| |
Women suicide bombers defy
Israel
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - Israel's task of countering suicide
terror has been complicated further with the increasing
participation of Palestinian women in suicide missions.
Prospective women suicide bombers are not only hard to
identify as they do not fit the conventional profile of
suicide bombers, but also they have given suicide
missions a new respectability in Palestinian society.
Suicide attacks have become a part of
Palestinian militant strategy only since 1993. For
around nine years thereafter, suicide missions remained
a male preserve. On January 27, 2002, this male bastion
was breached when 27-year-old Wafa Idris blew herself up
and two others to become the first Palestinian woman
suicide bomber. Since then five other Palestinian women
have carried out suicide attacks in Israel; the most
recent was 29-year-old Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, who blew
herself and 19 others up in a restaurant in Haifa,
Israel, earlier this month. Several other women had been
taken into custody before they could carry out their
deadly missions.
While the participation of
Palestinian women in suicide missions is a recent
phenomenon, their involvement in militant and terrorist
operations goes back several decades. In 1969, Leila
Khaled, a member of the Marxist People's Front for the
Liberation of Palestine hit the international headlines
with the successful hijack of a TWA flight.
Subsequently, she hijacked an El Al flight - Israel's
national carrier - from Amsterdam to New York. The
hijack failed and she was taken into custody but
released in exchange for more than 300 passengers on
other hijacked airplanes. Leila Khaled went on to become
an icon of the Palestinian resistance and liberation
struggle.
In 1978, Dalal Mughrabi - still
honored by many Palestinians - led a machine-gun attack
on a bus that killed 36 Israelis. Another Palestinian
woman militant to come under the media spotlight was
Atef Elian, a senior Islamic Jihad functionary who
intended carrying out a suicide attack by blowing up a
car in Jerusalem in 1987. The attack was foiled. Elian
was arrested and jailed in Israel for a decade.
The participation of women as suicide bombers
represents another phase in their involvement with the
Palestinian resistance. Several analysts have described
the participation of Palestinian women in suicide
attacks as a sharp departure from Palestinian tradition.
Islam not only forbids suicide but also is opposed to
women actively engaging in the public space. Islamist
militant groups such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have
traditionally been reluctant to involve women in
military operations.
Most of the Palestinian
suicide bombers, including those who were taken into
custody before they could carry out their mission, have
had ties with outfits linked to the secular Fatah group.
The Islamist Hamas remains reluctant to recruit women to
carry out suicide missions. The Islamic Jihad appears to
have overcome its earlier inhibitions with regard to
deploying women in suicide missions. According to Yoni
Fighel, a researcher at the International Policy
Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at Herziliya in
Israel, the Islamic Jihad launched a campaign early this
year to recruit women.
According to Fighel,
Islamic Jihad's "efforts to recruit women for suicide
attacks begins with the identification of potential
candidates in northern West Bank Universities, as well
as in towns and villages. Once a prospective suicide
bomber is found, the organization invests considerable
effort in convincing women that this kind of activity
does not contradict Islamic principles nor the daily
duties of the Muslim woman."
Islamic Jihad has
sought to justify its deployment of women suicide
bombers by insisting that they volunteer to participate
in the mission. It claims that it does not encourage
women to blow themselves up and allows them to do so
only if they insist.
On May 19 this year, the
first Islamic Jihad woman suicide bomber struck.
Nineteen-year-old Hiba Daraghmeh detonated a belt filled
with explosives that was strapped to her waist killing
herself and three others, and injuring 93 people in a
shopping mall in Afula in northern Israel. The Islamic
Jihad had recruited her a few months earlier. Jaradat
was the Islamic Jihad's second female suicide bomber
"martyr".
There are several reasons why groups
like the Islamic Jihad are turning to women to carry out
their suicide missions. Women are less likely to arouse
the suspicions of the Israeli security forces. The
chances of success are higher since a woman suicide
bomber dressed in Western clothes blends easily with the
Israeli population.
Furthermore, militant groups
have drawn much propaganda mileage from the "martyrdom"
of women suicide bombers. The image of young women
fighting mighty Israel by blowing up their bodies is a
powerful one. And while suicide bombing itself has
evoked much revulsion, the image of women, defying
tradition to sacrifice their lives for the Palestinian
cause has drawn more attention to the despair of the
Palestinian people. If Leila Khaled fired the
imagination of an entire generation of Palestinians and
liberation fighters elsewhere in the world in the 1970s,
suicide "martyrs" Wafa Idris, Hiba Daraghmeh and Hanadi
Jaradat are much-revered heroines today in the Gaza
Strip and West Bank.
While counter-insurgency
experts and analysts have made some progress with regard
to figuring out the modus operandi of suicide bombers,
their understanding of the motivations of suicide
bombers remains limited. This is particularly so in the
case of women suicide bombers.
Some analysts
have suggested that women suicide bombers were
misfits/outcasts in their society. An article on an
Israeli government website says: "Any hint of
impropriety, no matter how minor, can have serious
consequences for the woman involved, even prompting male
family members to murder her in a so-called 'honor'
killing. Such personal motives have been well exploited
by the terrorist organizations when they approach women
in order to recruit them for suicide attacks. Recent
intelligence information, gathered by Israeli liaison
and coordination officials, have identified a clear
effort by the Yasser Arafat's Fatah 'Tanzim' militia to
recruit as suicide terrorists those young women who find
themselves in acute emotional distress due to social
stigmatization."
Analyzing Jaradat's motivation,
Fighel writes: "There seems to be a great disparity
between her professional achievements and her personal
life. In a traditional orthodox society such as
Palestinian society, a woman of her age [27] who is
still unmarried inevitably faces the question of why she
is still single. How did this affect her psychological
predisposition to solve her personal 'unfinished
business' by her willingness to be a suicider and escape
her dead end?"
A woman suicide bomber's actions
are often framed by descriptions of her beauty, her
"victimhood" and her sufferings. In the 1960s and 70s
the media were obsessed with the "devastating good
looks" of "pin-up terrorist girl" Leila Khaled. That
obsession continues to date. A 2001 report in The
Guardian describes her appearance in some detail: the
"delicate Audrey Hepburn face", the "shiny hair wrapped
in a keffiah [scarf] ", the gun held by "fragile
hands" and the ring "resting delicately on her third
finger". Similarly, media reports on suicide attacks by
Palestinian women seem preoccupied with the suicide
bomber's "manicured fingernails", the shape of her face
and color of eyes - details that are conspicuously
absent in the reports of suicide bombings carried out by
male bombers.
While the media are preoccupied
with the woman suicide bomber's physical appearance,
researchers are focussed on looking for emotional
reasons for her actions. And thus, the woman suicide
bomber's decision to blow up her body to kill others is
seen as an act of revenge, a response to personal
injustice suffered and so on. Rarely is it seen as a
political act, the outcome of commitment to a political
cause or an ideology or even as a response to despair
and humiliation resulting from living under Israeli
occupation.
What drives a woman or a man to
become a suicide bomber cannot be pinned down to a
single reason. An incident such as the death of a
brother by the Israeli security forces might help her
make the final decision to offer her body as a weapon to
destroy the enemy, but it is a complex web of social,
psychological and above all political experiences that
shape her outlook on the matter.
(Copyright 2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for information
on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
