The Great War for Civilisation (98 page)

The Israelis took their revenge by raiding Jenin two days later and destroying its police station, unaware—or failing to comprehend—that it was their own murder of Hardan that sent Mohamed Nasr on his frightening mission. The killing of Hardan—intended to strike fear into Islamic Jihad—had the opposite effect. It turned Mohamed Nasr into a suicide bomber.

I once asked the head of the Lebanese Hizballah movement if he could explain to me how the mind of a suicide bomber works. It was his first Western television interview. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was dressed in his black turban and robes. He had formerly been the Hizballah's military commander in southern Lebanon and from his legions had emerged the first Arab suicide bombers who would— after more than a decade and a half—sap the morale of Israel's retreating army of occupation. Explain to me as a Westerner, I asked him, how a man can immolate himself.

There are qualities which our fighters have. He who drives his truck into the enemy's military base to blow himself up and to become a martyr, he drives in with a hopeful heart, smiling and happy because he knows he is going to another place. Death, according to our belief, is not oblivion. It is not the end. It is the beginning of a true life.

The best metaphor for a Westerner to try to understand this truth is to think of a person being in a sauna bath for a long time. He is very thirsty and tired and hot and he is suffering from the effects of the high temperature. Then he is told that if he opens the door, he can go into a quiet, comfortable room, drink a nice cocktail and hear classical music. Then he will open the door and go through without hesitation, knowing that what he leaves behind is not a high price to pay, and what awaits him is of much greater value. I cannot think of another example to explain this idea to a Westerner.

Nasrallah enjoyed metaphors, similes, like the Hizballah's “martyr” posters which so often show the dead in paradise, surrounded by rivers and tulips and weeping willows. Is that where the suicide bombers really believe they are going? To the rivers and the honey and the trees and—yes, of course—the virgins? Or the quiet, comfortable room with a cocktail and classical music?

The idea that sacrifice is a noble ideal—and let us, for a moment, put aside the iniquity of murdering children in a Jerusalem pizzeria—is common to Western as well as Eastern society. Our First World War calvaries in France are covered with commemorations to men—Bill Fisk's dead comrades—who supposedly “laid down their lives” or “gave their lives” for their country—even though most died in appalling agony, praying only that they would live. When, years after our conversation, Nasrallah's own son was killed in a suicidal assault on an Israeli army position in southern Lebanon, the Hizballah leader insisted that he receive not condolences but congratulations. Nasrallah appeared on Lebanese television, laughing and smiling, beaming with delight as he spoke to well-wishers on the phone. His son's young fiancée also expressed her pride in her dead husband-to-be. But she did not smile.

If the idea of self-sacrifice is thus explicable, it is clearly not a natural phenomenon. In a normal society, in a community whose people feel they are treated equally and with justice, we regard suicide as a tragic aberration, a death produced—in the coroner's eloquent lexicon—when “the balance of the mind is disturbed.” But what happens when the balance of a whole society's mind has been disturbed? Walking with a friend through the wreckage of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp in Beirut in the year 2000, I could only wonder at the stability of the survivors who still lived there amid the concrete huts and the football-sized rats. They have been homeless, many of them, since their original dispossession fiftytwo years ago. If I lived there, I tell my friend, I would commit suicide. And that is the point.

When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the “enemy” is all-powerful, when one's own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, “two-legged beasts,” then the mind moves beyond reason. It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time—not entirely with my tongue in my cheek—that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds. This, I am sure, was the suicide bomber to whom Nasrallah was referring, the one who drives into the military base “smiling and happy.” I later interviewed one of the few surviving American marines to have seen the bomber. “All I can remember,” he told me, “was that the guy was smiling.”

I spent months studying the suiciders of Lebanon. They were mostly single men, occasionally women, often the victims of Israeli torture or the relatives of family members who had been killed in battle with Israel. They might receive their orders while at prayer in the
masjid
or mosque in their south Lebanese villages. The imam would be told to use a certain phrase in his sermon—a reference to roses or gardens or water or a kind of tree. The cleric would not understand the purpose of these words, but in his congregation a young man would know that his day of “martyrdom” had arrived.

In Gaza, even before the Oslo agreement, I discovered an almost identical pattern. As in Lebanon, the would-be “martyr” would spend his last night reading the Koran. He would never say a formal goodbye to his parents. But he would embrace his mother and father and tell them not to cry if he were one day to die. Then he would set off to collect his explosives. Just as Mohamed Nasr had done in Qabatya.
¹⁰¹

Yet there is a terrible difference with the suicide bombers of Palestine. However terrifying, the Japanese kamikaze—“divine wind”—pilots of the Second World War attacked battleships and aircraft carriers, not hospitals. The Lebanese largely followed this priority: they usually went for military targets. I was puzzled why the Lebanese should have been queuing to watch
Pearl Harbor
when it opened in Beirut in July 2001—until I saw the young men studying the cinema stills of equally young Japanese pilots tying their “martyrdom” bandanas around their foreheads. In similar fashion, often with headbands containing a Koranic quotation, the Hizballah targeted the Israeli army and its militia allies. They blew up entire barracks and killed soldiers by the score. The Palestinians learned from all this. But more and more, their suicide bombers—including the women bombers who emerged in more recent years—have targeted Israeli civilians. A battleship or an Israeli tank is one thing; a three-year-old waiting for his young mother to cut his pizza for him quite another.
¹⁰²

