Lies of Desperation:
Answering Thomas Friedman
By M. Shahid Alam
Be ever steadfast in upholding equity, bearing
witness to the truth for the sake of God, even though
it be against your own selves or your parents and
kinsfolk.
Qur'aan (4: 135)
Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down
his life for his friends.
John (15:13)
As the ratio of fatalities between Palestinians and Israelis
has narrowed during the past few months, the media mills in
the United States that have demonized Palestinians for the
past 50 years have been going into higher gear.
One of the honored captains of this industry, the honorable
Mr. Thomas Fried-man, has now struck a high note in this
campaign with his "Suicidal Lies," in New York Times of March
31, 2002. His objective is to raise the alarm for Americans.
The Palestinians "are testing a whole new form of warfare,
using suicide bombers," and if this "new strategy of
liberation" is allowed to suc-ceed-presumably in forcing the
Israelis to end their occupation of West Bank and Gaza-the
consequences will be cataclysmic for United States, and
indeed, for all civilization. The imperative for United States is
clear. In order to save Civilization, it must fight Israel's war
as if it were a war for its own survival.
This indictment of Palestinians is built cleverly, but it is the
kind of cleverness that substitutes for facts and logic. Mr.
Friedman opens his indictment by wiping the slate of history
clean of the daily, unremitting struggle that
Palestini-ans-men, women and children-have waged over the
years against Israeli ter-ror, massacres, executions,
expropriations, deportations, house demolitions, sieges,
curfews, and myriad new forms of intimidation and
humiliation. This long, hard, constant, unflagging and valiant
struggle over more than 50 years is equated with the acts of
'suicide' bombers. In the words of Braveheart, this is history
written by those who have hanged heroes.
After completing this demolition job-accomplished with a
wave of his hand-Mr. Friedman proceeds to build his
penitentiary for the Palestinians. His immediate objective is
to prove that the Palestinians "have adopted suicide bombing
as a strategic choice, not out of desperation." There are
several steps in the argument that Mr. Friedman employs to
arrive at this devastating conclu-sion. I have to admit that
this charge ought be devastating-if it can be proved.
Mr. Friedman does not deny that the Israeli occupation has
caused "desperation" (the quotes are not mine) amongst
Palestinians; what he rejects is that there is a necessary link
between their desperation and 'suicide' bombing. First, "there
are a lot of people in the world who are desperate, yet they
have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves."
Surely, Mr. Friedman must have heard of Samson, Guy
Fawkes, the Kamikaze pilots, the Hizbullah and the Tamil
Tigers: since almost everyone else has. The Palestinians can
scarcely be credited with inventing this "new form of
warfare."
But there is another way of posing the question that would
shift the onus to the Israelis. A quick glance at the recent
history of settler colonialism reveals that there have been
many episodes, both long and short, of occupation and
resis-tance to occupation, but it is not too often that the
oppressed have employed 'suicide' bombing against their
occupiers. Is it mere happenstance, then, that every time the
Israelis occupy another people-whether it is Southern
Lebanon, Gaza and West Bank-they have had to face 'suicide'
bombers? Might the fault lie in the occupiers, and not the
occupied?
Mr. Friedman presses on with his indictment. President
Clinton "offered the Palestinians a peace plan that would
have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Mr. Arafat
walked away." We are back to the canard about the
'generous' peace plan, so perversely rejected by the
Palestinian leadership. In return for municipal control over a
few Bantustans, dominated by armed settler encamp-ments,
the Palestinians were asked to forego their sovereignty, their
right of re-turn, the right to defend themselves, control over
their borders, and rights to their own water resources. A
'generous' peace plan it was indeed-generous to the Israelis.
Is it surprising that the Palestinians are castigated ad
infinitum for rejecting this plan?
The Palestinians must account for another sin of omission.
They had the option of engaging in nonviolent resistance-à la
Ghandhi-that would have won them an independent Palestine
30 years ago. But, instead, they chose the path of violent
resistance. Oops! I mean, 'suicide' bombing. Mr. Friedman
writes as if Israeli occupation had somehow earned the right
to expect Gandhian nonviolence from its victims-as if this
was part of the divine package which gave them ex-clusive
rights to historic Palestine.
A presumption so brazen demands a response. One must ask
if the Zionists too had chosen this Gandhian alternative to
appropriating historic Palestine: if at any time their dreams
embraced the Palestinians as associates, equal partners, in
return for sanctuary in their country. Instead, all that the
Zionist visionaries saw was "a people (themselves) without a
land, and a land (Palestine) without a peo-ple." The
Palestinians did not exist: and if they did, they would be
"spirited across the borders" with some small inducement.
