The writing on the wall

The Road to Martyrs' Square
A Journey Into the World of the Suicide Bomber
Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg
Oxford University Press: 214 pp., $26

Los Angeles Times (CA)

January 30, 2005

Author: Johann Hari; Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent
and has reported from Israel, the Palestinian territories and Iraq.Features
Desk
Estimated printed pages: 3

THE West Bank and the Gaza Strip are like a potent drug. One visit and
you're hooked, and Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg have the craving.
Their book, "The Road to Martyrs' Square," is a strange, seductive hybrid
of sociology and memoir that recounts the eight years they spent
photographing and studying Palestinian graffiti.

If you've never been to the Palestinian territories, this might sound like
an esoteric or trivial subject. Studying wall scribblings while there's a
war going on? In fact, graffiti is the bulletin board of the Palestinian
intifada, the website where protests are planned, slogans are tested and
rage is vented. By studying the changes in this very public expression of
Palestinian rhetoric, Oliver and Steinberg have created a unique history.

When the authors arrived in the Gaza Strip in 1988, Palestinian suicide
bombers were unheard of; it would be six years before the militant group
Hamas adopted this murderous tactic. Oliver and Sternberg stumbled onto a
resistance movement undergoing mutation. After 31 years of Israeli
occupation, the old nationalist-Marxist model of resistance -- epitomized
by Yasser Arafat -- was clearly failing. The dominant ideas of Palestinian
life had failed to deliver liberation. Yet an Islamic model of resistance
-- epitomized by Hamas and the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin -- had not yet been
popularized.

So what draws tens of thousands of young men (and growing numbers of women)
to an elaborate death cult? The statistics are shocking enough. The U.S.
Agency for International Development -- hardly a pro-Palestinian pressure
group -- reported in 2002 that one in five young children in the
Palestinian territories suffers from malnutrition. For more than 13% of
children under 5 in the Gaza Strip, the problem is so acute that it will
affect their growth and mental development.

Even this misery is not enough to explain (let alone justify) blowing
oneself up to kill Israelis. Yet political ideas are viral. They spread in
debased conditions and -- whatever the other causes -- there can be no
question that decades of Israeli military occupation created a soil in
which jihadism would thrive.

When the authors first arrived, most Palestinians subscribed to a
nationalist ideology. Nationalists revere the peasant and the shepherd and
talk in a romantic way about the land. Islamists revere the hajj, the
religious pilgrim who relinquishes his earthly possessions to fulfill the
commands of God. Nationalism is, of course, far easier to deal with,
because nationalists are merely bidding -- however aggressively -- for real
estate.

Jihadism, by contrast, bids for souls. It is also far more corrosive of
Palestinian society. The greatest victims since the rise of Hamas'
influence on Palestinian life have been not just Israeli civilians but also
Palestinian women like Nuha, a female friend of the authors who had once
dreamed of going to college and studying poetry but now is "not allowed" to
leave the house. When they visit her, she has not stepped outside for
several years. "She lived ... behind a heavy iron door that opened only
when [her husband] Muhammed came and went."

By decoding the graffiti that reveres suicide bombers and interviewing the
families of such "martyrs," the authors have pried open the imaginative
universe of the jihadist youth. A suicide bomber, they explain, "sees
himself not only as an avenging Ninja, but also as something of a movie
star, maybe even a sex symbol -- a romantic figure at the very least,
larger than life."

These killers seek "ecstatic obliteration" because of disturbingly familiar
human flaws: superstitious delusion, vanity, tribal identification and
rage. Oliver and Steinberg quote a videotaped "final testament" by one
suicide bomber from occupied Gaza: "We have seen the dunya [physical
world], and ... it doesn't amount to anything."

This vision of Gaza and the West Bank may seem strangely familiar to Los
Angelenos: graffiti, tribal warfare, random violence, misogyny, reverence
for death and the lionizing of young men who lived fast and died young.
When the young men of South-Central Los Angeles are choked off from
economic opportunity, when they have no way to advance but through crime,
when they feel they have no safe space to call their own, they form gangs,
create alternative value structures and behave like maniacs.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in "The Road to Martyrs' Square" is when
the authors' friend Ali watches a pirated copy of the movie "Boyz N the
Hood." Ali is entranced; afterward, he refers to his own slice of the West
Bank as his "hood," without a trace of irony. Are Hamas and the militant
group Islamic Jihad so different from the Bloods and the Crips? Or do the
Palestinians operate in even more desperate circumstances?

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times