That Israeli policy engendered suicide bombing was acknowledged by Rabin. Having originally promoted indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon ‘until there’s nobody left there’ – he was defence minister at the time – he finally came to the view that ‘terror cannot be finished by one war; it’s total nonsense.’ By replacing ‘PLO terrorism’ with ‘Shia terrorism’, he acknowledged, Israel had done ‘the worst thing’ in the struggle against terrorism: ‘Not one PLO terrorist,’ he said, ‘has ever made himself into a live bomb.’
According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, today’s suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom – sacrificing oneself for God – increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. ‘It’s despair,’ El-Sarraj states baldly, ‘a despair where living becomes no different from dying.’ When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride. ‘In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,’ Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. ‘Not any longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we’d simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.’
