After the signing of the Oslo Agreements by the Labor Party Government of Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, there was a spate of suicide bombings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Affulah, the Beit Lid road junction near Netanya and elsewhere claiming many dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded. Several of these terrorist outrages occurred during the last months of the Shimon Peres in office. The Netanyahu Government was similarly favored only in the summer of 1997, when 14 people were killed and some 150 wounded by two suicide terrorists who blew themselves up in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. They have still not been identified, but it is clear that they too reached their target from a base under Palestine Authority rule. Palestinian comment varied from explaining their motives to identifying with them.
On March 13th, 1997, seven Israeli schoolgirls on a visit to the Naharayim area, ceded by Israel to Jordan under the terms of the Israel-Jordan peace treaty and optimistically called by both sides “the island of peace”, were machine-gunned to death there by a Jordanian soldier, Ahmed Daqamseh. The Jordanian court spared him the death sentence. It ruled that he was suffering from a “mental disorder” and that the murders were not premeditated. However, it also convicted him of plotting to kill Israelis since 1993 - a criminal intent incontestably revealing premeditation. The real reasons for its leniency were the internal tensions in Jordan. Much of the predominantly Palestinian population of the country, its expectations of unconditional Israeli surrender to the PLO at the negotiating tables shattered by the slow pace of concessions from Netanyahu and his refusal to commit himself to stopping Jewish settlement in Judea-Samaria or to the division of Jerusalem, was psychologically ready to take out its anger on Jordan’s Hashemite regime for the peace treaty it had signed. Though King Hussein’s control of effective military and police forces holds such tendencies in check, it was decided not to enrage these Palestinians, who regard Deqamseh’s murder of Jews (it is always Jews not Israelis) as a heroic act of Islamic duty, by executing him.
Deqamseh could not have expected this. His act, like those of the suicide bombers of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Beit Lid, was a display of the Jihad’s most sacred element of violence - the element of sacrifice. Sacrifice was part of the Arab tribal religion in what are now Saudi Arabia and Yemen when the Prophet Mohammed was born. Then Allah was the moon god - the reason why the crescent moon still appears on the flags and insignia of many Moslem states. Mohammed proclaimed Allah the only, all-powerful God, but his Koran contains the concept of sacrifice for Allah. Christianity and Judaism abandoned the practice of sacrificing human beings to their God many centuries ago. Islam, still attached to its 8th century religious norms, has retained it.
To understand the rationale and operation of Palestinian Arab terrorism or any other Moslem terrorism against Israel, one must therefore first understand the PLO-Hamas-Islamic Jihad-Hezbollah conceptions of the sacred. For Arab terrorism is, at heart, the expression of a religious sacrifice. Yasser Arafat, speaking to PLO security forces in Gaza on September 24th, 1996, said: “They will fight for Allah, and they 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 this revealing statement is the duality of sacrificial behavior - the meaning of “will kill and be killed” to his listeners: Victory for the Palestinian people will come when both the Jews and the Arab “martyrs” suffer death. But the end of the Jews will be unheroic and final - a confirmation of their status as “children of death.” For the Palestinians death will be only a temporary inconvenience on the way to immortality. Only by killing Jews and dying in the process, or subsequently being killed by them, can this eternal freedom from oblivion be realized.
This is the true meaning of Islamic terrorism: it is a form of sacred violence including the sacrifice of both enemies and martyrs. Therefore, through the purposeful killing of Jews - today through acts of terrorism, tomorrow in war - Palestinians and other Moslems embarked upon Jihad can buy themselves immortality. Once Israel understands that terrorism is a kind of religious sacrifice, it will be on the way to effective counterterrorism.
In August 1995, Arafat said: “The Palestinian people are prepared to sacrifice the last boy and the last girl to assure that the Palestinian flag will fly over the walls, churches and mosques of Jerusalem. He was not describing a purely political sacrifice but pointing to death in the context of a holy war. The Jews will be killed, but “the last boy and the last girl” will not only find eternal life but are not really “the last”. Multitudes of Arabs will go on living. Both Arafat and his audience understand this. For them, the sacred violence of the terrorist who dies while killing the despised Jews is the optimal fusion of religion and politics. Besides, terrorism against unbelievers has throughout the ages helped to quell violence within the Moslem communities and has tended to prevent intra-communal conflicts. This is the main reason why, despite American and Israeli arguments that Hamas and the Islamic Jihad threaten the control the Palestinian Authority by the Fatah, Arafat has taken no effective action against these movements, preferring to arrest people only to release them quietly after a short period. Only very strong American pressure manifested in damaging deeds not in words, or the realization that Israel will react in a manner destroying the possibility of an independent Palestinian state, can have a chance of changing this PLO attitude. The absolute refusal to honor the provision of the Oslo agreement requiring the PLO to extradite murderers of Israelis to Israel is due to the same considerations. Like the repeal of parts of the Palestinian Charter, it is a provision Arafat never intended to be more than the Koran- approved act of cheating the infidel.
The lessons Israel must learn can be provided by a thorough and more generic study of the sacrifice concept. Throughout human history, most (and in the case of the Islamic world all) sacrificial victims have been distinguishable from nonsacrificeable beings by one essential trait - they could be sacrificed without fear of reprisal. Sacred violence via sacrifice is best practiced without risk of vengeance. The victim without a champion is the ideal sacrificial victim.
Ironically, a feeling of immunity from Israeli or Jewish vengeance today permeates the entire Islamic terrorist community. By responding to acts of terror with self-criticism and/or degrading submission, the Jewish nation reinforces the PLO/Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Hezbollah view that the Arabs are engaged in genuinely sacrificial behavior. Revolted by a stooped people that refuses to fight back and even scrapes its own flesh and blood from sidewalk “altars” without planning revenge, these Arabs know their religious duty. And when Arab courts hand out light sentences for murders of Jews, their belief that the Government of Israel will remain mute is strengthened.
So before the Jewish State can protect itself from terrorism, it must recognize that Islam links terrorism against the infidel to the sacred. The only reaction likely to limit or eradicate it is to convince would- be attackers that Israel will never allow itself to be sacrificed. And this goal can only be accomplished by policies conveying to the Arabs the certainty of vengeance whenever Jews are slaughtered by Arab terrorists. Yet while such reaction can be justified even to governments hostile to Israel’s existence or its Zionist policies, it is inconsistent with the prevailing self-sacrifice practiced by Israel within the framework of the hideously misnamed “peace process”.
Finally, Arabs who connect terrorism with sacrifice draw their strength from their ideological blinkers. Islam shelters them from expectations of reciprocal violence, just as it provides the secret justification for the killing of Jews. The greater the extent to which Israel can succeed in demystifying Arab terrorism, openly unlinking its murders from the Islamic institutions consecrating it, the better will it be able to bring its enemies into the required circle of Jewish vengeance and punishment. In the short run, the demystification process will undoubtedly escalate Arab-Israel violence, but in the long run it may assure that the entire State of Israel will not be sacrificed on the bloodstained altar of Arab terror.