Bombshell (18 page)

The Israelis consider the deaths of Palestinian children as “collateral damage.” They have done little to limit the number of unintended victims of their counter-terror policies. Israel is unwilling to take the steps to ensure that children are not killed by accident, especially if this increases the danger posed to its soldiers on the ground. Officially, the country has implemented rules of engagement regarding the use of targeted assassination. The military is supposed to adhere to six iron-clad conditions: “that arrest is otherwise impossible; that targets are strictly combatants; that senior cabinet members approve each attack; that civilian casualties are minimized; that operations are limited to areas not under Israeli control; and that targets are identified as a future threat. Unlike prison sentences, targeted killing cannot be meted out as punishment for past behavior. In 2002, a military panel established that targeting cannot be for revenge, but only for deterrence.”
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The fact
that such rules of engagement exist means nothing to the Palestinian civilians bearing the brunt of bombing campaigns. The Palestinian terrorist organizations' response appears to be to deliberately target Israeli women and children. This in turn outrages Israelis further and ramps up the next counter-terror measure, creating a bloody call-and-response cycle on both sides.

What both sides fail to grasp is how the cycles of violence persist and worsen over time. A demonstrable culture of martyrdom and a longing for death have evolved within Palestinian society. According to Eyad Serraj, a psychiatrist who treats Palestinians suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, at least 25 percent of young people in Gaza aspire to a martyr's death. Some refuse to go to school because they fear not seeing their parents again because of the possibility that they will be arrested or killed, or will not find their house when they come home, because the Israelis have destroyed it. “In the First Intifada, the danger was limited to the places where soldiers and stone-throwers clashed. Now death comes from the skies and anyone anywhere can be hit. This has created a state of chronic panic.”
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The pattern of violence makes the conflict multigenerational. Children who are brought up in this environment seek death and their parents will not dissuade them from following their dream. Palestinians live in the fear that they can die at any moment from aerial bombardment or a stray bullet. Becoming a bomber might in some ways be empowering, because at least a bomber chooses the time and place of his or her death. When failed female bomber Shefa'a Al Qudsi was asked whether she would discourage her daughter, Diana, from following in her footsteps and becoming a martyr, she said that she would teach Diana that education is the most important thing in life. But since children can be shot coming home from school, the best and the brightest Palestinian children become martyrs, whether or not they want to be. So if
Diana wanted to become a “living martyr,” Shefa'a would not stop her.
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Suicide attacks have simultaneously radicalized Israeli viewpoints and hardened their political positions. Israel's heavy-handed military tactics, checkpoint abuses, targeted killings, and collective punishment are all justified in the name of security. Human rights abuses and the systematic humiliation of Palestinians are either ignored or tolerated by a population consumed by fear. In the end, it is the civilians on both sides of the conflict who pay the price. Within a month of Shehadeh's targeted assassination, the Izzedine Al Qassam Brigades he once headed perpetrated several more attacks against Israelis, in Safad at Meiroun's crossroads and near Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. This began yet another new cycle of violence with escalation on both sides.

THE WOMEN OF HASHARON PRISON

Ahlam at-Tamimi remains in HaSharon prison, a sprawling, multistory concrete structure surrounded by tall palm trees, razor wire, guard dogs, and towers outside of Tel Aviv in the Plain of Sharon. The prison houses 106 other female security prisoners, 58 of them linked to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other Islamist-inspired groups, and 48 from the secular movement Fatah. The women range in age from seventeen to thirty. Like Ahlam, many are serving life sentences with no chance of parole. According to Hamas's leadership, the Israelis are holding around 12,000 prisoners of both sexes, including 400 children (people under the age of eighteen). Other reports claim 360 children, including 200 awaiting trial and another 145 serving various prison terms.
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The women at HaSharon are kept in a virtual labyrinth, behind seven iron doors and gates at the ends of long corridors to which few people are allowed access. To reach the cells, one must climb and descend one flight of stairs after another, up, down, and around,
like something out of an M.C. Escher drawing. Ahlam claims that the women of HaSharon have made the prison a beautiful place, an ersatz Garden of Eden. They have painted murals of roses and flowers and babies on the white walls and brought vibrant color to the gray and blue concrete jail.

Ahlam is located in Ward 11 with other Hamasawis (Hamas supporters) and several women from the Islamic Jihad. In some interviews, Ahlam refers to herself in the third person when she describes how “Ahlam brought jihad to the people” or says, “Since Ahlam entered prison, the Palestinians have become acquainted with the hidden aspect of Ahlam's personality. The idea of jihad and its agenda.”
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She can be extremely curt. When former
New York Times
reporter Judith Miller went to HaSharon prison in 2007 to talk with failed bombers, Ahlam brushed her aside: “We don't like America because of the war in Iraq and your support for the Zionists and Jews,” she declared, and abruptly turned away.
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She also monitors what all the other women say and feeds them pre-approved responses during interviews: “Say how many children you have, how they live, how they saw blood and murder,” she tells Kahira Sa'adi, another inmate, during an interview, as she listens to ensure that Hamas propaganda is properly disseminated.

