40 contexts fall 2007

Contexts, Vol. 6, Number 4, pp 40-45. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2007 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Pleasedirect all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,

http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2007.6.4.28

six lessons of suicide bombers

feature article robert j. brym

In October 1983, Shi’a militants attacked the military bar-racks of American and French troops in Beirut, killing near-ly 300 people. Today the number of suicide attacks world-

wide has passed 1,000, with almost all the attacks concen-trated in just nine countries: Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Israel, Turkey,India (Kashmir), Russia (Chechnya), Afghanistan, Iraq, andPakistan. Israel, for example, experienced a wave of suicideattacks in the mid-1990s when Hamas and the PalestinianIslamic Jihad (PIJ) sought to undermine peace talks betweenIsrael and the Palestinian Authority. A far deadlier wave ofattacks began in Israel in October 2000 after all hope of anegotiated settlement collapsed. Altogether, between 1993and 2005, 158 suicide attacks took place in Israel and theoccupied Palestinian territories, killing more than 800 peopleand injuring more than 4,600.

Over the past quarter century, researchers have learnedmuch about the motivations of suicide bombers, the ratio-nales of the organizations that support them, their modusoperandi, the precipitants of suicide attacks, and the effectsof counterterrorism on insurgent behavior. Much of whatthey have learned is at odds with conventional wisdom andthe thinking of policymakers who guide counterterroriststrategy. This paper draws on that research, but I focusmainly on the Israeli/Palestinian case to draw six lessonsfrom the carnage wrought by suicide bombers. In brief, Iargue that (1) suicide bombers are not crazy, (2) nor are theymotivated principally by religious zeal. It is possible to dis-cern (3) a strategic logic and (4) a social logic underlyingtheir actions. Targeted states typically react by repressingorganizations that mount suicide attacks, but (5) this repres-sion often makes matters worse. (6) Only by first taking animaginative leap and understanding the world from theassailant’s point of view can hope to develop a workablestrategy for minimizing suicide attacks. Let us examine eachof these lessons in turn.

lesson 1: suicide bombers are not crazy

Lance Corporal Eddie DiFranco was the only survivor

of the 1983 suicide attack on the U.S. Marine barracks inBeirut who saw the face of the bomber. DiFranco was onwatch when he noticed the attacker speeding his truckfull of explosives toward the main building on the marinebase. “He looked right at me [and] smiled,” DiFrancolater recalled.

Was the bomber insane? Some Western observersthought so. Several psychologists characterized theBeirut bombers as “unstable individuals with a deathwish.” Government and media sources made similarassertions in the immediate aftermath of the suicideattacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Yetthese claims were purely speculative. Subsequent inter-views with prospective suicide bombers and reconstruc-tions of the biographies of successful suicide attackersrevealed few psychological abnormalities. In fact, afterexamining many hundreds of cases for evidence ofdepression, psychosis, past suicide attempts, and so on,Robert Pape discovered only a single person who couldbe classified as having a psychological problem (aChechen woman who may have been mentally retarded).

On reflection, it is not difficult to understand why virtu-ally all suicide bombers are psychologically stable. Theorganizers of suicide attacks do not want to jeopardize theirmissions by recruiting unreliable people. A research reportprepared for the Danish government a few years ago noted,“Recruits who display signs of pathological behaviour areautomatically weeded out for reasons of organizationalsecurity.” It may be that some psychologically unstable peo-ple want to become suicide bombers, but insurgent organi-zations strongly prefer their cannons fixed.

lesson 2: it’s mainly about politics, notreligion

In May 1972, three Japanese men in business suitsboarded a flight from Paris to Tel Aviv. They were mem-bers of the Japanese Red Army, an affiliate of the PopularFront for the Liberation of Palestine. Eager to help their

Much of what researchers have learned about suicide bombing is at odds with conventional wisdom and the thinking ofpolicymakers.

