Suicide Bombers
— -- A Talk With Dr. Eyad Sarraj
They are not depressed. They are not insane. They are not even suicidal. Still, they are willing to turn themselves into a human bomb killing themselves and anyone nearby. Why?
No one understands the psychology behind the suicide bomber better than Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj. Inside his tiny clinic in Gaza City he has been working with Palestinian children for 15 years. He remembers, shortly after returning from his practice in England, when he first heard a young man talk about killing himself in order to kill Israelis.
The young man was angry, so angry that he talked about blowing himself up, Sarraj recalled.
"I believe that every single case of a suicide bomber is attributed directly to a history of trauma during childhood," Sarraj said. "Witnessing the beating and the humiliation of the leaders of their fathers. Seeing people killed or destroyed, having your home demolished, having your landscape destroyed. These are the kinds of traumas Palestinian children have been subjected to and from this pool of traumatized children you have suicide bombers."
According to a study conducted by Sarraj's clinic, 45 percent of the children if Gaza witnessed the beating and the humiliation of their fathers --including being stopped at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers and homes destroyed. That has had a profound effect on this generation of young suicide bombers.
"If this young man is recruited into a group," Sarraj explained. "It's important. A group identity becomes important it's a replacement of the father identity who was so helpless." So the potential would be bomber believes, "I am so powerful because I belong to a group that gives me a new identity. That is important."
So too is understanding the living conditions that many suicide bombers come from.
Gaza, for example, is home to more than 1 million Palestinians and is the most densely populated piece of land in the world. Most residents in Gaza live dispersed throughout eight refugee camps.
"If you come to live in Gaza for sometime you will understand the issue," Sarraj said.
These days, Gaza is like a jail, most people cannot leave. They are denied the right to pass through Israeli checkpoints, often cut off from family members who live in the West bank. Since the beginning of the second Intifadah in September 2000, unemployment has skyrocketed to 80 percent. Squalor is a part of daily life. And so is despair.
"It is a form of despair," Sarraj said referring to the act of blowing oneself up. "Despair in the sense of loss of hope here in this life so we need another life. It is despair militarily. Because we cannot attack the Israelis we don?t have an army we don't have F-16s we don't have tanks we don't have anything. We only have our bodies. And of course, if someone wants to kill himself no one can stop him."
Sarraj sighs. He does not support suicide bombers but does understand their psyche.
"Arabs have this notion of shame and dignity that without understanding it you can never understand Arabs or deal with them," he said. "The Arab humiliation and the Muslim humiliation since the establishment of Israel and the defeat of the Arab nation, the Muslim nation continuously since 1948 have resulted in generations that are more defiant than previous ones and they are ready to sacrifice themselves and ready to die.
"Every generation you have a more defiant generation than before," Sarraj continues. "Every generation you have people who are ready to do more horrible things than even before. The first Intifadah was only stones and rocks and so on and some shooting. This Intifadah is mainly about suicide bombers and killing."
Suicide bombers embody the psychology of victims, Sarraj said. "They are victims of the Israeli, of course, occupation but they are the victims of their own leadership. They are victims of the culture of victimization when you are only concerned about what happens to you."
"But, even the paranoid can be treated," Sarraj explained. "And even the paranoid can stop killing each other if you have the right doctor. Unfortunately we don?t have the right doctors.
That, he says, has produced disastrous results.
"We now have a young generation of children that when you ask them what they would like to be when they are 20 and they will respond by saying I want to be a martyr. They don't say I want to be a doctor or an engineer or a TV presenter, they say I want to be a martyr. This is now the hero example. And this is very dangerous.
"The children of the first Intifadah became the suicide bombers of today and the children of today are looking for death and dying and martyrdom. And you can only try and imagine what it will be like in 10 years time. Today is so bad, so dangerous, so evil it is like the Holy Land has been taken by the devil."