While in prison, Ahlam married her cousin Nizar, who is incarcerated at another secure facility for acts of terrorism. Ahlam herself has become a celebrity. She has starred in documentaries, been the subject of poems, and been heralded in the Palestinian press and international media. Mutawakil Taha, head of the Palestinian Writer's Union and a former deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority, wrote a book honoring her and her husband, Nizar,
Ahlam ibn al Nabi
, in which he describes the couple as heroes. Two years after publication of the book, on April 7, 2008,
al Quds
newspaper quoted Taha saying how proud he was of the two prisoners, Nizar and Ahlam at-Tamimi. In the
al Quds
interview,
Taha explained: “I feel that the prisoners are martyrs in potential, and that we should bond with them without question or accounting. We should bond to the prisoners unconditionally as we bond to the martyrs and the homeland.”
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Avi Issacharoff,
Haaretz's
special correspondent for Arab affairs, claims that the lives of female suicide terrorists are no less tragic than those of male suicide bombers, yet the media accords these women more sympathy and treats them with kid gloves.
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In fact, when women perpetrate acts of terrorism, they draw eight times the media attention given to men. Many of the terrorist organizations are aware of this and exploit women accordingly. Some of the Palestinian groups deliberately select more attractive and telegenic operatives precisely for this reason. Looking at a police lineup of female Palestinian suicide bombers (both successful and preempted) you would be struck by how attractive many of them are. The groups are seeking that reaction, followed by the obvious question,
What could make such a pretty girl do that? There must be something seriously wrong.

Between 2002 and 2009, ninety-six Palestinian women attempted suicide attacks, though just eight were successful. Most of the women were preempted or caught before their attack could be completed, and a handful changed their minds at the last moment. Most of the attempts were conducted during the height of the Second Intifada, before the Israelis erected the security fence (known by some as the Apartheid Wall) to separate themselves from the Palestinians. According to Israeli counter-terrorism expert Anat Berko, Palestinian women are increasingly involved in all levels of terrorist activity, everything from scouting targets and smuggling guns and explosives to being suicide bombers. Berko claims that now that there is a sufficient number of successful and unsuccessful operatives, a profile of Palestinian female suicide bombers seems to be emerging. “The male suicide bombers tend to be introverts, the
women less so. The women are older and better educated than their male counterparts. Whereas the men are usually in their late teens and early twenties with scant education, studies carried out by Shin Bet [the Israeli security agency] on sixty-seven women recruited to become suicide bombers from 2002 to 2005 found that 33 percent were college graduates and an additional 39 percent had finished high school.”
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The terrorist organizations doubly exploit the women. They deliberately use women to avoid detection and catch the enemy off guard, knowing that the bombers will later become an issue for the Israelis with international human rights organizations. Several of the women, like Noor Al Hashlamoon, have given birth in the prison. The Israelis permit children up to two years old to stay with their mothers while incarcerated, and there are a half dozen babies and toddlers at HaSharon. Yusuf az-Zaqq, at one year and three months, is their youngest prisoner. The long-term imprisonment of children violates international law and puts Israel in an uncomfortable position when Hamas tries to negotiate for their release (for example, during prisoner exchanges). For critics, the women are mere pawns. The terrorist organizations consider the women strong and clever enough to coordinate and execute suicide attacks, but once convicted “they morph into delicate, fragile creatures deserving early release by dint of their femininity.”
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In an interview with Al Jazeera television, the Shi'a cleric and spiritual head of Hezbollah, Grand Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died on July 4, 2010, explained: “It is true that Islam has not asked women to carry out jihad, but it
permits them
to take part if the necessities of defensive war dictate that women should carry out any regular military operations, or suicide operations … We believe that the women who carry out suicide bombings are martyrs who are creating a new, glorious history for Arab and Muslim women [emphasis added].”
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The women in HaSharon prison tend to provide a laundry list of reasons for their involvement in terrorist activities. The death of family members is most often cited as the straw that broke the camel's back. To understand their motivations, it is important to differentiate between the structural conditions that affect the population as a whole (like the injustices of the Occupation) and the reasons specific to the individual bomber. One study suggests nationalism is the essential motivation. “There is no religious reason that in itself drives a man to carry out a suicide operation. Religion reinforces and helps the nationalist motivation. It is a political drive with religious backing.”
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This observation is congruent with the would-be martyrs' descriptions of their motivations for undertaking suicide missions.

WAFA AL BIS

In discussions with the journalist Judith Miller, one bomber confessed that two of her cousins had been killed and her brother jailed. The army invaded her city and demolished houses there. A war raged inside her: Shouldn't she do something? “The Israelis were killing us like rats and nobody was doing anything, not the Arabs, nobody. And I thought: No one will help us. I must make these dogs know how we feel. Even bullets that miss make noise.”
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Miller discovered how difficult it is to assess the underlying motivations of female suicide bombers when she spoke with Wafa Al Bis, another inmate. Born into wretched poverty in Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, one of twelve children, Al Bis had much of her body and fingertips burned in a freak cooking accident at home the year before her failed mission. She did not like the feel of the suicide pack or the outfit she was expected to wear. She told her handlers that the pants were too tight and the explosive pack too heavy. She felt uncomfortable. Her handlers assured her that they could get her other clothes. Wafa hedged and wondered to
herself why she was doing this. Why was she at the checkpoint? She claimed that she was there because she had been coaxed—no, coerced—into becoming a martyr by Abul Khair, an older man from the Abu Riesh Brigade
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(an offshoot of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade). She wished that she had never met him. During her interview, her eyes welled up with tears and she explained that when she looked into the mirror she did not recognize the reflection that stared back at her.
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Al Bis claimed that she had no choice in the matter and had been coerced, but then she was forced to recant her story when the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade aired her pre-attack last-will-and-testament video.

The issue of coercion is often neglected in discussions about terrorism. There is an assumption that most suicide bombers want to perpetrate the act. This is complicated by journalistic accounts after the fact, when the operative has become a hero in the community. Many interviews with the families and friends of the bombers can be misleading because there is a great deal of community pressure to support what their son or daughter or friend has just done. Because there is such a disconnect between the families' public and private faces, the grieving process is largely misunderstood and statements such as “I wish I had more than one daughter to give to the cause” create the impression that life is cheap for Palestinians and that the parents do not care whether their children become martyrs. This pressure explains the seemingly contradictory statements given to reporters by Al Masri's family as well as Al Bis's changing story.