Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (28 page)

A more benign version of Culture Talk can be found in a piece by Sohail Hashmi, a professor of international relations at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Writing in the
Washington Post
, Hashmi is struck by how some Islamic scholars, such as the popular Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi of Egypt, can strongly condemn some terrorist attacks (like those of 9/11) but not others (like the suicide bombings in Israel): “It is the religious scholars as much as
the bomb makers who are responsible for sending young men and women—often impressionable teenagers—on their murderous missions with promises of a martyr’s reward.” Hashmi is disturbed because “suicide bombings challenge two fundamental principles of Islamic ethics: the prohibition against suicide and the deliberate killing of noncombatants.” At the same time, they can also not be “reconciled with Islam’s rejection of the idea of collective responsibility.”

The point of view of the suicide bomber has best been brought out in an article in
The Times
(London) titled “Inside the World of the Palestinian Suicide Bomber.” The reader is introduced to Yunis, a twenty-seven-year-old art school graduate “who was preparing for a suicide mission that might be days or weeks away.” Yunis explains his decision as, first of all, a response to a very contemporary political reality, the occupation: “My aim is to prohibit settlers from enjoying their lives here. My aim is to force the Israeli checkpoint out of my country. If they leave in peace, I have no intention of following them into their areas. But if they remain here I shall use the methods at my disposal to force them out.” His decision is also an acknowledgment of another aspect of reality, the simple fact of a technological imbalance between the Israeli state and Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories: “I know I cannot stand in front of a tank that would wipe me out within seconds, so I will use myself as a weapon. They call it terrorism. I say it is self-defence.” But he also intends the act as an ode to freedom. Life, he declares, is “precious,” which is why “we have no choice but to fight”: “Freedom is not handed as a gift. History is testimony to the fact that major sacrifices have to be made to attain it.” Claiming that suicide bombers are “educated strugglers” and “not terrorists,” Yunis delivers his final message: “At the moment of executing my mission, it will not be purely to kill
Israelis. The killing is not my ultimate goal, though it is part of the equation. My act will carry a message beyond to those responsible and the world at large that the ugliest thing is for a human being to be forced to live without freedom.”

I have often wondered whether the label “suicide bombing” accurately captures either the practice or the motivation behind it. Clearly, the prime objective of the suicide bomber is not to terminate his or her own life but that of others defined as enemies. We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life—both our own and that of others—to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism. The danger of a moral discussion by itself (how can any culture condone suicide) is that it quickly turns into a replay of Culture Talk, stereotyping individuals and preventing any deliberation about alternative strategies. Thus the need to combine a moral discussion with a broad historical and political one.

Like the left-wing guerrilla, the right-wing settler, too, blurs the boundary between the civil and the military: a large proportion of the fighting force is often made up of civilian commandos, and all adult males, as in South Africa, or all adults, male or female, as in Israel, undergo compulsory military training and are drafted into reserve forces placed on short call. It is the spectacular expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza after the Six-Day War of 1967, and particularly after the 1993 Oslo talks, that explains the context that produced the suicide bomber.

Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War of 1967. The movement of settlers into the Occupied
Territories did not involve significant numbers until the Yom Kippur War of 1973-1974. In this period, a rapidly growing religious movement, led by the Kookists (followers of Rabbi Kook), gave religious sanction to a political program for settler conquest and supremacy. The Kookist movement took off when a group of rabbis, hawkish young secularists, Kookists, and other religious Zionists who had served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and fought in Israel’s wars formed a group they called Gush Emunim, the “Bloc of the Faithful.” For Kookists, the victory of Israel in 1967 “was conclusive proof that Redemption was indeed under way and God was indeed pushing history forward to its final consummation.” There was no question of withdrawing from any of the Occupied Territories, for “the return of every inch of the sacred land would be a victory for the forces of evil.” Whereas labor Zionism tried to normalize Jewish life, the Gush tried to exceptionalize it, believing that “because Jews had been chosen by God, they were essentially different from all other nations and were not bound by the same rules,” including UN resolutions forbidding Jewish settlement of conquered Palestinian territory.

After the Yom Kippur War, the Gush formed “a master plan for the settlement of the whole of the West Bank: the aim was to import hundreds of thousands of Jews into the area and to colonize all the strategic mountain strongholds.” On Israeli Independence Day in 1976, nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching from one part of Samaria to another. When the new right-wing Likud Party came to power in 1977, Menachem Begin “visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkav Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him.” The Likud government “began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories.” Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israeli Lands Commission, began by declaring “his intention of settling one million
Jews on the West Bank within twenty years.” In 1978, each West Bank settlement became “responsible for security in its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from regular army units to protect their community and police roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment.” In March 1979, “the government established five regional councils on the West Bank with the power to levy taxes, supply services, and employ workers.” The Gush supplied 20 percent of the West Bank settlers, and “Gush members usually had key roles” in these councils.

Gush members generally agreed “that Palestinians had no rights to the land and that there was no place for them there.” The movement of settlers into the Occupied Territories took place in phases, accelerating with each successive one. Settlers numbered an estimated forty-six thousand by 1984, the end of the decade that followed the Yom Kippur War. By the time the Oslo Accord was signed a little less than ten years later, in 1993, there were roughly 200,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The irony is that the flow increased after the Oslo Accord. In the third decade, by the end of 2002, the number of settlers had doubled, to nearly 400,000—including those in East Jerusalem, now claimed by Israel. A recent Israeli human-rights report notes that Israeli settlements now control almost 42 percent of the West Bank, not including Palestinian East Jerusalem.

