The Cult of Dismembered Limbs
Authors: Aran Gideon 
Published: August 2023

Suicide terrorism has cast a giant shadow over people’s lives throughout the globe for the past forty years. Much has been written on both the background and causes of this horrific phenomenon and its impact and implications. However, there is a conspicuous absence of social-scientific research concerning what lies between these two foci of interest: the climax of suicide terrorism, the act itself and its immediate aftermath. Hardly any reliable methodical account has been published on this recent version of hell. The present book attempts to fill this lacuna by describing and analyzing the scene of suicide terrorism in the first few minutes after the explosion and the hours thereafter. Through a firsthand ethnography of ZAKA, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization dedicated to care for the victims of Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel during the Intifada, the book offers a new perspective on death and violence, on the human body and blood, on Jewish belief and practice, on Haredim, on Israeli political culture, on the Middle East conflict, and on rituals and martyrdom. The book also addresses contemporary halakha and kabbalah, victimhood, and sacrifice. Among other matters, the book reveals the religious logic that stirs the deep structure of the arena of suicide terrorism as a macabre priestly cult of tearing the body apart and putting it together, unwittingly co-produced by the opposing sides of the ethno-national regional divide. Two rival ethe of religious virtuosity related to violent death inspire each other, converge, and tacitly collaborate in a bloody bacchanalia. In about two hundred Palestinian suicide attacks in Israel and in thousands of other events of unnatural death, many of them mass and brutal fatality incidents, among the first to arrive at the scene of horror and to take an active part in shaping it—with the medical and rescue teams—are a few dozen bearded ultra-Orthodox religious Jews dedicated to care for the victims of the tragedy. They collect, sort, and identify the mutilated corpses, assemble torn limbs, comb the site to save even tiny tissues of bone, and sponge the pools of blood to the last drop to be ceremonially buried. This extraordinary self-appointed volunteer group is called ZAKA. A sociological-anthropological description and analysis of ZAKA is the core of the present book. The first part focuses on never yet published intimate acquaintance with ZAKA, based on extensive fieldwork, mostly participant observation. The ethnographic study of ZAKA enables a firsthand methodical examination of the scene of suicide terrorism in real time, hitherto ignored by research literature. The second part of the book discusses various aspects of ZAKA’s activity in the macabre arena, thus providing new empirical data and original theoretical insights concerning death, the human body, religious radicalism, religious ritual, the invention of religious tradition, contemporary Judaism, Israeli society and politics, the Middle East ethno-national rivalry, and violence, victimhood, and sacrifice. The book opens in depicting the arena in the immediate aftermath of the explosion in terms of a complex symbolically charged rite in which live and dead holy delegates of the two sides in the regional conflict unwittingly collaborate in a bacchanalian fest of martyrdom, and it concludes in portraying Hasidic Jews aggressively competing with each other, frantically seeking to boast, grasping the decapitated head of the perpetrator of the suicide attack.