Inside the mind of a Palestinian suicide bomber

By ROBERT FISK

JERUSALEM - I once asked the head of the Lebanese Hizbollah if he could explain to me how the mind of a suicide bomber worked.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was dressed in his black turban and robes. He had formerly been the Hizbollah's military commander in southern Lebanon and from his legions had emerged the first Arab suicide bombers who would sap the morale of Israel's retreating Army.

Explain to me as a Westerner, I urged Nasrallah, how a man could immolate himself.

"Imagine you are in a sauna," he said. "It is very hot but you know that in the next room there is air-conditioning, an armchair, classical music and a cocktail."

There was a pause as the Hizbollah leader moved his hand swiftly upwards, as if opening a door. "So you pass easily into the next room." I will not forget the smile he then gave me. "That," he said, "is how I would explain the mind of the martyr to a Westerner."

Nasrallah enjoyed metaphors, similes; like the Hizbollah's "martyr" posters which so often show the dead in paradise, surrounded by rivers and tulips and weeping willows. Is that where the suicide bombers really believe they are going, I used to ask myself? To the rivers of honey and the trees and - yes, of course - the virgins?

The idea that sacrifice is a noble ideal - and let us, for a moment, put aside the iniquity of murdering children in a Jerusalem pizzeria - is common to Western as well as Eastern society.

First World War Calvaries in France are covered with commemorations to men who supposedly "laid down their lives" for their country - even though most died in appalling agony, praying only that they would live.

When, years after our conversation, Nasrallah's son was killed in a suicidal assault on an Israeli Army position in southern Lebanon, the Hizbollah leader insisted that he receive not condolences but congratulations.

If the idea of self-sacrifice is comprehensible, it is clearly not a natural phenomenon. In a normal society, in a community whose people feel they are treated equally and with justice, we regard suicide as a tragic aberration, a death produced - in the coroner's eloquent lexicon - when "the balance of the mind is disturbed".

But what happens when the balance of a whole society's mind has been disturbed? Walking through the wreckage of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut a few weeks ago - the same camps in which up to 2000 civilians were massacred in 1982 - I could only wonder at the stability of the survivors who still lived there amid the concrete huts, the rubbish and the football-sized rats. If I lived here, I remember thinking, I would commit suicide.

And that is the point. When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the "enemy" is all-powerful, when one's own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, "two-legged beasts", then the mind moves beyond reason.

It becomes fascinated in two senses - with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential.

I spent months studying the suiciders of Lebanon. They were mostly single men, occasionally women, often the victims of Israeli torture or the relatives of family members who had been killed in battle with Israel.

They would often receive their orders at prayer in the "masjid" or mosque. The imam would be told to use a certain phrase in his sermon - a reference to roses or gardens or water or a kind of tree. The cleric would not understand the purpose of this but in his congregation a young man would know that his day of "martyrdom" had arrived.

In Gaza, even before the 1993 Oslo agreement, I discovered an almost identical phenomenon.

As in Lebanon, the would-be "martyr" would spend his last night reading the Koran.

He would never say goodbye to his parents. But he would embrace them and tell them not to cry if he were one day to die. Then he would set off to collect his explosives.

Five minutes before he set off from the West Bank town of Tulkarem, a young Hamas member went through this ritual. Five minutes later, an Israeli missile struck the car he was driving. But a week later another suicider reached the doors of the pizzeria on the corner of Jaffa St and King George's St in West Jerusalem.

There is a terrible difference with the suicide bombers of Palestine.

The Japanese "kamikaze" pilots attacked battleships and aircraft carriers, not hospitals.

The Lebanese largely followed this pattern and went for military targets. But more and more, the Palestinian suicide bombers have targeted Israeli civilians.

A battleship or an Israeli tank is one thing - a 3-year-old waiting for his mother to cut his pizza for him is quite another.

I called a Palestinian friend to ask about this, to ask how young Palestinian men - in Lebanon as well as Ramallah - could rejoice in the streets at the pizzeria massacre.

She expressed her abhorrence at what happened - she was genuine in this - but tried to explain that the Palestinians had suffered so many civilian casualties since the "intifada" began that Palestinians found joy in any suffering inflicted on their enemy. There was a feeling that "they should suffer too".

But I go back to my own first reaction when I reached the Sbarro pizza house. Unforgivable. What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on Earth, recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin?

Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own people's tragedy. The pressure cooker of the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.

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