The reach of settlers goes beyond the land they directly control to shaping the conditions in which Palestinians eke out a living. Settlers in the Gaza Strip, for example, form 0.5 percent of its residents but control 20 percent of the land. According to Amira Hass in
Ha’aretz
, even after the so-called 1993 peace process, “settlers continued to dictate how the Palestinians would live—where a water pipe would not be, where a refugee camp would not expand, where cars would not drive and where a sewage treatment
plant would not be built…. It is an ‘axiom’ now that ‘state lands’ are only for Jews; that Palestinians need less land and water per head than Jews; that they do not deserve or require the same infrastructure or conveniences as Jews; that Palestinians live here because we allow them, not because it is their right…. That is the discrimination practiced every day, and every minute of every day. It is an alienating, burning insult, the same one familiar to the blacks of South Africa, the blacks of the United States, and the Jews of Eastern Europe.”

The Occupied Territories do not include East Jerusalem in official Israeli pronouncements. But life for Palestinians in Jerusalem is not very different. Though Palestinians make up more than a third of the population of “Israeli” Jerusalem, they “have access to only 6% of its land for all their residential, communal and commercial needs.” Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem are regularly demolished; Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions has documented “more than 300 in the past decade, with hundreds of demolition orders outstanding.” Even after the signing of the U.S.-designed road map, the Israeli government issued “dozens of demolition orders” in just a few weeks. According to Halper, “Israel argues that ‘East Jerusalem’ is not covered by the Road Map since it has been formally annexed to Israel.”

Without understanding this context, it is difficult to grasp the sense of hopelessness and despair that marked the beginning of the second intifada and the spate of suicide bombings. To one who came to political maturity at the height of the antiapartheid struggle, the contemporary debate on suicide bombing recalls an earlier antiapartheid debate around necklacing, a practice whereby township vigilante youths would dip a used tire in gasoline, place it around the neck of a suspected apartheid informer, and set it alight. As with suicide bombing, the debate on necklacing also
had two sides to it. Its moral side often sounded less like a critique of necklacing than a settler discourse on the lack of civilization among natives: What kind of society would countenance such a practice? In contrast, the debate among natives—in the ranks of liberation movements—was more often than not about the political effectiveness of necklacing in checking the proliferation of informers.

We can draw four lessons from that period. First, the more the moral debate gained the upper hand, the more the political debate was stifled. Second, the spread of necklacing was testimony to two closely related developments: on the one hand, the penetration of the antiapartheid resistance by agencies of the apartheid state, and, on the other, the spread of a militaristic culture of street gangs that in turn fueled a rough-and-ready vigilante culture among natives. Third, the political debate on necklacing had to distinguish between its immediate and long-term effectiveness. Immediately, it was difficult to argue that necklacing was not effective. To the contrary—just as with suicide bombing—necklacing, too, seemed to give public evidence that the oppressed were capable of mustering a force to counter the spreading tentacles of settler occupation. Many nodded in agreement when Winnie Mandela, fire in her eyes, declared at Munsieville, near Johannesburg, on April 13, 1985: “We have no guns—we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol. Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.” Even the African National Congress (ANC) leadership was reluctant to criticize the speech publicly. ANC president Oliver Tambo said as much to a summit meeting of nonaligned nations in Harare: “We are not happy with the necklace but we will not condemn people who have been driven to adopt such extremes.” Eventually, however, the political debate had to go beyond the
question of the immediate effectiveness of necklacing to probe its longer-run political costs: alienating allies, both at home and abroad, both when the wrong person was necklaced and when not, in which case it raised anxiety about growing militarism in the culture of resistance. The final lesson is of course that so long as there was no effective political alternative, it was difficult to discredit necklacing politically. Once a nonviolent way of ending apartheid did appear as an alternative, it was as if the sun had come up, the fog lifted, and there was a new dawn; in a land where few had dared even to whisper criticism only yesterday, hardly anyone could be found to champion necklacing the day after.

The South African debate on necklacing turned out to be part of a broader political debate on questions such as: Who is a settler and who a native? Who is the enemy and who are we? This debate pointed up the differences between settlers and natives and between three political views. The first to be formulated were two variants of nationalism, conservative and radical. For conservative nationalism, the answer was relatively simple: every immigrant was a settler. The point of the struggle against settler nationalism was to restore the situation that existed before settler conquest: native freedom guaranteed by a native state. Radical nationalism, however, made a distinction between immigrants and settlers. The settler was a person whose privilege was inscribed in law; alternately, immigrants were of different types, whites with privilege, nonwhites without. Whereas immigrants and natives could coexist in a single polity, settlers and natives could not. The point then was to rid the land of settlers who sought political power to undergird a privileged position in the economy and society. The radical-nationalist Pan African Congress summed up this point of view neatly, if rather crudely, in its motto: “One settler, one bullet.” Of greater relevance in shaping the future for a postapartheid
South Africa was the third point of view, which transcended both forms of nationalism. Here the problem was not the settler but the settler state, the legal setup that guaranteed settler privilege. Without a state that legally discriminated between settler and native, there would be no settler privilege and, thus, no settler, since all settlers would become as immigrants whose historical origins would cease to have significance in law. The enemy from this point of view was everyone who defended the power of the settler state. Instead of embracing a mirror image of settler ideology—by turning the identity “native” from a racial stigma into a badge of racial pride—the promise of postapartheid South Africa was to let go of both “settler” and “native” as twin political identities generated by the settler state. As the ANC put it so subversively in its Freedom Charter, South Africa belongs to all those who live in it. From a postapartheid point of view, the real issue in Palestine and Israel is not whether there should be one, two, or ten states but how to base any state on equal citizenship for all those who live in it.