Amnesty International devoted a whole report to the targeting of civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers. Between September 2000 and July 2002, at least 350 civilians, most of them Israeli, had been killed in over 128 attacks by Palestinian armed groups or individuals. “Civilians should never be the focus of attacks, not in the name of security and not in the name of liberty,” Amnesty said. “We call on the leadership of all Palestinian armed groups to cease attacking civilians, immediately and unconditionally.” The oldest victim of a suicide attack, according to Amnesty, was Chanagh Rogan, killed in a Passover bombing at a Netanya hotel on 27 March 2002. She was ninety years old.
¹⁰³

I called a Palestinian friend in Ramallah to ask about this, to ask how young Palestinians could rejoice in the streets at the pizzeria massacre. She expressed her abhorrence at what happened—she was genuine in this—but tried to explain that Palestinians had suffered so many civilian casualties since the first intifada began that they found joy in any suffering inflicted on their enemy. There was a feeling, she said, that “they should suffer too”; which, of course—and the principle applies, though not the historical parallel—is exactly how Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris's area bombing of German civilians was explained in Britain. They should suffer too. And save for a few souls like the bishop of Chichester, blitzed Britons supported Harris all the way. But I go back to my own reaction when I reached the blitzed Sbarro pizza house. Unforgivable. I ask again: What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on earth, recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin? Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own people's tragedy. His was not an act of “mindless terror,” the words Israeli spokesmen use as they try to deceive both the world and their own people. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured and killed in terrible numbers. The pressure cooker of the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.
¹⁰⁴

If only—how often we use that phrase about the Middle East—if only the United States administration had seriously addressed the Arab–Israeli dispute in 2001, instead of wasting its energies in the creation of another war in the region, how much might have been gained, how much suffering alleviated, how much the pain of future history might have been spared us. In February 2001, Palestinians and Israelis were fighting a civil war. And what did the United States do? It bombed Iraq. What did the new secretary of state Colin Powell do? He arrived in the Middle East not to confront the furnace of the war in Israel and “Palestine,” but to “re-energise” sanctions against Iraq and reforge the anti-Iraqi Arab coalition that ceased to exist more than a decade before. There's a story—probably apocryphal—that as the Red Army stormed into Berlin in 1945, German civil servants were still trying to calculate the Third Reich's paperclip ration for 1946. Powell was now the paperclip man.

Already he had sent instructions to U.S. embassies in the region that they were no longer to refer to the occupied Palestinian territories as “occupied.” They were henceforth to be referred to as “disputed.” And immediately the American media—and quite a number of British newspapers—fell into line. I recall a phone interview with the BBC World Service in early 2001—they had called me on my mobile while I was sitting in a traffic jam in East Beirut—in which I was “twinned” with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem. And the moment I referred to the “Israeli-occupied territories,” an Israeli voice boomed back: “But Mr. Fisk, the territories are
not
occupied by Israel!” I waited for a second. Aha, I countered, so you mean that the soldiers who stopped me on the road between Ramallah and Jenin last week were Swiss! Or were they Burmese? But this was no laughing matter. An occupied territory might generate violent resistance which could demand international legitimacy. But violence used over a “dispute”—a real estate problem, something that might be settled in the courts—was obviously illegitimate, criminal, mindless; indeed, it could be portrayed as the product of that well-worn libel, “mindless violence.” Powell—and the Israelis, of course—wanted to delegitimise the intifada.

All of this, however, obscured a momentous change within Arab society: the one great transition I have witnessed in almost thirty years reporting the Middle East. When I first visited the West Bank scarcely nine years after the 1967 war, there was in the occupied territories an Israeli-controlled Palestinian police militia, an army of collaborators—they even wore black berets—who “controlled” a supine and humiliated Palestinian people. North of the Israeli border, a Lebanese population lived in fear of Israeli military invasion. Israeli troops had only to cross the frontier to send a quarter of a million Lebanese civilians fleeing in panic to Beirut. To the east, millions of Iraqis lived in grovelling obedience to the Baath party.

Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid. The regimes are as timid as ever, loyal and supposedly “moderate” allies obeying Washington's orders, taking their massive subventions from the United States, holding their preposterous elections, shaking in fear lest their people at last decide that “regime change”—from within their societies, not the Western version imposed by invasion—is overdue. It is the Arabs as a people—brutalised and crushed for decades by corrupt dictators—who are no longer running away. The Lebanese in Beirut, under siege by Israel, learned to refuse to obey the invader's orders. The Hizballah proved that the mighty Israeli army could be humbled. The two Palestinian intifadas showed that Israel could no longer impose its will on an occupied land without paying a terrible price. The Iraqis first rose up against Saddam and then, after the Anglo-American invasion, against the occupation armies. No longer did the Arabs run away. The old Sharon policy into which the American neo-conservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—of beating the Arabs till they come to heel or until they “behave” or until an Arab leader can be found “to control his own people”—is now as bankrupt as the Arab regimes that continue to work for the world's only superpower.

This is not to recommend the social and military “people's” revolutions which have occurred in the Middle East. But in Lebanon, “Palestine” and Iraq, the suicide bomber has become the symbol of this new fearlessness. Once an occupied people have lost their fear of death, the occupier is doomed. Once a man or woman stops being afraid, he or she cannot be made to fear again. Fear is not a product that can be re-injected into a population through re-invasion or harsher treatment or air attacks or walls or torture.