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Palestinian comrades liberate Israel from Jewish rule, theyhad packed their carry-on bags with machine guns andhand grenades. After disembarking at Lod Airport nearTel Aviv, they began an armed assault on everyone insight. When the dust settled, 26 people lay dead, nearlyhalf of them Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage tothe Holy Land.

Israeli guards killed one of the attackers. A secondblew himself up, thus becoming the first suicide bomberin modern Middle Eastern history. The Israelis capturedthe third assailant, Kozo Okamoto.

Okamato languished in an Israeli prison until the mid-1980s, when he was handed over to Palestinian militantsin Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley in a prisoner exchange. Then,in 2000, something unexpected happened. Okamotoapparently abandoned or at least ignored his secular faithin the theories of Bakunin and Trotsky, and converted toIslam. For Okamoto, politics came first, then religion.

A similar evolution occurs in the lives of many peo-ple. Any political conflict makes people look for ways toexplain the dispute and imagine a strategy for resolvingit; they adopt or formulate an ideology. If the conflict isdeep and the ideology proves inadequate, people modi-fy the ideology or reject it for an alternative. Religiousthemes often tinge political ideologies, and the impor-tance of the religious component may increase if analy-ses and strategies based on secular reasoning fail. Whenreligious elements predominate, they may intensify theconflict.

For example, the Palestinians have turned to one ide-ology after another to explain their loss of land to Jewishsettlers and military forces and to formulate a plan forregaining territorial control. Especially after 1952, whenGamal Abdel Nasser took office in Egypt, manyPalestinians turned to Pan-Arabism, the belief that theArab countries would unify and force Israel to cede terri-tory. But wars failed to dislodge the Israelis. Particularlyafter the Six-Day War in 1967, many Palestinians turnedto nationalism, which placed the responsibility for regain-ing control of lost territory on the Palestinians them-selves. Others became Marxists, identifying wage-work-ers (and, in some cases, peasants) as the engines ofnational liberation. The Palestinians used plane hijackingsto draw the world’s attention to their cause, launchedwave upon wave of guerilla attacks against Israel, and inthe 1990s entered into negotiations to create a sovereignPalestinian homeland.

Yet Islamic fundamentalism had been growing in pop-

ularity among Palestinians since the late 1980s—ironical-ly, without opposition from the Israeli authorities, whosaw it as a conservative counterweight to Palestiniannationalism. When negotiations with Israel to establish aPalestinian state broke down in 2000, many Palestinianssaw the secularist approach as bankrupt and turned toIslamic fundamentalism for political answers. In January

2006, the Islamic fundamentalist party, Hamas, was dem-ocratically elected to form the Palestinian government,winning 44 percent of the popular vote and 56 percentof the parliamentary seats. In this case, as in many oth-ers, secular politics came first. When secularism failed,notions of “martyrdom” and “holy war” gained inimportance.

This does not mean that most modern suicidebombers are deeply religious, either among thePalestinians or other groups. Among the 83 percent ofsuicide attackers worldwide between 1980 and 2003 forwhom Robert Pape found data on ideological back-ground, only a minority—43 percent—were identifiablyreligious. In Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, and Gazabetween 1981 and 2003, fewer than half of suicidebombers had discernible religious inclinations. In its ori-gins and at its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is notreligiously inspired, and suicide bombing, despite its fre-quent religious trappings, is fundamentally the expres-sion of a territorial dispute. In this conflict, many mem-bers of the dominant group—Jewish Israelis—use religionas a central marker of identity. It is hardly surprising,therefore, that many Palestinian militants also view thestruggle in starkly religious terms.

The same holds for contemporary Iraq. AsMohammed Hafez has recently shown, 443 suicide mis-

Robert Brym’s latest books include Sociology as a Life or Death

Issue and Sociology: Your Compass for a New World, 3rd ed., with

John Lie.

