Hamas and Suicide Terrorism

Multi-causal and Multi-level Approaches

Rashmi Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415832281
• eBook ISBN: 9781135695996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book analyses the root causes of suicide terrorism at both the elite and rank-and- file levels of the Hamas and also explains why this tactic has disappeared in the post-2006 period.

This volume adopts a multi-causal, multi-level approach to analyse the use of suicide bombings by Hamas and its individual operatives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It uses extensive fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews in order to delve beneath the surface and understand why and how suicide operations were adopted as a sustained mechanism of engagement within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three core factors fuelled Hamas's suicide bombing campaigns. First, Palestinian suicide operations are a complex combination of instrumental and expressive violence adopted by both organisations and individuals to achieve political and/or societal survival, retaliation and competition. In other words, suicide bombings not only serve distinct political and strategic goals for both Hamas and its operatives but they also serve to convey a symbolic message to various audiences, within Israel, the Palestinian territories and around the world. Second, suicide operations perform a crucial role in the formation and consolidation of Palestinian national identity and are also the latest manifestation of the historically entrenched cultural norm of militant heroic martyrdom. Finally, Hamas's use of political Islam also facilitates the articulation, justification and legitimisation of suicide operations as a modern-day jihad against Israel through the means of modern interpretations and fatwas.

This approach not only facilitates a much needed, multifaceted, holistic understanding of suicide bombings in this particular region but also yields policy-relevant lessons to address extreme political violence in other parts of the world. This book will be of much interest to students of Hamas, terrorism, Middle East politics and security studies.

1 Introductory remarks

On 16 April 1993, 22-year-old Sahar Tamam Nablusi packed a white Mitsubishi van with cooking-gas canisters, placed a copy of the Qur'an on the passenger seat and purposely barrelled into two buses, killing himself and another Palestinian and wounding eight Israelis. The militant Palestinian Islamist group, Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which was the first suicide bombing in the decades-old landscape of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The attack was so unexpected and novel that even days later the Jerusalem Post continued to call it an ‘apparent suicide’. Of course today, 17 years later, there no longer exists such hesitation in identifying these increasingly common attacks as suicide bombings. Since then numerous books have been written on Hamas and/or the phenomenon of suicide attacks. Those focusing on Hamas often tend to either dedicate a chapter to its use of suicide attacks or, at the very least, mention it in passing. Studies looking at the phenomenon of suicide attacks in particular also often use Hamas as one of their many case studies. Yet very few researchers have written specifically about Hamas's use of suicide attacks from 1993 to 2006 at length and then only from a particular viewpoint (religious, social, strategic, etc.) and/or focusing upon only one level of analysis (individual, organizational, societal).¹ In short, for those asking, ‘why another book on Hamas?’ it must be underscored that there still remains the need to formulate an in-depth, multi-causal, multi-level understanding of how and why suicide attacks emerged and were used in the Palestinian scenario over a given period of time. As this book will specifically address suicide bombings in the Israeli–Palestinian context its conclusions may be restricted to this particular case. However, at the same time, the approach applied and analysis presented hopes to provide an evaluative framework that can be applied to the use of suicide attacks by other groups in other socio-political, cultural settings.

Of course, suicide as a mode of political protest is by no means a recent phenomenon nor has it been practised by one people or faith alone. Early Christian martyrs suffered gruesome tortures and deaths for their religious convictions and for these early Christians martyrdom was a form of religious persecution.² The early Persian Ismaili-Nazaris, more commonly known as the hashishiyun (assassins), were a Shi'ia sect based in north-western Iran in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These skilled assassins targeted heavily guarded political and military leaders in missions where the likelihood of escape was often impossible and characteristically murdered their targets before sometimes killing themselves with the same dagger.³ The hashishiyun were so effective that they came to be feared and demonized by both Sunni leaders in the region and the heads of Christian Crusader states alike.

