A Palestinian doctor explains why so many of his people want to be martyrs

BY EYAD SARRAJ

Monday, Apr. 08, 2002

A few weeks ago, my sister, a professional and a mother of four,
was visibly shaken as she watched, on television, Israeli tanks
torturing the streets of a refugee camp and soldiers raping its homes.
She shocked us all when she declared that she would like to become a
martyr. A few hours later, a young Palestinian woman stunned the world
when she turned herself into a human bomb and exploded in Jerusalem,
killing one Israeli and wounding 150 others. In the weeks after, more
women joined the queue of suicide bombers as the world stood alarmed
and bewildered.

To understand why Palestinian men, and now women, are blowing
themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses is to understand the
Arab-Israeli conflict. Ours is a nation of anger and defiance. The
struggle today is how not to become a suicide bomber. We are told that
there are long queues of people willing to join the road to heaven, and
I believe it.

What propels people into such action is a long history of
humiliation and a desire for revenge that every Arab harbors. Since the
establishment of Israel in 1948 and the resultant uprooting of
Palestinians, a deep-seated feeling of shame has taken root in the Arab
psyche. Shame is the most painful emotion in the Arab culture,
producing the feeling that one is unworthy to live. The honorable Arab
is the one who refuses to suffer shame and dies in dignity.

The 35 years of Israeli military occupation of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip has served as a continuous reminder of Arab
weakness. But it was the destruction of the P.L.O. in Lebanon by Ariel
Sharon that decisively shifted the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation to
the occupied territories and Israel. Helplessness and shame gave way to
anger that later poured into the streets as defiance. That was the
first intifadeh.

Suddenly Palestinians felt that they were restoring their
honor by fighting the aggressor, by not being helpless victims. Facing
a superior Israeli army with its formidable arsenal, they felt morally
victorious as the children of the stones became heroes of defiance.
While that sense of victory served Arafat as a psychological platform
to launch his peace initiative and recognition of Israel, it was the
Oslo agreement and the peace process that followed that disillusioned
the Palestinians and threw them into a new episode of confrontation.
The reluctance of Israeli governments to implement promised withdrawals
from Palestinian land, and then the catastrophic failure of the Camp
David talks, prepared the fertile soil for a new breed of militants and
suicide bombers.

It was the re-entry of Sharon to the political scene that
sparked the new intifadeh. Scores of Palestinians were killed and
maimed as Sharon declared his intention to cause as many casualties as
possible. This time around, however, Israeli soldiers were not on foot
and not even visible as they shot from their tanks. Palestinian
militants shifted their target to the exposed Israeli civilians in
markets and cafes. For the extremist militant, there is no difference
between Israelis. They are the enemy; they are all the same.

In every case of martyrdom, there is a personal story of
tragedy and trauma. A curious journalist once asked me to introduce him
to a potential martyr. When the journalist asked, “Why would you do
it?” he was told, “Would you fight for your country or not? Of course
you would. You would be respected in your country as a brave man, and I
would be remembered as a martyr.”

This is the influence of the teaching of the Koran, the most
potent and powerful book in Arabia for the past 14 centuries. In the
holy book, God promised Muslims who sacrificed themselves for the sake
of Islam that they would not die. They would live on in paradise.
Muslims, men and women, even secularists, hold to the promise
literally. Heaven is then the ultimate reward of the devout who have
the courage to take the ultimate test of faith.

What the young man did not say was that he was burning with a
desire for revenge. He was a tearful witness, at the age of six, to his
father’s beating by Israeli soldiers. He would never forget seeing his
father taken away, bleeding from the nose.

As Sharon was taking Arafat hostage and grinding the salt of
humiliation into the sour wounds, he was taking us into a new horrific
level of madness. Another Palestinian girl blew herself up in Jerusalem
last week, killing two Israelis and wounding more. She will not be the
last.
Dr. Eyad Sarraj is a psychiatrist and founder of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights

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