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sions took place in Iraq between March 2003 andFebruary 2006. Seventy-one percent of the identifiableattackers belonged to al-Qaeda in Iraq. To be sure, theyjustified their actions in religious terms. Members of al-Qaeda in Iraq view the Shi’a who control the Iraqi stateas apostates. They want to establish fundamentalist,Sunni-controlled states in Iraq and other Middle Easterncountries. Suicide attacks against the Iraqi regime and itsAmerican and British supporters are seen as a means tothat end.

But it is only within a particular political context thatthese ambitions first arose. After all, suicide attacksbegan with the American and British invasion of Iraq andthe installation of a Shi’a-controlled regime. And it is onlyunder certain political conditions that these ambitions areacted upon. Thus, Hafez’s analysis shows that suicidebombings spike (1) in retaliation for big counterinsur-gency operations and (2) as a strategic response to insti-tutional developments which suggest that Shi’a-con-trolled Iraq is about to become more stable. So althoughcommunal identity has come to be religiously demarcat-ed in Iraq, this does not mean that religion per se initiat-ed suicide bombing or that it drives the outbreak of sui-cide bombing campaigns.

lesson 3: sometimes it’sstrategic

Suicide bombing often has apolitical logic. In many cases, it isused as a tactic of last resortundertaken by the weak to helpthem restore control over territorythey perceive as theirs. This polit-ical logic is clear in statementsroutinely released by leaders oforganizations that launch suicide attacks.Characteristically, the first communiqué issued by Hamasin 1987 stated that martyrdom is the appropriateresponse to occupation, and the 1988 Hamas chartersays that jihad is the duty of every Muslim whose territo-ry is invaded by an enemy.

The political logic of suicide bombing is also evidentwhen suicide bombings occur in clusters as part of anorganized campaign, often timed to maximize strategicgains. A classic example is the campaign launched byHamas and the PIJ in the mid-90s. Fearing that a settle-ment between Israel and the Palestinian Authority wouldprevent the Palestinians from gaining control over all ofIsrael, Hamas and the PIJ aimed to scuttle peace negotia-tions by unleashing a small army of suicide bombers.

Notwithstanding the strategic basis of many suicide

attacks, we cannot conclude that strategic reasoninggoverns them all. More often than not, suicide bombingcampaigns fail to achieve their territorial aims.Campaigns may occur without apparent strategic justifi-cation, as did the campaign that erupted in Israel afternegotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authoritybroke down in 2000. A social logic often overlays thepolitical logic of suicide bombing.

lesson 4: sometimes it’s retaliatory

On October 4, 2003, a 29-year-old lawyer enteredMaxim restaurant in Haifa and detonated her belt of plas-tic explosives. In addition to taking her own life, HanadiJaradat killed 20 people and wounded dozens of others.When her relatives were later interviewed in the Arabpress, they explained her motives as follows: “She carriedout the attack in revenge for the killing of her brotherand her cousin [to whom she had been engaged] by theIsraeli security forces and in revenge for all the crimesIsrael is perpetrating in the West Bank by killingPalestinians and expropriating their land.” Strategic cal-culation did not inform Jaradat’s attack. Research I con-

ducted with Bader Araj showsthat, like a majority of Palestiniansuicide bombers between 2000and 2005, Jaradat was motivatedby the desire for revenge andretaliation.

Before people act, they some-times weigh the costs and bene-fits of different courses of actionand choose the one that appearsto cost the least and offer themost benefits. But people are notcalculating machines. Sometimes

they just don’t add up. Among other emotions, feelingsof anger and humiliation can trump rational strategic cal-culation in human affairs. Economists have conductedexperiments called “the ultimatum game,” in which theexperimenter places two people in a room, gives one ofthem $20, and tells the recipient that she must give someof the money—as much or as little as she wants—to theother person. If the other person refuses the offer, nei-ther gets to keep any money. Significantly, in four out offive cases, the other person refuses to accept the moneyif she is offered less than $5. Although she will gainmaterially if she accepts any offer, she is highly likely toturn down a low offer so as to punish her partner forstinginess. This outcome suggests that emotions can eas-ily override the rational desire for material gain.(Researchers at the University of Zürich have recently

In Lebanon, Israel, theWest Bank, and Gaza

between 1981 and 2003,fewer than half of suicidebombers had discernible

religious inclinations.

