ON PALESTINIAN ARAB TERRORISM AS SACRIFICIAL BEHAVIOR
Louis Rene Beres <BERES@POLSCI.PURDUE.EDU>
Professor, Department of Political Science, Purdue University
Professor, Department of Political Science, Purdue University
To understand the steadily widening Palestinian war against Israel, it is first necessary to understand the Palestinian concept of sacrifice. This idea plays a very substantial role in Palestinian policies in the much publicized war. And Palestinian terrorism is the optimal way in which sacrifice is expressed.
Anti-Israel terrorism, as a form of sacrificial Islamic behavior, serves among other things to protect the entire Palestinian community from its own violence. It spurs this community to choose victims outside itself; that is, Jewish victims. As in all traditional societies where sacrifice is practiced, the elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn here to the persons of the sacrificed victims and thereby eliminated.
For Palestinians who will continue their war against Israel - and they number in the tens if not hundreds of thousands -terrorism will be a means to restore harmony to their fractionated community and to reinforce the Palestinian social fabric. This propitiatory function of sacrificial rites is widely known in the anthropology literature, but it is altogether unrecognized in the State of Israel - the state most endangered of all by terror/violence. In ritualistic societies most familiar to us, including those of the ancient Hebrews, the sacrificial victims are always animals.
But there have always been other societies in which human victims are substituted for those individuals who feel threatened. In Euripides' "Medea", the principle of human substitution of one victim for another appears most starkly and horribly. Because the true object of her hatred - her faithless husband Jason - is out of her reach, Medea substitutes her own children. Moreover, Medea prepares the death of her children exactly like a priest preparing for sacrifice. What is most important, Medea's sacrifice reveals the following overriding truth about violence, a truth that should be at the very top of the list for Israeli officials concerned about Arab terror: Violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding areas. The role of sacrifice/terror is nothing less than to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitution and redirect violence into "proper" channels.
But how do we know that Palestinian terrorists actually think of their own violence against Jews in this way? One answer is that they say so, day after day after day. There is no ambiguity in the Friday sermons; or on the PA (Palestine Authority), Hamas and Islamic Jihad websites. Here it is made absolutely clear that terror/violence against Jews is a religious obligation. It is assuredly nothing so trivial as a political/military tactic. On the contrary, for those Palestinians who would wield terror/violence against Israel, violence and the sacred are inseparable. For them, the correctness of terror/violence even depends upon its being performed in a spirit of submission, a spirit which marks all aspects of their religious life.
It is important to understand that for Palestinian terrorists, sacrificial violence against Israel has two categories of victims. One category, of course, is the "vile, infidel Jew." The other is the "glorious martyr" who kills the despised Jew (it is always the "Jew," never the Israeli) and who earns eternal glory by "dying for the sake of Allah." This "martyr" need not fear personal death in sacrificing himself as a suicide bomber. On the contrary, by choosing to "die" in this way he actually buys himself free, forever, from the penalty of dying. "Do not consider those who are slain in the cause of Allah, as dead," says the Koran. "They are living by their Lord."
"Strive for death, and you will receive life," believes the Palestinian terrorist who would sacrifice himself as well as the hated "jew plunderer." Significantly, a series of articles on Palestinian "martyrs" (the Shuhada) in AL-ISTIQLAL emphasizes their presumed difference from the Jews, whom they allege fear death and seek life at all costs. In essence, this is an unfounded polarity, as the overriding rationale of the terrorist "martyr" is to avoid death at all costs; to obtain a "seat in Paradise" and to be saved "from the torture of the grave." In principle, Israeli officials who would understand Arab terror against Israel, in
part, as a form of religious worship might seek ways to disabuse intended "martyrs" of their particular brand of faith in immortality, but this would be far beyond the scope of operational possibility.
As Israel continues to project its own Western, rational, American model upon Palestinian thinking, "martyr" Samy Rahim's words speak volumes about the true nature of the terrorist adversary: "Every day on which the sun rises and no Jew is killed, nor any martyr has died, will be a day for which we will be punished by Allah." (AL-ISTIQLAL), August 20, 1999).
This punishment will arise because both obligatory aspects of sacrificial terror will have been neglected: The sacrifice of the Jew and the sacrifice of the "martyr." The two-sided nature of terror/sacrifice is also codified in the Charter of Hamas, which states clearly: "...the Palestinian problem is a religious one, to be dealt with on this premise...."I swear by that who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad! I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill."
Lest anyone believe that the more "moderate" Arafat feels differently, consider his recent remarks, in Gaza, to Palestinian "security" forces: "You will fight for Allah, and you will kill and be killed, and this is a solemn oath....Our blood is cheap compared with the cause which has brought us together, but shortly we will meet again in heaven....." Central to these remarks is the duality of sacrificial behavior; the fighters "will kill and be killed...." Victory for the Palestinian people will come when both the despised Jews and the Arab "martyrs" suffer death. But while death for the Jews will be final and unheroic, a confirmation of intrinsic Jewish limitations and unworthiness, death for the Palestinians will be only a temporary inconvenience on the way to eternal life. It is only by killing Jews and subsequently being killed by them that true freedom from death can be
realized.
Yasir Arafat's appointed clergy, preaching on the Temple Mount on August 11, 2000, spoke as follows: "Palestinians spearhead Allah's war against the Jews. The dead shall not rise until the Palestinians shall kill all the Jews....All agreements with Israel are provisional." The Palestinian solution for "the Jews" is a Final Solution. Only as Israel begins to understand that this solution is rooted in the concept of sacrifice can it begin to take essential steps toward national survival.