Jihad 101

...many celebrate their sons' deaths as weddings, even as they rue the fatal step taken...

...It therefore pays careful attention to their rhetoric in each of its three sections...

...When Oliver and Steinberg did their research, it was only Israelis who had to worry about being blown up by suicide bombers...

...Perhaps influenced by the meandering and fanciful Arabic rhetoric of Hamas, the authors write in a stream-of-consciousness style...

...Over the next six years, they traveled sporadically through Gaza and the West Bank, continuing to ferret out information about Palestinian aspirations and delusions...

...Jews, the bombing acolytes were taught, are "monkeys and pigs and the servants of evil," "corrupted corrupters" who seek to control the world, and whose destruction will usher in the final triumph of God and Truth...

...Most have been young men with meager prospects of achieving fame or greatness in their lifetimes, for whom the chance of becoming a martyr was enticing...

...As its title indicates, the book is primarily interested in understanding the perpetrators' motivations...

...Somehow, the version of Islam that these young people accepted does not take human life very seriously...

...Later the couple settled in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, and "by 1990 we had something of a project going...

...To leave this life and to be in Paradise—this is the greatest wish of all Muslims...

...None of these explanations, of course, nor even all of them together, can make sense out of suicide bombing for the reader not steeped in the Muslim religion...

...Hatred of one's body, we learn from the bombers, can bring the destruction of many bodies besides that of the hater...

...Part Three, "A Death on the Path of God," is essentially the record of an interview with a suicide bomber who failed to blow up a crowded Israeli bus...

...The first intifada also produced Hamas (meaning "'zeal"), a Palestinian faction that remains dedicated to wiping the Jewish state off the map...

...What counts is the next world...

...Reveling in blood and gore, they are often eschatological, concerning the hastening of the "end of days," and speak of Jews in a way that can justify their annihilation...

...Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organization— headquartered in Tunis, uninvolved in the uprising, and still calling for the violent destruction of Israel—were persuaded to announce a reversal of their stand and accept a negotiated two-state solution...

...In that more "innocent" age, the bombers' ideology was a hodgepodge of teachings from Islam's hadith traditions—teachings and prophecies, handed down by word of mouth, attributed to the Prophet Mohammed...

...Moreover, although defenders downplay it as an antiIslamic canard, the tradition that assigns 72 houris (young virgins) to every suicide bomber entering Paradise was found to have been taken very seriously by single young men whose economic circumstances did not afford them brilliant marriage prospects...

...It shows that Islam, or a twisted version thereof—not some generic "literalist" approach to life—is what motivates these suicide bombers...

...For those of us in the West who often find ourselves bemoaning the excessive materialism and thiswordliness we see and experience, it may be salutary to look carefully at what can happen when the ordinary pleasures of life are downgraded...

...The book demonstrates, as well, the degree of support they have received from the larger Palestinian community...

...By the time the wave of Palestinian violence abated some two years later, the world had become familiar with the Arab word intifada (literally, "shaking off"), though no one could know that a second even bloodier round would explode in the fall of2000...

...This accident set off spontaneous demonstrations that soon spread to the West Bank...

...They came to teach, but the school "never seemed to materialize," so they spent six months living with a local family and researching the developing violence...

...The authors' own evidence proves otherwise...

...Part Two, "The Portfolio," describes, categorizes and analyzes the themes of martyrdom broadcast in the visual and aural documentation the authors painstakingly gathered...

...The bombers' families have been caught up in the sexual motif, too...

...Those hoping for an end to such violence were hardly comforted by a headline appearing November 1 in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz as Arafat lay dying in a Paris hospital: "Hamas Sees Itself as Substitute for PA.' Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, who coauthored The Road to Martyrs' Square, arrived in Gaza early in 1988, shortly after the intifada broke out...

...The reader is never quite sure of the chronology of events, and after a while the individual identities of the Palestinians interviewed blend into one another...

...As illuminating as it is, The Road to Martyrs' Square would have benefited from good editing...

...On that day, in the Gaza Strip town of Jebalya, an Israeli truck hit a car, killing four Palestinians...

...Under the Oslo Accords, announced the next year, Israel yielded control of large sections of Gaza and the West Bank to Arafat's newly created Palestinian Authority (PA...

...One bomber, obsessing over the virgins who awaited him, talked endlessly about "their impossible beauty...

...The actual writing, for reasons they explain in their Introduction, was marked by periods of "exhaustion and often paralysis...

...You know," the brother of another bomber tells the authors, "for Muslims, the greatest thing that you can wish for is to be in Paradise...

...Hamas introduced suicide bombings to the region— a tactic that would be adopted by Islamic Jihad, the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades (an offshoot of Arafat's Fatah organization), and eventually AI Qaeda...

...But does "literalist" religion necessarily breed suicide bombers...

...He was killed last March by a missile fired from an Israeli Apache helicopter...

...Time will tell whether Arafat's death onNovember 11 will bring any change...

...Instead of the gradual emergence of an Arab state living peacefully alongside the Jewish state, there was renewed bloodshed...

...Then they swelled into a grassroots revolt against rule by Israel, which had occupied both areas plus the Golan Heights while defeating the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in the 1967 Six-Day War...

...He believed that "their fingers looked like the sun___He would sit for long periods of time, just imagining what they must look like...

...It "closes the door on confusion and uncertainty, but also on what could be called the salvation of accident, the ways in which contingency facilitates freedom, allowing people to move in multifarious directions...

...They conducted interviews with leaders as well as men and women on the street, collected posters, examined videotapes made by suicide bombers before setting off on their bloody assignments, and transcribed signs and graffiti...

...was not yet widely considered the Islamic world's greatest enemy...

...Part One, "Saint Yasin,' revolves around the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yasin...

...The shock of the first intifada made it clear to the United States and to a majority of Israelis that the status quo in the disputed territories could not continue indefinitely...

...Indeed, Oliver and Steinberg themselves suggest a universalization of the suicidal mindset by invoking something they call "the literalist project," which goes far beyond Islam...

...But the process broke down...

...Alas, reading The Road to Martyrs' Square will not make anyone feel more secure...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Associate Director of Research, American Jewish Committee...

...In evaluating Oliver and Steinberg's findings, the reader needs to bear in mind that their book only deals with the early years of the suicidal scourge, when Osama bin Laden's name was unknown and the U.S...

...Young Muslims recruited by these groups have killed thousands of innocent Israelis, Americans, Russians, Iraqis, and others...

...By early 1992 secret peace negotiations had begun...

...Practically unknown when the intifada began, he quickly became the spiritual guide of the suicide bombers...

...In their somewhat heavy-handed jargon, literalism "promises to jumpstart change in overdetermined systems through the actualization of texts...

...Seriously hurt, the would-be martyr somehow found his way back to his Palestinian family, where the authors found him...

...Dunya (the Arabic word denoting the physical world) "doesn't amount to anything," says one bomber...

...A diplomatic settlement giving the Palestinians some form of selfrule was necessary...

...No other "literalist" faith has yet produced such people in any significant number, and certainly no other society has ever encouraged or validated such actions...

...today it is virtually everyone...

...Personal circumstances, Oliver and Steinberg indicate, also play a role in creating suicide bombers...

...coeditor, "American Jewish Yearbook" December 8,1987 was a key date in the history of the Middle East and the world...

...Oliver and Steinberg, unable to maintain their stance of objectivity, declare: "One sits there, exhausted, speechless, resourceless, before this extended discourse of the weak, the rage and fury of the damaged and the damned") But quite aside from anti-Jewish rantings and end-of-days anticipation, the evidence presented by the suicide bombers and their supporters points to something more tragic...