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demonstrated the physi-ological basis of thisoverride function byusing MRI brain scans onpeople playing the ulti-matum game.) At thepolitical level, research Iconducted with BaderAraj on the events pre-cipitating suicide bomb-ings, the motivations ofsuicide bombers, andthe rationales of theorganizations that sup-port suicide bombingsshows that Palestiniansuicide missions are inmost cases promptedless by strategic cost-benefit calculations thanby such human emotions as revenge and retaliation. Theexistence of these deeply human emotions also helps toexplain why attempts to suppress suicide bombing cam-paigns sometimes do not have the predicted results.

lesson 5: repression is a boomerang

Major General Doron Almog commanded the IsraelDefense Forces Southern Command from 2000 to 2003.He tells the story of how, in early 2003, a wealthyPalestinian merchant in Gaza received a phone call froman Israeli agent. The caller said that the merchant’s sonwas preparing a suicide mission, and that if he wentthrough with it, the family home would be demolished,Israel would sever all commercial ties with the family, andits members would never be allowed to visit Israel again.The merchant prevailed upon his son to reconsider, andthe attack was averted.

Exactly how many suicide bombers have been similar-ly deterred is unknown. We do know that of the nearly600 suicide missions launched in Israel and its occupiedterritories between 2000 and 2005, fewer than 25 per-cent succeeded in reaching their targets. Israeli counter-terrorist efforts thwarted three-quarters of them usingviolent means. In addition, Israel preempted an incalcula-ble number of attacks by assassinating militants involvedin planning them. More than 200 Israeli assassinationattempts took place between 2000 and 2005, 80 percentof which succeeded in killing their main target, some-times with considerable “collateral damage.”

Common sense suggests that repression shoulddampen insurgency by increasing its cost. By this logic,

when state organizations eliminate the people who plansuicide bombings, destroy their bomb-making facilities,intercept their agents, and punish the people who sup-port them, they erode the insurgents’ capabilities formounting suicide attacks. But this commonsenseapproach to counterinsurgency overlooks two complicat-ing factors. First, harsh repression may reinforce radicalopposition and even intensify it. Second, insurgents mayturn to alternative and perhaps more lethal methods toachieve their aims.

Consider the Palestinian case (see the accompanyingtable). Bader Araj and I were able to identify the organi-zational affiliation of 133 Palestinian suicide bombersbetween September 2000 and July 2005. Eighty-five ofthem (64 percent) were affiliated with the Islamic funda-mentalist groups Hamas and the PIJ, while the rest wereaffiliated with secular Palestinian groups such as Fatah.Not surprisingly, given this distribution, Israeli repressionwas harshest against the Islamic fundamentalists, whowere the targets of 124 Israeli assassination attempts(more than 60 percent of the total).

Yet after nearly five years of harsh Israeli repression—involving not just the assassination of leaders but alsonumerous arrests, raids on bomb-making facilities, thedemolition of houses belonging to family members ofsuicide bombers, and so on—Hamas and PIJ leadersremained adamant in their resolve and much more radi-cal than Palestinian secularist leaders. When 45 insurgentleaders representing all major Palestinian factions wereinterviewed in depth in the summer of 2006, 100 percentof those associated with Hamas and PIJ (compared to just10 percent of secularist leaders) said they would never be

insurgency, repression, and perceptions by party

The first two rows of data in this table were calculated from a systematic analysis ofnewspapers (the New York Times, ha-Aretz, al-Quds and al-’Arabi) by Robert Brymand Bader Araj. The remainder of the data are based on a survey of 45 Palestinianinsurgent leaders conducted by Bader Araj in the West Bank and Gaza during thespring and summer of 2006.

