EDITOR'S NOTE: The following essay is comprised of two excerpts from the current book A View From the Eye of the Storm: Terror and Reason in the Middle East by Haim Harari, copyright (c) 2005 by Haim Harari. It is published in this issue of Midstream by arrangement with ReganBooks/HarperCollins Publishers. We'd like to express our gratitude to the publishers and their staffs for their kind cooperation in this project. Very special thanks must go to Professor Harari himself whose warm approval of our initial request to share a portion of his incisive work with our readers made it all possible.
Where is the storm?
If you draw a map of all the Arab states, covering the entire front page of the New York Times, Israel would cover less than the single letter “N” in the name of the newspaper.
There are twenty-two Arab countries in the world. The total land area they cover is more than 5 million square miles or 13 million square kilometers—much larger than all of Europe, from the Ural to the Atlantic. The area covered by Israel is about half of that of Slovakia. The Arab lands are much larger than the entire territory of the United States, including Alaska. Israel is a little larger than Hawaii. The twenty-two Arab states have a population of more than three hundred million people, with almost no Jews left. Israel has six million, of which more than one million are Arabs.
The world seems to be obsessed with Israel. Many Europeans support the Arabs because they are “the underdog.” Did I hear that right? The underdog? How can 6 million people endanger 300 million? Could Slovakia trouble Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and all the rest of Europe combined? Could Hawaii threaten the entire United States? Excuse the expression, but this is total nonsense.
I could have begun by sharing with you some fascinating facts and personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I prefer to devote my first remarks to the broader picture of the Arab world and its contiguous Muslim countries. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab and Muslim, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Muslim minorities. This is where the storm is, even if Israel is in its eye.
Why put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood, even temporarily? Because Israel and its problems, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, are not the central issue, and never have been, in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a hundred-year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but that’s not where the main show is.
The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq War had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Muslim regime is massacring its black Christian citizens in the south and its Muslim citizens in the west, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilians in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. The hundreds of insurgents killed recently in Yemen, the Saudis killed by al Qaida and the Muslim-Christian civil war in Lebanon, were not triggered by Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endanger Saudi Arabia, and butcher his own people because of Israel. He alone killed many more Iraqis than the total number of casualties of all the Israeli-Arab clashes over one hundred years, on both sides. Are these lives less important? Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 1960s because of Israel. Assad the father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. Libya’s bombing of Pan Am 103 had nothing to do with Israel. I could go on and on.
The root of the trouble is that the entire Muslim region itself is dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for one hundred years. The twenty-two Arab countries, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a population larger than that of the United States and almost as large as the European Union before its recent expansion. These countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) smaller than that of the Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief, and too many of the rich have made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers or by depositing the oil money in very few pockets. The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western world one hundred and fifty years ago. Women are not allowed to drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Women who are raped usually find themselves accused of damaging the honor of their families, an act punishable by death for the woman, not her rapist. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected to chair the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the UN, the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the region’s poverty, social inequality, and cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region that was being touted only thirty years ago as the next wealthy part of the world, one that has historically been one of the most advanced cultures in the world.
It is fair to say that these factors have conspired to create an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, abductions and beheading, suicide murders, and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, or on anyone and anything except themselves.
Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary: I firmly believe that the world would be a much better place if things were different. I believe that the Western world must do everything possible to help educate the Arab masses, gain rights for Muslim women, and help create a decent Arab judicial system. This may sound paternalistic, and some Arab leaders would claim that it would represent a colonialist invasion of values. But the alternatives are either a gradual move toward a World War III, eventually leading to a Muslim defeat, or a Muslim Europe, pushing the region back in time to earlier centuries.
There are many millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Muslims or secular citizens raised in Muslim families. They are double victims—of an outside world that is now developing “Islamophobia,” and of their own environment, which breaks their hearts with its cruel dysfunction. The vast silent majority of these Muslims are not part of the terror and incitement, but the problem is that they do not stand up against it. In maintaining their silence, they become accomplices by omission. This applies equally to political leaders, intellectuals, businesspeople, and others throughout the Muslim world. Many of them certainly know right from wrong but are afraid to express their views.
History is full of examples of evil leaders who destroyed entire nations, mostly their own, because the silent majority of decent and fair-minded people were numb, fearful, and coerced into collaborating. It is not easy for such people to stand up against terror and incitement, especially when they are continuously brainwashed by lies and fabrications. But the fate of hundreds of millions of Muslims depends first and foremost on the liberation of this silent majority from its chains of submission.
The persistent ugly storm engulfing the Arab world is at the root of the current world conflict—the conflict we might already think of as an undeclared World War III. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that this is a world war, but we are already well into it. It rages from Bali to Madrid, from Nairobi to New York, from Buenos Aires to Istanbul, and from Tunis to Moscow. Iraq, the Palestinian area, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan are just some of the favorite spots of the dysfunctional players, but they are definitely not the full story.
