Update on suicide bombings. posted by Richard Seymour

There was, as you can see below, a flood of commentary on yesterday's article on suicide bombing. There are a few points I want to make, but first of all it should be of some interest to reconsider those sentences cited by Linda Grant in her communication with Norm:

Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by
interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.

This was bewildering at first, and communication with Linda didn't make it less so. She is, for a start, extremely polite and helpful. She also appears to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. I won't quote directly, since I do not have permission to do so, but I will say that Linda was not able to provide a reference to the cited research. It was apparently in Haaretz, about a year ago, but their archive isn't free. Googling has yielded nothing, and the supplementary information that was provided didn't seem to contribute to Linda's case.

For instance, this shows that one Palestinian group is busily persuading young Palestinians that there is glory in suicide bombing, but it doesn't mention hair gel or image consciousness. This suggests that those who typically carry out suicide bombings have been witness to Israeli brutality, but it doesn't say anything about hair gel or image consciousness. And this suggests that general despair at the situation of Palestinians imposed by Israel is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombings, but it doesn't mention...

In fact, some actual research that I was able to dig up points to two key factors in the phenomenon of suicide bombers in Palestine. One is individual level economic and social factors; the other is organizational strategy. Neither is sufficient alone, but both are necessary components.

The blogger, Lawrence of Cyberia , reports:

Shin Bet interviews intensively every intercepted suicide bomber to find out their motives, and reports that the single most common motivator is having a relative or close friend killed by Israeli occupation forces.

On the role of women suicide bombers, Israeli sources attribute a mixture of motives: nationalist, religious, personal, socio-economic... But no hair gel, and no concern for one's image. Indeed, one theme that seems to persist is that one has either witnessed Israeli brutality directly or experienced it in the family. This fits in with the argument cited from Jacqueline Rose's piece yesterday, specifically that "today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada".

As several interlocutors pointed out, ideology must have a substantial weight in the decision to detonate oneself in a crowded area. I also mentioned individual psychological conditions, as there often appear to be mental health issues involved (wasn't it Frantz Fanon who first established a connection between colonial war and mental disease?). All of which leads me to insist on my main conclusion, which should be so obvious that it ought not bear repeating: No occupation, no suicide bombers.

Whatever other factors you insist upon, no matter how wrong (strategically and morally) you reckon suicide bombing to be, and no matter how much we emphasise the fate of victims, the above aphorism is untouchable and unexceptionable. The political conclusions are obvious.

Update: Linda Grant, although she is on to what I am up to on my blog, took the trouble to e-mail me the article she was alluding to. When someone posted this article on the MediaLens message board and suggested that it was the one Linda was alluding to, I wasn't so sure. The reason is because I can't see any justification for the sentence alluded to above in the article cited. It is an interesting article, but I don't think it says that hair gel is the number one request among failed suicide bombers, and I don't think it quite qualifies as research. Nor does it appear to say that suicide bombers do it because it is cool. You tell me.