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willing to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel.That is, the notion of Israel as a Jewish state was stillentirely unacceptable to each and every one of them.When asked how Israel’s assassination policy had affect-ed the ability of their organization to conduct suicidebombing operations, 42 percent of Hamas and PIJrespondents said that the policy had had no effect, whileone-third said the policy had increased their organiza-tion’s capabilities (the corresponding figures for secular-ist leaders were 5 percent and 9 percent, respectively).

And when asked how costlysuicide bombing had been interms of human and organization-al resources, organizational dam-age, and so on, 53 percent ofHamas and PIJ leaders (comparedto just 11 percent of secularistleaders) said that suicide bombingwas less costly or at least no morecostly than the alternatives.Responses to such questions prob-ably tell us more about the persist-ent resolve of the Islamic funda-mentalists than their actual capa-bilities. And that is just the point. Harsh Israeli repressionover an extended period apparently reinforced the anti-Israelsentiments of Islamic fundamentalists.

Some counterterrorist experts say that motivationscount for little if capabilities are destroyed. And theywould be right if it were not for the substitutability ofmethods: increase the cost of one method of attack, andhighly motivated insurgents typically substitute another.So, for example, Israel’s late prime minister, YitzhakRabin, ordered troops to “break the bones” ofPalestinians who engaged in mass demonstrations, rockthrowing, and other nonlethal forms of protest in the late1980s and early 1990s. The Palestinians responded withmore violent attacks, including suicide missions. Similarly,after Israel began to crack down ruthlessly on suicidebombing operations in 2002, rocket attacks againstIsraeli civilians sharply increased in frequency. In general,severe repression can work for a while, but a sufficientlydetermined mass opposition can always design new tac-tics to surmount new obstacles, especially if its existenceas a group is visibly threatened (and unless, of course, themass opposition is exterminated in its entirety). One kindof “success” usually breeds another kind of “failure” ifthe motivation of insurgents is high.

lesson 6: empathize with your enemy

In October 2003, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon

explicitly recognized this conundrum when he stated thatIsrael’s tactics against the Palestinians had become toorepressive and were stirring up potentially uncontrollablelevels of hatred and terrorism. “In our tactical decisions,we are operating contrary to our strategic interests,” hetold reporters. Ya’alon went on to claim that the Israeligovernment was unwilling to make concessions thatcould bolster the authority of moderate Palestinian PrimeMinister Mahmoud Abbas, and he expressed the fearthat by continuing its policy of harsh repression, Israel

would bring about the collapse ofthe Palestinian Authority, thesilencing of Palestinian moderates,and the popularization of moreradical voices like that of Hamas.The head of the General SecurityService (Shabak), the defense min-ister, and Prime Minister ArielSharon opposed Ya’alon.Consequently, his term as chief ofstaff was not renewed, and his mil-itary career ended in 2005. A yearlater, all of Ya’alon’s predictionsproved accurate.

Ya’alon was no dove. From the time he became chiefof staff in July 2002, he had been in charge of ruthlesslyputting down the Palestinian uprising. He had authorizedassassinations, house demolitions, and all the rest. But 15months into the job, Ya’alon had learned much from hisexperience, and it seems that what he learned above all elsewas to empathize with the enemy—not to have warm andfuzzy feelings about the Palestinians, but to see things from

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Severe repression can workfor a while, but a sufficient-ly determined mass opposi-tion can always design new

tactics to surmount newobstacles, especially if its

existence as a group is visibly threatened.

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their point of view in order to improve his ability to furtherIsrael’s chief strategic interest, namely, to live in peace with itsneighbors.

