The light-heartedness of the suicide bomber

Abdul Rahman Makdad, the man who organised two bus bombings in Jerusalem which killed 19 people, calmly described how he and the 23-year-old bomber Mohammed Za'ul had eaten a hummus breakfast before Za'ul set out on the first mission in January last year.

In an interview with the Independent in April last year, he said they had "ordinary conversation" as Makdad prepared the explosives the previous night. He added coolly: "There was no need at all to convince this man to carry out the operation. He himself chose to be a martyr. The easiest thing [about such operations] is to find a martyr. In our nation we have thousands of people who want to be martyrs."

It is during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past five years that the phenomenon of suicide bombing has been most studied.

On the one hand, the Israeli experience provides some answers - not least through the frequent arrests and interrogation of failed suicide bombers and the dispatchers and organisers of successful ones - to the still deeply disturbing question of why young men, or, increasingly, among Palestinian militants at least, young women, are prepared so readily to sacrifice their lives - even for a national cause in which they passionately believe.

On the other hand, that research - extensive though it is - may give far fewer clues to what motivated the quite different West Yorkshire cell who appear to have perpetrated the London bombings.

It's true that techniques such as the videos made by Palestinian and, in some case, Iraqi suicide attackers before a mission, or the last dinner their Tamil Tiger counterparts enjoy with a revered idol from the movement may be ways of locking the bomber in, and preventing second thoughts.

All the evidence, however, is that most attackers approach their missions with relatively light hearts and confident of its absolute rightness, in the way that Makdad described.

That doesn't of course mean that suicide bombers in different countries are motivated in the same way.

Nevertheless, Boaz Ganor, head of Israel's Herzilya Institute of Policy Research for Counter Terrorism, believes that counter-intuitively the bomber has taken "an entirely rational" decision based on indoctrination in a version of Islam which bars suicide but encourages "martyrdom", and which explicitly ensures that the martyr will go straight to paradise - bringing, at least in the Palestinian case, honour to his or her name among peers.

And although there is little tradition of martyrdom in Sunni Islam, there is no doubt that religion, and the concept of a translation from a frequently miserable earthly world for a heavenly one plays a central part in many cases.

It is a totemic fact that a note left in an airport car park from Mohammed Atta, the leader of the suicide bombers who in September 2001 did most to change the world order, exhorted his comrades to remember the 72 virgins they would encounter in paradise.

But most of the recent literature on the subject - and three books on the topic have been published in the past few months - shrinks from providing one simple explanation for suicide bombing. The earthly benefits of money for the "martyr's" family from the Palestinian armed factions - and until his toppling, Saddam Hussein - may be part of the explanation on occasions.

You didn't have to stay long at the pitifully dilapidated West Bank home of the 17-year-old militant who bombed a bus stop outside Tel Aviv in September 2003 to realise that the family - the mother deeply grieving, the aunt less convincingly professing her "pride" in her nephew's sacrifice - was desperately poor.

But that, too, is no more than one of many elements of the story even among Palestinian militants - and is unlikely to figure at all in the machinations of al Qaeda.

In an attempt to render the multiple complexities of a suicide bombers' motivation, two recent authors, Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, suggest: "What the rank-and-file [of Hamas] seemed to live and die for, in the end, was neither hospitals nor politics nor ideology nor religion nor the Apocalypse, but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death on the path of Allah."

Another expert, Louise Richardson, executive dean at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, pointed out that among suicide bombers there was often "more interest in the dying than the killing, as evidenced by the sometimes remarkable lack of attention to deploying the suicide bomb to maximum effect".

Though this is no doubt true on occasions, the terrible flip side is often an apparent indifference to the death of victims in cases like last week's where the bombers tried to maximise the killing. Abdul Rahman Makdad was at his most chilling 15 months ago when he claimed he could not even remember the numbers of the buses whose bombing he had organised in Jerusalem in January and February 2004.

But Richardson - very controversially - questions whether the motivation for suicide bombing is really as unique as it is made out to be, adding: "In all our societies we reserve the highest honours for those who have given their lives for their country."

And yet this does nothing to explain, much less confront, a network, if that's what it is, like al Qaeda, which unlike the Palestinian factions does not even have a comprehensibly focussed national goal and yet which has the power to kill innocent civilians on a global scale.

Much less could it help with the rootless individuals who may be connected to extremist organisations by the internet as depicted by Dr Rosemary Hollis since last Thursday's carnage.

Nor, finally, does it do justice to the deeply disturbing crises posed to free societies by the suicide bombers - problems that genuinely can be described as unique.

The bombers cannot easily be described as "cowardly" - the word used to describe the Irish republican bomber who slips a carrier bag under a chair in a pub before making his escape; or "evil" when he or she may think they are doing something good.

They cannot be "hunted down" by the forces of law and order when they have died with their victims and when their names may even be proudly proclaimed by their comrades.

They cannot be subjected to punishment, let alone vengeance, for precisely the same reason.

Dr Ganor rightly points out that almost all modern suicide bombings are highly organised rather than the alternative of what he calls "personal initiative attacks", and argues that it is the organisations which therefore have to be confronted.

True though that may be, it is far from clear how easy that is going to be in the case of the slaughter in London's first suicide bombing.

- INDEPENDENT