The first contact the modern Western world had with suicide attacks as a premeditated political-military phenomenon was during the Second World War when over 3,000 Japanese army and navy pilots died attempting to crash their planes into Allied ships and aircraft carriers.⁴ The term ‘Kamikaze’ refers specifically to the Shinpū (‘divine wind’) Special Attack Corps formed in October 1944 whose pilots rammed their airplanes, gliders and manned torpedoes into Allied vessels. Though the efficacy of Kamikaze attacks may be debatable they nonetheless continued unabated till August 1945 when Japan surrendered. It is commonly accepted that these attacks damaged or sank at least 375 US naval vessels and killed over 12,000 American servicemen.⁵ However, even more significant than the military efficacy of the Kamikaze is the fact that this was perhaps the first time that modern ‘Western’ nations fought a fully trained and equipped army that belonged to a radically different cultural tradition with starkly different conventions of war.⁶

After the Kamikaze missions the wave of suicide bombings conducted by Hizballah (‘the party of God’), a Lebanese Shi'ite group, from early 1983 to mid-1985, signalled the re-emergence of suicide attacks in their most contemporary form. The first of these attacks were the truck bombings of the US Marine and French barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 241 US soldiers and 58 French troops. After this initial attack Hizballah continued to target US, French and Israeli troops in Lebanon conducting a total of 36 suicide attacks in the 1980s and successfully evicting these forces from Lebanon.⁷

By 1990 the contemporary use of suicide attacks had spread further. In July 1990, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Hindu-Marxist group, began targeting Sri Lankan political leaders in their fight for a Tamil homeland. The LTTE is reputed to have invented the concealed suicide bomb vests and is known for conducting suicide operations on land, sea and air. It is also the only organization that has successfully assassinated two heads of state in suicide missions, including the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi and the former Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. In the Middle East, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) began conducting suicide attacks against Israeli settlers, troops and citizens in 1993 and 1994 respectively. A number of experts believe that Hamas cadres were trained in the tactical use of suicide attacks in 1992 when a few hundred Hamas members were deported to southern Lebanon by the Israeli state as punitive action taken for the killing of five Israeli servicemen. Still others believe that while Hamas received no direct training, Hizbal-lah's successful deployment of this tactic against the American, French and Israeli troops from Lebanon in the early 1980s may have influenced it to adopt suicide missions in what has been termed the ‘contagion effect of suicide bombing’.⁸ Either way, it seems that the strategic use of suicide missions slowly became entrenched in the Palestinian consciousness and hence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, especially in the period between 2000 and 2006. However, while Hamas's use of suicide attacks has tapered off in the past four years, suicide bombings have increasingly been used in various other parts of the globe since the mid-1990s and can be traced today to regions as diverse as Kashmir, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, the United States, Spain, Great Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq-indicating that a deeper understanding of this phenomenon is a definite necessity.

But what exactly is a suicide attack? A suicide attack⁹ may be defined as ‘a politically motivated violent attack perpetrated by a self-aware individual (or individuals) who actively and purposely causes his own death through blowing himself up along with his chosen target. The perpetrator's ensured death is a precondition for the success of his mission’.¹⁰ Therefore, a suicide attack is seen as an operational method in which the operative is fully aware that the mission ‘will not be executed if he is not killed in the process’.¹¹ It is this precondition of death that differentiates a suicide attack from all other types of high-risk attacks where the possibility of death may exist but is not an operational requirement. The attack itself can be conducted by activating explosives either worn or carried by the operative as a portable explosive charge (for example in a backpack) or alternatively explosives may be planted in a vehicle that is driven by the operative(s). In cases where a vehicle is used the attack is either carried out by parking and detonating the vehicle in a densely populated area or by ramming it into a selected target (such as a bus or building). Robert Pape notes that a defining characteristic of modern suicide attacks is that for the first time multiple actors are simultaneously opting to use suicide missions as a mechanism of engagement and coercion across the globe where previously there had never been more than one suicide bombing campaign active in a given period of time.¹² In other words, suicide attacks have emerged as an operational tactic applied to achieve different political and military ends in vastly different conflicts and circumstances. As such, it is imperative that each conflict is studied individually in order to understand what prompts, enables and legitimizes the tactical resort to suicide attacks in each specific context.

