“A different suicide bombing has taken location in Israel,” said the Tv announcer. “But this isn’t just any suicide bomber. This time it is a young girl.” What? A girl in her teens, yet to blossom and venture into life, has place her soul at the mercy of God. (Aiat Al-Khras blew herself up to attempt to calm her anger and frustration and to lessen her own discomfort and that of her folks by killing some Israeli soldiers and civilians.)
A girl? It boggles my mind that a girl my age has sacrificed her life. A girl – no offense at my going on and on that this was a girl – of course I am into girl energy and all that. But what would make her give up her life so surely?
What were her motives? Had been they hatred? Have been they humiliation? Or did they spring from the want to prove a point? Is it a religious upbringing with promises of paradise in reward for acts of martyrdom? Is it the parental support she received for her convictions? Is it brainwashing, or rather encouragement from a Palestinian society with no other implies of fighting back against oppression and humiliation from Israelis?
On April 6, 1994, 40 days just after a Jewish terrorist shot dead 29 Palestinians praying in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque for the duration of the holy month of Ramadan, the 1st Palestinian suicide bomber struck in the Israeli town of Afula, killing nine.
As opposed to the Japanese kamikaze, Palestinian suicide bombers are neither merchandise of a passive and unquestioning obedience to political authority nor pressed into service against their will. Religious or ideological fervor appears to offer you only a partial explanation. And from what is recognized about their individual backgrounds they are also not social misfits or clinical psychopaths.
Without having exception, the suicide bombers have lived their lives on the getting end of a technique created to trample their rights and crush just about every hope of a brighter future.
In the eyes of a lot of Palestinians and other individuals the Israeli occupation is virtually indistinguishable from South African apartheid. Confronted by a seemingly endless mixture of death, destruction, restriction, harassment and humiliation, they conclude that ending life as a bomb – rather than having it ended by a bullet – endows them, even if only in their final moments, with a feeling of goal and manage previously thought of out of attain. The resort to suicide bombings also has a…