Is suicide bombing a gruesome but necessary method of struggle? The real question is not whether Israeli aggression against Palestinians justifies a relentless and revolutionary fight against it, but whether suicide bombings advance and strengthen this struggle or are counterproductive.
A related question is whether it is possible to support a great cause but have reservations about — or stand opposed to — to such a gruesome and indiscriminate method of struggle? It is.
Islamic suicide bombers are not the first to resort to this method of struggle. Known as the kamikaze, Japanese pilots crashed their aircraft, loaded with explosives, into enemy targets during World War II. But the Islamic warriors are certainly the first in the world to detonate explosives strapped to their bodies for a cause.
The zealous fearlessness these acts require in the minds of the bombers — knowing that within seconds, their bodies and those around them will be blown to pieces — make them the epitome of self-sacrificing courage, a new phenomenon bedevilling and baffling Israeli security experts, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists.
So intensely brutal has the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians been that it has uniquely produced Islamic suicide bombers, who draw their unprecedented moral courage from a complex combination of factors, but centred around the undeniable nobility of their cause and religious fervour — based on the Islamic concept of jihad (holy war) and the belief that as martyrs, they will go to heaven.
However, this belief does not resolve the questions raised here. To believe that because these bombings are motivated by divine injunction they are beyond the purview and scrutiny of democratic debate would be a grave mistake. Besides, no cause can be so noble that its methods of struggle are beyond question and reproach.
The complicitous role of the United States in maintaining the state of Israel through both financial and military support has fuelled a situation in which an unstoppable avalanche of Palestinian suicide bombers is readily and rapidly produced in inverse proportion to the calamitous war against them.
However, the bloody battle lines are so deeply drawn in a complex mixture of rights, honour, religion, tradition and history that it requires great courage to step aside and question the efficacy of a method of struggle that has left great and indiscriminate human horror in its wake. Children and pregnant women have been among the casualties, bombed into gory obliteration.
Are the consuming battles and their tragic, daily dramas so fierce and absorbing that we cannot (in fact, dare not) stop and think — and rethink? We are often so blindly caught up in varying, deeply-rooted loyalties that we refuse or are afraid to think and especially express ourselves differently — for fear that we could be condemned by zealots whose passions are so intense that their blood boils over their heads.
There are several reasons why acts of individual terrorism may be counterproductive.
One, they have historically tended to isolate, marginalise and alienate the oppressed masses, making them passive spectators and not self-active participants in their own liberation struggles. Mass action — strikes, demonstrations and even armed insurrection for revolutionary change — is often far more effective.
Two, they tend to lead to reliance on small, professional guerrilla groups whose acts are often a substitute for mass struggles. A sense of power and confidence grows far more strongly out of mass action than isolated acts of terror.
Three, these acts tend to result in greater state repression. It is the poorest Palestinians who bear the brunt of retaliatory strikes, which target all Palestinians, in the same way that suicide bombers indiscriminately target all Jews, including those who may support their struggle.
Besides, for every suicide bomber who takes Jewish lives, the Israeli retaliation — since its arsenal is so much more powerful — takes more Palestinian lives. Because the state of Israel and probably most Jewish people believe they have a divine right to land the Palestinians believe is historically theirs, their determination to inflict greater harm than they receive through these bombings — and thereby maintain their domination — is evident.
Four, there is a case to be made against the indiscriminate and horrifying loss of life that these bombings leave in their wake. A valid question is whether the blowing up of people — which may include children and even sympathisers — is just the unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of a bloody and brutal civil war, and therefore acceptable.
But it is not necessarily acceptable and the fact that Israeli attacks have killed women and children does not diminish the validity of this question.
Finally, the Israeli state appears nowhere near losing or even lessening its grip on power as a result of these bombings. To the contrary, it bristles with more ruthless determination to strike back and maintain its power by beefing up its military muscle and denying Palestinians even the most basic rights.
However, it is high time that this method of struggle and its results are reviewed. Such a decision would not mean the slightest concession to Israeli domination, lessening the resolve to overthrow its yoke or diminish the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggles. Neither does it have anything in common with pacifism or liberalism.
Ebrahim Harvey is a doctoral student and freelance writer