Understanding suicide attacks as a tactic enables us, first and foremost, to move away from approaches that tend to project it as an ‘Islamic’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ phenomenon. The point of entry into this research then is, first and foremost, the rejection of the monolithic Islamist global threat so evident in much of the popular literature today in favour of an in-depth examination of a particular case study. Thus, Hamas and Suicide Terrorism adopts a multi-level, multi-causal approach to the phenomenon of suicide attacks specifically within the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and focuses particularly upon the use of suicide missions by both the elite and the rank-and-file of Hamas from 1993 to 2006. The discussion is firmly rooted in a historical perspective which not only allows it to identify why and how suicide bombings emerged in the occupied territories, but also why they were adopted as a mechanism of engagement on both an individual and organizational level at such a specific point of time in this long-standing conflict. Studying the use of political violence in la longue durée also allows one to understand why these so-called ‘martyrdom operations’ came to be, for a time, a socially sanctioned method of armed resistance. This approach also enables us to reflect upon some potential reasons suicide attacks stopped so abruptly in 2006 and came to be almost fully replaced by mortar and artillery rocket attacks and increasingly sophisticated guerrilla warfare. Contextualizing the use of political violence in the Palestinian territories this book locates the emergence and spread of suicide attacks in a network of interrelated factors, namely:

1 The expressive and instrumental rationality of suicide missions, which explains why suicide violence emerged and was used a mechanism of engagement with the Israeli state;

2 The struggle for a national identity and the evolution of the culturally entrenched norm of militant heroic martyrdom, which explains how suicide violence evolved specifically within the Palestinian socio-political setting; and

3 The use of political Islam to frame violent resistance against the Israeli state as a modern day jihad, which explains how suicide violence was justified, legitimized and enacted specifically within the Palestinian milieu.

This combination of factors allows us to account for some of the key strategic imperatives behind Hamas's tactical use of suicide bombings while also highlighting the broad social and cultural incentives that enabled suicide violence to emerge as an acceptable mechanism of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. In short, three levels of analysis, i.e. the individual, the organization and the society from which they both emerge, are simultaneously considered and given equal weight in this work. Having said that, while the equal consideration of all three levels of analysis is imperative for fully understanding the emergence, durability and shifts in the use of suicide missions in the Palestinian territories, the organization, i.e. Hamas, is identified as having provided the crucial initial impetus for suicide operations in this particular socio-political, cultural context. It is, therefore, imperative to understand the nature of Hamas as an organization before analysing how it so successfully introduced suicide attacks as an acceptable, if not a preferred, mode of engaging with the Israeli state and people. This book is based on the premise that conceptualizing Hamas's use of suicide attacks provides not only a crucial insight into the pervasiveness of political violence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict but also sheds light upon how Hamas has evolved and endured in Palestinian politics.

Hamas, an acronym for the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (the Islamic Resistance Movement) emerged with the first intifada, a popular uprising that erupted in the occupied Palestinian territories in December 1987. It rapidly gained ground, carving an identity for itself as a militant Islamist group that has since come to be synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism and the use of violent tactics ranging from mine and artillery rocket attacks to, of course, its hallmark tactical use of suicide attacks on civilian populations. At the same time Hamas is, and always has been, more than just a ‘terrorist organization’. From its very inception as a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, it has dedicated its energies and resources towards supporting the Palestinian community and responding to its immediate hardships and concerns. Hamas supports an extensive network of social welfare organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which provide, directly or indirectly, emergency cash assistance, food and medical care as well as educational and psychological services to hundreds of Palestinians.¹³ By building upon and appropriating the networks established by the Muslim Brotherhood it has not only slowly and successfully overshadowed its parent organization but also ensured its sustainability within the Palestinian political milieu. Hamas is deeply invested in its charity work, which it considers, along with armed resistance, a central component of its Islamic-Palestinian identity and purpose. In a society where roughly two-thirds of the population lives below the poverty line, Hamas's social welfare activities are vital, not only for its own political sustainability in the territories but, in the absence of a functional state, also for the survival of the one in six Palestinians that it assists.

