Palestinian suicide bombing: public support, market share, and outbidding.

Why have suicide bombings in the Middle East become so popular? In this article, I investigate how and why Palestinian public opinion increasingly supports suicide bombings even though support for such operations and for Hamas has fluctuated in the past. Since November 2000, Palestinian public opinion has alarmingly shifted its support toward radical Islamic organizations because of a number of factors endogenous to Palestinian society. (1) Under conditions of mounting public support, the bombings have become a method of recruitment for militant Islamic organizations within the Palestinian community. They serve at one and the same time to attack the hated enemy (Israel) and to give legitimacy to outlier militant groups who compete with the Palestinian Authority for leadership of the community.

Multiple organizations are engaged in this competition and use violence to increase their prestige. With every major attack since November 2000, support for suicide bombings has increased and support for the Palestinian Authority has decreased. In addition to building support for martyrdom, groups that use the tactic become more popular. The support for militant Islamic movements appears to capture previously nonaligned groups among the Palestinians, demonstrating that martyrdom operations boost the organizational profile of the groups using them.

Palestinian suicide bombings are violent, politically motivated attacks carried out in a deliberate state of awareness by persons who blow themselves up together with a chosen target. (2) Support for suicide operations works against the stated goals of a better future for Palestinian civilians. Public opinion polls indicate that Palestinians are worse off now than they were before the al-Aqsa intifada according to every indicator (economic, social, health, etc.). Yet, the majority of Palestinians support the continuation of the al-Aqsa intifada and martyrdom operations regardless of Israeli retaliatory policies. (3) The targets and modus operandi of suicide bombings vary, ranging from government officials to military of economic targets, and from scores of attacks to solitary or sporadic ones. (4) However, there is no single theory about what motivates suicide bombers and no firm opinion among Palestinians as to their usefulness.

Conventional explanations of Palestinian suicide bombings regard them as a way for radical Islamic organizations to slow or stem the improvement of relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In this capacity, the bombings play a strategic "spoiler role" in regard to the peace process. Hamas has urged more violence as relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have improved. According to Palestinian Authority documents released in January 2004, "suicide bombings are a key element in the arena of the struggle between the Israelis and Palestinians, and an analysis of the circumstances of the timing and execution of the vast majority of the bombings, particularly the major ones conducted by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, makes clear the timing was much more a purely political matter than a practical military one." (5) According to the report, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had agents who provided information on political developments, including inside information about negotiations with Israel and the United States, thus enabling Hamas and Islamic Jihad to respond accordingly.

An alternative explanation follows from the logic of Barry Weingast and Rui de Figueiredo, who have argued that violence is often retaliatory. (6) This school of thought traces Palestinian suicide bombings to Israeli provocations, beginning with the Hebron Massacre by Baruch Goldstein. As Mazin Hammad has commented: "The al-Ibrahimi Mosque massacre opened the doors of revenge in Palestine like never before." (7) Other provocations include the opening of the tunnel under the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Israeli policy of "targeted assassinations" of Palestinian militant leaders, for example, Hamas's bomb maker, Yahiyeh Ayyash, (8) Izz Eddin al-Qassam Brigade leader Salah Shehada and his family and, most recently, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on 22 March 2004. (9)

The news media implies causality and linkage between the two explanations: "Signs of progress recorded by Middle East peace-brokers were obliterated in an orgy of terror as six Israelis were killed in a Palestinian suicide attack in January after Israelis killed Raed Karmi, the local militia leader in Tulkarm of [Yasser] Arafat's Fatah organization." (10)

Andrew Kydd and Barbara F. Walter have argued that violence plays a spoiler role to the peace process and is to be expected when negotiated settlements become imminent. "The purpose is to exacerbate doubts on the target side that the moderate opposition groups can be trusted to implement the peace deal and will not renege on it later on." (11) For Walter and Kydd, suicide bombing is a complex game dependent upon uncertainty between moderates and the target state and upon whether moderates are weak or strong vis a vis their opposition. They posit that weak moderates are less capable of stopping terrorism from within their own ranks, causing uncertainty in the other side that results in the cancellation of peace negations and a shift in Israeli voting in favor of antipeace candidates. Their model appears to explicate the bombings that surrounded the 1996 Israeli elections, although it fails to explain the whole story.

