The State of the Jews by Edward Alexander

Author:Edward Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2012-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Professors for Suicide Bombing: The Explosive Power of Boredom

Of the variegated forms of murderous assault that the Palestinian Arabs unleashed against Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada—often called the Oslo War—starting in September 2000, none proved so cruel or lethal, or so perfectly embodied absolute evil, as suicide bombings, which killed a large percentage of the 1,100 Israelis and 64 foreigners murdered during the war. Yet none exercised so hypnotic a spell upon, or elicited so much fawning admiration from, the “learned classes” in England and America. In July of 2004, when the second Intifada had nearly run its course (Arafat died in November), the British press reported that London mayor Ken Livingstone had given a “warm welcome” to the Muslim cleric Dr. al-Qaradawi, who ardently defended Palestinian suicide bombers on the grounds that they were carrying out “martyrdom operations,” which he pronounced definitely permissible “within the rules of Islam.” This prompted the Sunday Telegraph to remark that Qaradawi held many views “that might raise even more eyebrows around an Islington dinner table: after all, there are now so many British people who seem depressingly ready to defend the deliberate targeting and blowing to pieces of Jewish grandmothers and small children that it is almost de rigueur.”1 The novelist Kurt Vonnegut weighed in with praise for the killers because “they are dying for their own self-respect.”2

In the course of Arafat’s campaign to “soften up” Israel up for concessions even more far-reaching than those of the Oslo accords, well over 300 suicide bombers succeeded in detonating themselves—in crowded buses and cafes, in university cafeterias, at a Passover seder, and almost any place where children could be found in sizable numbers. They killed hundreds of people and maimed thousands. These human bombs, most of them teenagers inculcated from kindergarten with Jew-hatred, but also mothers and grandmothers, generally acted out of a superabundance of hope: hope of driving the Jews out of Israel; hope of making their families wealthy with the enormous bonuses at first guaranteed by Iraq and Arafat, then by other Arab (and Iranian) benefactors; and above all, hope of heaven. And so, of course, professors imprisoned in Marxist clichés of socioeconomic determinism concluded—on the basis of no evidence whatever—that the suicide bombers, mostly products of upper middle class families, had acted out of poverty, hopelessness, and despair. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz observed in The New Republic in 2002 that the “root cause” of suicide bombings appeared to be “money, education and privilege.”3 Indeed, Islamic Jihad had itself declared: “We do not take depressed people [to become suicide bombers].”4

Beyond this, liberalism’s angelic sociology was invoked to “explain” suicide bombing as the inevitable result and measure of Israeli oppression: “Each new act of murder and suicide,” wrote Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism, “testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt…. And even Nazism struck many of Israel’s critics as much too pale an explanation for the horrific nature of Israeli action.

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