As such, Hamas must be seen, first and foremost, as a social movement which, as a direct consequence of being based in the occupied territories, is deeply rooted in Palestinian society and its everyday realities from the very beginning of its organizational existence in a way its arch political rival, Fatah, never was. As a result of this local base, Hamas has always possessed an intimate understanding of the Palestinian street, its anxieties and concerns. In the 22 years since its genesis it has cunningly used this knowledge to mould its strategies of resistance to echo these popular sentiments, needs and hopes, working not only to mitigate the immediate difficulties and concerns of Palestinian society but, in doing so, also simultaneously charting a unique course through a political landscape that had been dominated by the secular Fatah for over 40 years. At least some of its success can be credited to its large and varied support base. Thus while initially its main stronghold was comprised of the lower strata of Palestinian society Hamas has over time transcended social fragmentation and class divisions to acquire a heterogeneous support base. This has further strengthened its social moorings making its isolation from Palestinian society difficult, if not impossible. However, its success is also rooted in its ability to project an ideological coherence, political vitality and organizational unity which has enabled it to steadily garner influence, legitimacy and power amongst those living in the occupied territories – as was effectively demonstrated by its victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Hamas has always endorsed both a military jihad against Israel and social welfare as equally legitimate mechanisms for realizing its goals of establishing an independent Islamic Palestinian state. As such, it has both carved out a unique identity within the Palestinian political landscape and adapted to a new political reality without needing to alter or moderate its original ideological outlook. In rearticulating the political programme for Palestinian statehood in specifically Islamic terms Hamas has also effectively appropriated and overshadowed the secular national narrative and redefined not only the strategic goals of the national movement but also the means available to achieve them. As such, Hamas characterizes its acceptance of any Palestinian state limited to the territories of West Bank and Gaza as no more than a pragmatic step in its jihad against Israel which seeks, as its final goal, an Islamic Palestinian nation-state within the geographical boundaries of historic Palestine. By shrewdly interpreting any political agreement with Israel as a mere pause in its historic jihad, Hamas has managed to successfully acquire both political flexibility and manoeuvrability without ever compromising its ideological credibility and unique political identity. Such an articulation has not only enabled Hamas to participate in established political processes within the occupied territories but has also provided it with the ability to frame even its hostile takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 within the parameters of its historic jihad, and therefore as a necessary step towards achieving the long-term strategic goal of the Palestinian nation-state.

Having said that, the role of political violence in Hamas's socio-political toolbox cannot be underestimated. Hamas has always been a revolutionary organization. As the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, from the very beginning Hamas represented a sharp break from the Brotherhood's logic of bringing about gradual social reform through education and preaching in favour of more violent strategies of engagement. Its campaign of violence not only targeted Israel but also its Palestinian rivals, primarily Fatah, and since its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip it has gained the reputation of crushing all opposition with a ruthlessness perhaps never before seen in the Palestinian political arena. In its arsenal of violent tactics Hamas has used mortar and artillery rocket attacks, mines, knifings and shootings but it is still perhaps best known for the deadly spate of suicide bombings it conducted against Israel from 1993 to approximately 2006. Hamas was not only the first Palestinian group to use suicide attacks against Israel but its campaign of terror was so successful in garnering Palestinian support that it effectively forced more moderate groups, like Fatah, that were rapidly losing political ground, into adopting suicide bombings as a tactic during the second intifada (2000–2005). However, despite the use of such murderous mechanisms to politically engage the Israeli state, Hamas's resort to violence, and specifically its use of suicide attacks must be placed in a broader trajectory of violence in the occupied territories. Of course, Hamas is not the first group to use violent tactics to enhance its appeal to the Palestinian population by adopting armed resistance to Israeli occupation – and it certainly will not be the last. Indeed violence was used to mobilize Palestinian society and propel the national struggle from the very beginning of the resistance, as exemplified by the Great Revolt of 1936 and the guerrilla activity of the 1960s and 1970s. However, over the course of what has been nearly a century of Palestinian resistance, a marked change has occurred in the scale and intensity of the violence employed against the ‘enemy’. Thus, the intensity of political violence has, despite fluctuations and period...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series: LSE International Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1   Introductory remarks
• 2   Rationality, nationalism and political Islam
• 3   A brief political history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
• 4   Rationality and the convergence of expressive and instrumental violence
• 5   Palestinian nationalism, identity and the norm of militant heroic martyrdom
• 6   Political Islam and the rhetoric of jihad and martyrdom
• 7   Concluding remarks
• Appendix A: List of interviews
• Appendix B: Suicide bombings conducted by Hamas, 1993–2006
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index