The attacks carried out in February and March 1996 were among several factors that influenced the outcome of the Israeli prime ministerial election of May 1996 that brought right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu into power and delayed the implementation of the Oslo and Wye Agreements. Netanyahu's victory was actually unexpected and occurred in the wee hours of election night by a slim margin of less than one half of one percent. This outcome was the product of several factors, including the boycott by Israeli Arabs of the election. Israeli Arabs, who comprise 20 percent of the electorate, boycotted the election after 102 men, women, and children were accidentally killed in an Israeli artillery attack on the UN compound in Kana, Southern Lebanon on 18 April 1996--six weeks before the election. The Kydd and Walter model fails to explain why bombings in 1995 did not have the same effect on the peace process when Yitzhak Rabin was still alive, (12) nor can it rationalize how a left-wing government under Ehud Barak was elected in 1999 despite their indication of two episodes prior to the election. However, according to my data, there were no suicide attacks during this period and it is documented that "there was relatively little Palestinian terror on Netanyahu's three-year watch. Due to Arafat's combination of threats, policing and political cajolery, Arafat got Hamas to cut down its violence." (13)

Their explanation partially explains what motivates the organizations but does not account for why public opinion supports or rejects the tactic and, finally, they conflate the results of suicide bombing campaigns with their underlying motivation. There have been periods of time when Hamas has willingly honored cease tires (hudna) to allow Arafat to pursue peace negotiations with the Israelis. For example, Arafat convinced Hamas to suspend military actions after 11 September 2001 on the condition that Israeli targeted assassinations stop. The Israelis continued their policy, and Hamas proceeded with their attacks. (14) This was repeated in June 2003, when Hamas called a hudna, only to resume operations after a failed attack on Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

Hamas may use suicide terror to deter policymakers from reaching agreements but only as long as Israeli policymakers transparently equate violence with non-negotiation, providing Hamas with its own "road map" of how to spoil a peace process that would, by definition, exclude them. Kydd and Walter correctly identify extremist violence as being strategic; the target of the violence is not only the moderates negotiating the peace treaties. There are actually two audiences for the violence, one domestic (within the Palestinian community) and one external (the "Zionist Entity"). (15)

These existing interpretations (spoiler or retaliatory) ignore the internal state-building process and discount the competition for leadership under way within the Palestinian community that accounts for both the occurrence of bombings as well as the absence of attacks in the period from November 1998 to November 2000. Furthermore, the significant increase in attacks in March 2002 took place against a political backdrop with few substantive peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority--limiting the explanatory power of the spoiler rationale to explain this phenomenon as a whole. James Bennet commented, "Having seen peace initiatives melt before previous waves of violence, Israelis, like Palestinians, were already deeply skeptical of the new plan [Bush's Road Map]. Many on both sides do not seem to be paying much attention to the renewed diplomacy." (16) So it is unclear how effective the attacks are at spoiling a peace no one believes in. Finally, these existing interpretations cannot account for the variance in public support for such operations over time.

Two PHASES OF SUPPORT FOR SUICIDE TERROR

In the first period (1994-1996), support for suicide operations never exceeded a third of Palestinians polled, whereas after November 2000, support for operations jumped to two-thirds or more. The bombings are not just the result of impending implementation of peace treaties or part of tit-for-tat violence. Suicide bombings are more than just a reaction to external stimuli; we have to acknowledge the motivations for violence within Palestinian society. One should nuance support for the bombings and explain each phase separately. To do this, we need to better comprehend the internal dynamics of the Palestinian polity and the ways in which radical organizations have effectively penetrated civil society. (17)

Palestinians' disillusionment with Arafat, his Palestinian Authority, and the deadlocked peace process provided radical groups with an opportunity to increase their share of the political market by engaging in violence. (18) Finally, Israeli heavy-handed responses to the violence (incursions into Area A, targeted assassinations, use of helicopter gunships, and civilian casualties) make Hamas's rhetoric appear valid and prescient. (19)

The frustrations associated with the Oslo Process and with Camp David II, and the provocative visit in September 2000 of Ariel Sharon to the Haram al-Sharif and the al-Aqsa Mosque exacerbated negative relations between Palestinians and Israelis. Israeli sharpshooters inflicted heavy casualties on Palestinian demonstrators, who were initially comprised of unarmed youths engaged in symbolic stone throwing. Israel relied on excessive force, generating a cycle of violence that has been escalated by Israel at each stage, inflicting disproportionate casualties on the Palestinian side. (20)

In the first period, suicide bombings were intermittent and, according to Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, were intended to both undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and negatively affect the peace process. (21) The timing of the attacks was correlated to respond to Israeli actions, which provided defensive justifications for Hamas violence--in accordance with Islamic law. However, responsibility for the attacks during the first period was often not claimed by any group at the time. Later on, groups vied with one another to claim each incident.

Popular support for the bombings during this period remained low, and Hamas was unable to mobilize Palestinians by using violence. In 1996, the attacks were intended to disrupt the Israeli elections, but the missile attack on Kana and the subsequent boycott of the elections by Israeli Arabs also had a significant impact on the election results.

In the second period (after November 2000) and increasingly since, support for suicide operations increased exponentially and the waves of bombings demonstrated a competition between groups vying for power against a backdrop in which violence resonates with the rank and file. Furthermore, we can observe increasing popular support for groups after they perpetrate martyrdom attacks.

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