As odd as it may sound at first, and as difficult as it maybe to apply in practice, exercising empathy with one’senemy is the key to an effective counterterrorist strategy.Seeing the enemy’s point of view increases one’s under-standing of the minimum conditions that would allow theenemy to put down arms. An empathic understanding ofthe enemy discourages counterproductive actions such asexcessive repression, and it encourages tactical moves thatfurther one’s strategic aims. As Ya’alon suggested, in theIsraeli case such tactical moves might include (1) offeringmeaningful rewards—for instance, releasing hundreds ofmillions of Palestinian tax dollars held in escrow by Israel,freeing selected Palestinians from Israeli prisons, and shut-ting down remote and costly Israeli settlements in thenorthern West Bank—in exchange for the renunciation ofsuicide bombing, and (2) attributing the deal to the inter-cession of moderate Palestinian forces so as to buttresstheir popularity and authority. (From this point of view,Israel framed its unilateral 2005 withdrawal from Gazapoorly because most Palestinians saw it as a concessionfoisted on Israel by Hamas.) Once higher levels of trust andstability are established by such counterterrorist tactics,they can serve as the foundation for negotiations leadingto a permanent settlement. Radical elements wouldinevitably try to jeopardize negotiations, as they have inthe past, but Israel resisted the temptation to shut downpeace talks during the suicide bombing campaign of themid-1990s, and it could do so again. Empathizing with theenemy would also help prevent the breakdown of negoti-ations, as happened in 2000; a clear sense of the minimal-ly acceptable conditions for peace can come only from anempathic understanding of the enemy.

conclusion

Political conflict over territory is the main reason for sui-cide bombing, although religious justifications for suicidemissions are likely to become more important when secularideologies fail to bring about desired results. Suicide bomb-ing may also occur for strategic or retaliatory reasons—tofurther insurgent aims or in response to repressive stateactions.

Cases vary in the degree to which suicide bombers aremotivated by (1) political or religious and (2) strategic orretaliatory aims. For example, research to date suggests thatsuicide bombing is more retaliatory in Israel than in Iraq, and

more religiously motivated in Iraq than in Israel. But in anycase, repression (short of a policy approaching genocide)cannot solve the territorial disputes that lie at the root of sui-cide bombing campaigns. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, PresidentJimmy Carter’s national security adviser, wrote a few yearsago in the New York Times, “to win the war on terrorism,one must ... begin a political effort that focuses on the con-ditions that brought about [the terrorists’] emergence.”These are wise words that Israel—and the United States in itsown “war on terror”—would do well to heed.

recommended resources

Hany Abu-Hassad. Paradise Now. This movie sketches the cir-

cumstances that shape the lives of two Palestinian suicide

bombers, showing that they are a lot like us and that if we

found ourselves in similar circumstances, we might turn out to

be a lot like them. (Nominated for the 2005 Oscar for best for-

eign-language film.)

Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj. “Suicide Bombing as Strategy

and Interaction: The Case of the Second Intifada.” Social Forces

84 (2006): 1965–82. Explains suicide bombing as the outcome

of structured interactions among conflicting and cooperating

parties and organizations.

Mohammed M. Hafez. “Suicide Terrorism in Iraq: A Preliminary

Assessment of the Quantitative Data and Documentary

Evidence.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006):

591–619. The first systematic analysis of suicide bombing in Iraq

demonstrates the strategic and retaliatory aims of the assailants.

Errol Morris. The Fog of War. Robert McNamara’s extraordinar-

ily frank assessment of his career as secretary of defense in the

Kennedy and Johnson administrations. This film is a profound

introduction to strategic thinking and a valuable lesson on how

to learn from one’s mistakes. His first lesson: empathize with

your enemy. (Winner of the 2003 Oscar for best documentary.)

Robert A. Pape. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide

Terrorism (Random House, 2005). In support of the view that

suicide bombing takes place mainly for rational, strategic rea-

sons, Pape analyzes all suicide attacks worldwide from 1980 to

2003.

Christoph Reuter. My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of

Suicide Bombing. Trans. H. Ragg-Kirkby (Princeton

University Press, 2004). A succinct overview of the past 25

years of suicide attacks.

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