This was a dream of settler colonialism: quite commonplace
amongst Europeans in the nineteenth century. But since the
Zionists did not have their own gun-boats, they would
contract out the job to Britain, the arch imperialist power in
those times. In 1917, even before it had acquired
Palestine-in the Balfour Declaration-Britain generously
offered to create a Jewish state in Palestine. A year later,
when the British had occupied Palestine, the European Jews
estab-lished their first settlements in Israel, their heads full
of dreams of messianic colonialism. It is these dreams,
resurrecting archaic and arcane prophecies, that would
eventually create a new colonial settler state in 1948-when,
in other parts of the world, such states were being
dismantled.
These are the mechanics of Mr. Friedman's argument. He
does not reject some "desperation" amongst Palestinians, but
this is not why they engage in 'suicide' bombings. They do
this out of a perversity, "because they actually want to win
their independence in blood and fire," and this has led them
to adopt "suicide bombing as a strategic choice." Mr.
Friedman forgets-I admit, it is hard to feel the enemy's
pain-that while the first 'suicide' bombings against Israeli
occu-pation began in 1993, the Palestinians have been going
through "blood and fire" since at least the 1930s.
What this means is that Palestinians are now engaged in a
most dangerous inno-vation in the strategy of liberation. "A
big test is taking place of whether suicide terrorism can
succeed as a strategy for liberation." It is truly extraordinary
that Mr. Friedman, writing on the op-ed page of the New York
Times, can assume that his readers have never heard of the
Kamikaze, the Tamil Tigers, or the Hizbullah. There you have
an index of the power of NYT.
It would appear that the deployment of 'suicide' bombers was
a strategic choice made by Japan when the odds against
them appeared to be mounting. It was a choice they
implemented massively, mobilizing tens of thousands to
launch 'suicide' missions using airplanes, torpedoes, mines
and small boats. They were also quite effective. Warner and
Warner, in The Sacred Warriors, show that the Allies lost 65
naval and merchant ships to these 'suicide' missions, and 370
more were damaged. By comparison, the recent 'suicide'
bombings are minor league distractions. At least until
February 2000, the Palestinians were not the biggest players
even in this minor league. Hamas claimed only 22 'suicide'
mis-sions compared to 168 strikes by Tamil separatists.
So why does Mr. Friedman raise this alarm about Palestinians
"testing" "a whole new form of warfare," "a new strategy of
liberation?" Faced with a second intifada against their
deepening control over the West Bank and Gaza-an intifada
that was slowly replacing stone-throwing children with
guerilla war-fare-the Israelis made a strategic choice. On
February 6, 2001, they let loose Ariel Sharon, convicted by
his own courts of personal responsibility for the Sa-bra and
Shatilla massacres, to crush the new intifada. But the
Palestinian re-solve, tested for 33 years under the occupation
of the world's most efficient military machine, refuses to
capitulate before yet another round of warfare. The people
who should have been "spirited across the borders" by beads
and baubles have shown yet again that their spirits will not
be cowed: that they will rise to match and neutralize the
power of Israeli military.
Mr. Friedman admits this. The Palestinian resistance-he calls
it 'suicide' bombing-"is working." That is what alarms him. He
thinks that Israel now "needs to deliver a military blow that
clearly shows that terror will not pay." In other words, he
wants United States to give Israel a free hand in dealing with
the Palestinian resistance. This might mean more Palestinian
deaths, more house demolitions, more incarcerations, and
may be even deportations on some significant scale.
Everything that is necessary to crush the resistance. Yes, the
Europeans will make noises-and there will be some noise in
the Arab streets. But with solid American backing, none of
this should matter. At least, that is Mr. Friedman's fantasy.
I have been placing 'suicide' in 'suicide' bombings within
quotes. This requires an explanation. The Oxford English
dictionary defines a suicide as "one who dies by his own
hand." This definition is clearly inadequate. In the absence of
a motive, we cannot distinguish between (i) a person who
takes his life because he wants to die and (ii) a person who
takes his life because this will save her soul-or her honor,
her family, her friends, her community, or her country. The
first suggests suicide; the latter is ordinarily regarded as a
martyr. Judge for yourself then whether the Palestinians are
suicides or martyrs.
Although the Jewish tradition considers suicide reprehensible,
it admits excep-tions. According to the Talmud-Kaplan and
Schwartz, A Psychology of Hope-"suicide can be permissible
and even preferred" when the alternative is forced apostasy
or torture that is beyond endurance. Imaginably, the
Palestinians who choose to 'sacrifice' their lives might argue
that the pain and indignity of life under Israeli occupation
exceeded their capacity for endurance.
Use your imagination again. Consider a different history of
Germany and Europe-one without the Second World War,
without the Final Solution, with-out Auschwitz-all because a
lone Jewish 'suicide' bomber in 1938 had pene-trated the
inner chambers of Nazi leadership and blown them to
smithereens while also killing herself. Would this 'suicide'
bomber-and her likes-also be regarded as a threat to all
civilization? What would Mr. Friedman say about her?
M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern
University, Boston. His recent book, Poverty from the
Wealth of Nations was published by Palgrave (2000). He
may be reached at m.alam at neu.edu.