Posted on 09/12/2003 8:11:44 AM PDT by knighthawk
HERZLIYA, Israel - Just a few months ago, I was writing upbeat editorials about the U.S.-championed "road map" for Middle East peace. Now that Hamas and Israel are fighting an all-out war, I feel embarrassed to reread them. On Tuesday, suicide bombers struck twice -- once in Jerusalem, once in Tel Aviv. Even in this out-of-the-way suburb where I'm attending a conference hosted by the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, people are on edge, worried that Hamas might try something apocalyptic.
Like many Western observers, I'd let myself become overly encouraged by the pragmatism of Mahmoud Abbas, whose short-lived tenure as Palestinian Authority prime minister ended this week. Although Abbas never had the firepower to destroy Hamas and its ilk, he at least denounced terrorism "regardless of justifications or motives" -- common sense by Western standards, but front-page apostasy to the many Arabs who see suicide bombers as warriors of "national liberation."
The stock explanation for Abbas's demise is that he was undermined by the more popular PA Chairman, Yasser Arafat. There's truth to that. But it's also true that societies get the leaders they deserve. Over the course of Abbas's 100-day premiership, Palestinians were effectively asked to decide between a bland technocrat bent on negotiating a reasonable land-for-peace deal with Israel; and a terroristic pariah who even the Europeans have come to despise. It is because the choice seemed so obvious to Westerners that many of us were hopeful. Yet at the end of the day, the Palestinians chose door number two by a wide margin.
The basic question is this: What is it about Palestinian society that causes its members to be so unshakably addicted to terrorism -- even when a brave man like Abbas gives them a chance to go cold turkey?
Of all the speakers at this week's conference, Tel Aviv University scholar Ariel Merari had the best answer. "There is no universal terrorist personality type -- no common pathology in the clinical sense," the psychology professor and terrorism expert said. "These people come from a broad cross-section of Palestinian society. They drift into the organization as a form of social activity. They're taken into the bosom of a loving group, in which they find friendship and a cause."
The bonding agent between group and recruit is boosted status. In Palestinian society, becoming a "martyr" is seen as an act of heroism -- a shortcut to fame and respect available to even the most anonymous loser. A Jew who blew himself up amid Palestinians would be seen as a demented murderer. When Palestinians do it, on the other hand, people put their faces on posters and give out candy.
"There's an organizational process that builds up from recruitment to self-explosion," says Merari, who has studied every suicide bomber to have struck the Middle East in the past two decades. "Because of the community atmosphere and group process, the person is trapped once he signs on. He can't back out without losing self-respect."
The means by which this "community atmosphere" is inculcated are hardly subtle. On PA television broadcasts -- which were screened at this week's conference with English subtitles -- Muslim clerics tell viewers that 72 black-eyed virgins await martyrs in paradise; and that they can act as "heavenly advocate" for 70 hand-picked friends and family who might otherwise not be worthy. (Do the math: Assuming at least 1.4% of Palestinians martyr themselves, everyone gets to heaven.)
The new, UN-funded textbooks used in PA schools likewise exhort 10-year-olds to fetishize death. A popular vignette broadcast on PA television -- also shown at the conference -- features a teenage boy dying from Israeli gunfire and ascending to a heaven populated exclusively by adoring young females. The vignette is scored with music, and bathed in gaudy sentimentality. The women are all gorgeous.
The terrorist and Palestinian society feed off one another, in other words -- with the terrorist earning self-esteem, and the whipped up population-at-large exulting in his exploits as if he were a sports hero. In such a toxic intellectual climate, it's no surprise that the staid, compromising tactics of Abbas would be rejected. Romanticized violence, embodied by Arafat and his terror puppets, is the currency of the realm.
Everyone around Abbas knew all this. A Jerusalem-based journalist friend of mine spoke with Abbas's son at a conference in Egypt recently. "He begged his father not to take the job," my friend told me. "The whole family did. They knew he'd get nowhere, and that his life would be in danger." But Abbas held out the vain hope that the circle could be squared with good intentions, a written plan and U.S. support.
He was wrong. It took years to program the Palestinians to hate, and it will take years to erase that programming. Until the Palestinian polity is ideologically decontaminated, there can be no peace.
Jonathan Kay is editorials editor of the National Post.; jkay@nationalpost.com
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