uneducated, socially estranged, or psychologically deranged. Nor do most captured would-be suicide bombers have a criminal past, according to Ariel Merari. (Marc Sageman found a similar pattern among Al Qaeda operatives through 2003.
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In America, by contrast, two thirds of criminals never finished high school and are functionally illiterate, a majority come from socially depressed areas, and 10 percent to 15 percent are mentally ill.)
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In the arts department at Al-Najah I was led through an exhibit whose title was Martyrs Give Us Dignity to Free Ourselves. The blazing eyes in two paintings of covered faces resembled the intense gazes of the two artists nearby. “Who are these martyrs?” I asked. “Soon to be, if God wishes,” one of them replied. Their yearning for paradise was conveyed through images of another longing, incarnated in the black-eyed maidens of martyrs’ heaven. But this was clearly about a more knightly, chivalrous love than a lust for heavenly virgins. “If a youth knocks saying he wants to be a martyr to get sex in paradise or money for his family, we slam the door,” huffed one senior Hamas leader, expressing a common sentiment, which our research bears out.
The mock-up of paradise at the Al-Najah Martyrs’ exhibitincluded a small pool of water, covered with plastic flowers and leaves and surrounded by paintings of red and white roses and recently slain Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul Azziz Rantisi. Little teddy bear key chains were offered, and books sold—most prominently the so-called Islamic Manifesto,
Milestones,
written in prison by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb just before he was hanged in 1966. The anti-Semitic czaristera forgery,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
was also on sale.
So I took the opportunity to ask one of my standard questions: “What if you take a child from a Zionist family at birth and raise him in a good Muslim family, would the child grow up to be a good Muslim, a bad Muslim, or a Zionist?” “A good Muslim,” was the answer all around.
“A person is what his surroundings make him,” said the Hamas student leader.
“Then why do you kill Israeli children?” I shot back.
“We do not target the children,” he calmly explained. “But we do not mourn them if they are killed on an Israeli bus or if the children happen to be in the way, because Israeli society will turn them into soldiers who will try to kill us. Would we do an operation like the one that Sheikh Bin Laden did to America or our Chechen brothers did in Beslan? No, that is not our way, although what happened in Beslan is understandable and even justifiable because the Russians have killed so many Chechen children.”
I posed the same question that I had posed to al-Betawi: “You say ‘An eye for an eye,’ but then won’t the whole world become
blind?”
He answered much as did al-Betawi: “Should we turn the other cheek or offer flowers? Do the Jews or Christians? We fight with any means. They have tanks, planes, and atom bombs. We have ‘human bombs’
(qanabil bi sharia).
When they stop killing us, we will stop killing them.”
In June 2006, Dr. Ghazi Hamad, then-spokesman of theHamas-led Palestinian national government, told me that Hamas’s base (about 15 percent of the Palestinian electorate) would rise up in arms if Hamas immediately agreed to recognize Israel and stop violence against the occupation (the two chief demands in the “road map” for peace proposed by the “Quartet” of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations).
“There might no longer be a Hamas,” he said, “but a lot of little Al Qaedas.”
Another 20 percent of the Palestinian electorate votes for Hamas, but this support can move to others (as it has previously from Fateh to Hamas), and while this group might go along with Hamas in accepting some of the Quartet proposals as they stand, the base would collapse and so would Hamas. (It would be as if the Republican or Democratic party in the United States abandoned its base to secure the support of independents.) In addition to committing political suicide by unconditionally accepting Quartet conditions, “Hamas would be left naked and in the cold,” Ghazi said, “without any cards left to negotiate, as Arafat was in the end. We can only gradually bring the base along, but not now or all at once.” (Ghazi clearly belongs to Hamas’s “moderate” wing. He has publicly declared that the Palestinian plight is partly its own fault, and not entirely Israel’s, and he was temporarily “suspended” from Hamas for opposing Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in the summer of 2007.)
Hamas’s talk of justice against oppression is “a big lie,” insisted Ben Israel. “So, what’s their target if not the children?” He answered his own question with unforgiving logic:
“The bus by itself? Who were the other persons in the bus or in a restaurant? Soldiers? No, they were all either children or women or male civilians, and I think this is the main moral difference between guerrilla fighters—freedom fighters—and the terrorists. When an Israeli army unit is attacked in the occupied territories, it is not terrorism. But bombing children in a bus with the excuse that one day they will be soldiers is a morally wrong attitude. What willprevent us from dropping some doomsday weapon on Gaza and end the conflict with the Palestinians in a few seconds? Or, not to be so extreme, to send our air force to daily bomb refugee camps, with conventional weapons: We can kill more than ten thousand people a day with this ‘method.’ The only ‘obstacle’ is ethical.”
“But isn’t Hamas’s forgoing any help from Al Qaeda also an ‘ethical’ choice on their part?” I asked.
“It’s true Al Qaeda isn’t our problem, and Hamas doesn’t have their [Qaeda’s] ambition. But if they tried to bring in Al Qaeda, that would be their end. We would annihilate them.”
“And annihilating Hamas, what would that accomplish in the end?” I asked.
“That they would never have a chance to annihilate us. Look, don’t you think we want peace, that I want peace? Just as one of my sons leaves the army, another has to go in; my wife hasn’t slept for three years, and she won’t sleep for at least another three. I won’t let my children ride a public bus. You know, to tell you the truth, if we had peace and open borders, and Palestinians settled here and became the majority, I would be sad that we no longer had a Jewish homeland. I would regret it. But I wouldn’t go to war to stop it, provided we could all live in an open society. But Hamas doesn’t want that, and I don’t think the Palestinians want it enough to do something seriously about it, or they would have. They have the leaders they choose, or allow.”
At Khalil Shikaki’s home I met Hashim Abdul Raziq, the minister of prisons for the Palestinian Authority, who spent seventeen years in Israeli jails. His young son was with him on the couch. “Do you think that I don’t want peace?” he said, and pulled his son near him in an embrace. “Do you think I want my son to suffer what I have suffered? Do you think we are really that crazy?”
Later I recalled Betawi telling me how glad he would be to sacrifice himself and his sons for the cause, if need be. Betawi is many things, but he is not crazy.
THE TWO FACES OF HAMAS
“We have no problem with a sovereign Palestinian state over all our lands within the ‘67 borders, living in calm,” Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya told me in his Gaza City office in late June 2006, shortly before it was blasted in an Israeli missile attack, “but we need the West as a partner to help us through, to have a dialogue of civilizations, not a clash of civilizations.”
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Haniya’s pitch to Western governments comes down to “We need you, as you need us.” He has asked that Americans and Europeans end their sanctions against his government and recognize that the Arab and Muslim world sees Hamas’s election to power as a genuine exercise in democracy. Engaging his government, Haniya says, would be the best opportunity for the American administration to reverse the steep decline of the United States in the esteem of Arabs and Muslims everywhere. If Palestine were the Mother of All Problems, Haniya argued, so could it also be the key to the solution.