Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: did not signify despair

considerazioni di Christopher Hitchens a proposito dell'ondata di
terrorismo suicida (che e' finita, ve ne siete accorti?)
http://www.slate.com/id/2222734/
What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?
Nasty, fanatical old men, not human emotions, decided who died and
when.
By Christopher Hitchens
It is sometimes important to write about the things that are not
happening and the dogs that are not barking.
To do so, of course, can provide an easy hostage to fortune, which is
why a lot of columnists prefer not to risk it. For all I know, some
leering fanatic is preparing to make me look silly even as I write.
But I ask anyway: Whatever happened to the suicide bombers of
Jerusalem?
It's not that long since the combination of self-immolation and mass
murder was a regular event on Israeli soil. Different people drew
radically different conclusions from the campaign, which had a nerve-
racking effect not just on Israeli Jews but on Israeli Arabs and Druze—
who were often among the casualties—and on visiting tourists. It was
widely said by liberals, including people as eminent as Tony Blair's
wife, Cherie Blair, that the real cause of such a lurid and awful
tactic was despair: the reaction of a people under occupation who had
no other avenue of expression for their misery and frustration.
Well, surely nobody will be so callous as to say that there is less
despair among Palestinians today—especially since the terrible events
in the Gaza Strip and the return to power of the Israeli right wing as
well as the expansion of Jewish-zealot settler activity. And yet there
is no graph on which extra despair can be shown to have eventuated in
more suicide. Indeed, if there is any correlation at all, it would
seem to be in reverse. How can this be?
Of the various alternative explanations, one would be the success of
the wall or "fence" that Israel has built or is building,
approximating but not quite conforming to the "green line" of the 1967
frontier. Another would be the ruthless campaign of "targeted
assassinations," whereby Israeli agents took out important leaders of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two organizations most committed to
"martyrdom operations." A third might be the temporary truces or cease-
fires to which Hamas (but not Islamic Jihad) have from time to time
agreed.
But, actually, none of these would explain why the suicide campaign
went into remission. Or, at least, they would not explain why it went
into remission if the original cause was despair. If despair is your
feeling, then nothing can stop you from blowing yourself up against
the wall as a last gesture against Israeli colonial architecture. If
despair dominates your psyche, then targeted assassinations of others
are not going to stop you from donning the shroud and the belt and
aiming yourself at paradise, even if only at a roadblock. If despair
is what has invaded your mind, why on earth would you care about this
or that short-term truce?
Even before the assault died away, there were good reasons to doubt
that despair had been the motive or the explanation. For one thing,
almost all the suicide attacks were directed at civilians in pre-1967
Israel "proper"—in other words, in the Jewish part of Jerusalem or in
towns along the Israeli coastline (in one case, a hotel in Netanya on
Passover). It can probably be said with some degree of confidence that
nobody blows themselves up for a half-a-loaf compromise solution.
These cold-blooded attacks did not just avoid well-defended West Bank
settlements or Israeli army bases; they also vividly expressed the
demand that all Jews leave Palestine or risk being killed. Despair
cannot so easily be channeled so as to underline a strictly political/
ideological objective.
Another possible reason for the slump in suicide is that those who
were orchestrating it came to find that the tactic was becoming
subject to diminishing returns. Despair must have meant a roughly
constant stream of potential volunteers, but the immediate needs of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad may not have always required the tap of
despair to be left turned on. Indeed, there must have been some quite
intense private discussions about how to turn it off. Not every
despairing person can make, at home, the necessary belts, fuses, and
lethal charges. These things require a godfather. And this, in turn,
prompts the question: What will be said if or when the tap is ever
turned back on? Surely it won't quite do to say that despair must have
broken out all over again, though I can easily think of some fools who
will be ready to say it.
There were children among the last wave of suicide-murderers, some of
whom lost their nerve and surrendered at the last moment. There were
also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been
killed for "honor" reasons and who were offered the relatively
painless alternative of a martyr's fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old
men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the
days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street
celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify
despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which
relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their
own children as well as those of other people. To have added the
promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and
mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene
into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same
level of bliss and promiscuity by the Quran.)
Meanwhile, the wall still stands and grows, ironically expressing the
much more banal and worldly fact that there are two peoples in
Palestine and that sooner or later there will be two states as well.

 By Christopher Hitchens
Beh, che la disperazione non c'entrasse un granché era abbastanza chiaro.
Piuttosto, Hitchens ha decisamente ragione a dire che talvolta occorre 
fermarsi a notare quello che non c'è o non c'è più.
Accanto agli attentati suicidi, metterei anche i razzi su Sderot.
Cioè le campagne "autolesionistiche" (o al meglio inutili) dell'IDF che 
avrebbero dovuto aumentare il livello del conflitto, spedendo legioni di 
reclutandi suicidi agli uffici di Hamas, in realtà hanno funzionato 
molto bene.
Tb
-- 
"A vote is like a rifle, it's usefulness depends upon the character of
the user."
~ Theodore Roosevelt