Dimona

By now, you have no doubt heard the grim news about the suicide bombing in Dimona on Monday. I have received some touching e-mails expressing concern for my safety, which I appreciate, but in truth the bombing made me angry, not scared. The perpetrators call themselves "martyrs," but in fact they are murderers, and no one should have qualms about saying so. I knew there would probably be another bombing while I was here, but they are rare now. Before Monday, there had not been one in more than a year. In large part, that is due to the much maligned security fence, which has proven to be effective in saving lives. Furthermore, Israelis have learned out of necessity to be very careful. In many stores and restaurants here, you will find a security guard who will search your bag and scan you with a hand-held metal detector before he allows you to enter. People adapt to "the situation" (as they say here) and get on with their lives as best they can. What else can they do?

Some of my colleagues, I have noticed, are inclined to analyze Palestinian terrorism in terms that resemble the old "classical model" of social movements and revolutions. This explanatory model has been roundly criticized over the past thirty years, and in any other context they would surely reject it out of hand. Applied to Palestinian terrorism, the model boils down to something like this: oppressive Israeli policies fuel frustration and anger among Palestinians, which leads inevitably to the kind of terrorism that was perpetrated in Dimona on Monday. But a suicide bombing is not an act to which the perpetrators are inexorably driven by suffering or poverty or desperation or hopelessness or anything else. Of course, it may be a reaction to all of these things, but one chooses to react in this way. As the American sociologist Charles Cooley pointed out, society is not a chicken yard. What he meant is that human beings, unlike chickens, do not react directly to stimuli. Between stimulus and response comes interpretation. People behave toward one another and objects in their environment in accordance with the meanings they have learned to place upon them. This key insight helps to explain why there are plenty of frustrated and angry individuals around the world who don't become terrorists.

The other problem with this simplistic analysis of Palestinian terrorism is that it neglects to explain how uncoordinated individual psychological discontent is transformed into mass murder (or, to use the more antiseptic language of social science, organized collective violence). As Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly pointed out way back in 1974 (in their seminal book Strikes in France, 1830-1968), "individuals are not magically mobilized for participation in some group enterprise, regardless [of] how angry, sullen, hostile or frustrated they may feel. Their aggression may be channeled to collective ends only through the coordinating, directing functions of an organization, be it formal or informal." In the case of Monday's bombing in Dimona, that organization was probably Hamas, a racist movement with an explicit policy of destroying Israel and cleansing Palestine of Jews, responsible for countless suicide bombings in Israel, and initially elected to power in 2006 (before seizing complete control of Gaza in a coup in 2007) on an anti-Semitic, anti-peace program. In a 2002 report, Human Rights Watch stated that the leaders of Hamas "should be held accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity" that its members have committed. Indeed they should.