THE VIRGINS ARE READY
Dear God: If you exist, don’t let them use your name when performing atrocities. If you do not exist, please let them know it immediately.
A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in Haifa at lunchtime. It is Saturday, a day of rest, when families enjoy quality time together. She sits alone, orders food, eats, observes families with old people and little children eating their lunch at nearby tables, laughing and chatting. She finishes her meal, and pays the bill—don’t ask me why. She then blows herself up, killing twenty-one people, including many children, whose body fragments are scattered all around the restaurant. Many additional victims remain disabled for life, with pieces of metal in their heads and bodies. Entire families perish. She is called a “martyr” by several Arab leaders and an “activist” by the European press. Palestinian dignitaries condemn the act in public, but in private they visit her bereaved family, pay their respects, and also pay a generous financial reward.
This is not the worst suicide story to emerge in the past few years. There was also the man who walked into the festive Passover night Seder meal in an Israeli hotel, attended mostly by old people, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. He stood in the middle of the dining room, had enough time to observe his intended victims, and then blew himself up, killing twenty-seven people, twenty-one of them over the age of seventy. Today he is a hero, his photo posted in numerous Palestinian schools and offices.
The Palestinian suicide murderers succeed in their avowed goal of killing Jews almost exclusively. Here the madness is at least consistent. But in Iraq many suicide murders kill only or mostly Iraqis, sometimes killing as many as twenty Iraqis with the hope that an American or two will die in the process. Even within the twisted logic and barbarian attitude of those who finance, arm, and dispatch suicide murderers, the wholesale killing of your own countrymen for the sake of murdering perhaps one or two foreigners is incomprehensible. But human evil knows no boundaries, as even Europe has demonstrated.
Suicide murders are not a new invention, but they have been made popular, if I may use the expression, only recently. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western world does not yet understand this very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last four years is about a fifth of those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya based Muslim suicide murderers since that conflict started. Each year, Saddam killed more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.
So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? They create headlines. They are spectacular and frightening. Suicide bombing makes for a very cruel death, dismembering dozens of bystanders and inflicting horrible and severe lifelong injuries on those who survive. And it is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.
But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western world. The United States and Europe are constantly improving their defenses against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world, but if you want to commit murder by suicide, you don’t have to board a plane to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain, and the terrorists will target the buses. Protect the buses, and they will go after the movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools, and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall, and the murderers will aim for the lines of people, killing both the attendees and the guards themselves. Preventive measures and strict border controls can help the problem, but they cannot eliminate it entirely. This war cannot be won in a defensive way.
What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power, and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with fanatical religious beliefs. No Muslim preacher has ever blown himself up, nor has any son of an Arab politician or religious leader. Wouldn’t you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this were truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren’t they interested in the benefits of going to heaven? Instead they send outcast women, naive children, retarded people, and young hotheads. They promise them the delights—mostly sexual—of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.
Suicide killing also has nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa, and suicide murder never happens there. There are countless desperate people in the world, in every culture, country, and continent. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance, and transportation.
There was certainly more despair in Saddam’s Iraq than in Paul Bremer’s, and no one exploded himself or herself. A suicide murder is simply the weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, who have no regard for human life, including the lives of their fellow countrymen, but have very high regard for their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.
Some enlightened scholars and peace-loving people around the world have tried to understand the real motives of the individual suicide murderer. The subject has rightfully become the subject of psychological profiling and sophisticated analysis by social scientists. One problem is that when you spot a suicide murderer with an explosive belt, there’s not much time to ask him to fill out a questionnaire about his or her motives, family history, and religious beliefs. There are only two choices: stop the suicide murderer or die, in which case you’ll have little chance to analyze his or her answers. Yet these details have not been well understood in the halls of Western academia.
Only rarely do such figures live to explain themselves. One who did was a sixteen-year-old Palestinian —a shorter-than-average boy who looked thirteen and was always ridiculed by his friends. He believed that becoming a suicide murderer would make him a worshipped hero, and he “knew” that it would guarantee him the chance to be with seventy-two virgins, who are guaranteed in heaven to those who kill Jews. Needless to say, he could have accomplished nothing if not for the good people who provided him with an explosive belt, laced with nails and metal fragments, and sent him to blow himself up. Luckily he was stopped by Israeli soldiers on his way to explode and was saved, removing his suicide belt carefully in front of the CNN cameras before sharing his story.
In a different case, one woman in Gaza was caught by her husband having an affair with another man. Realizing that she was facing death at the hands of her husband, she was talked into exploding herself, killing a few Israelis in the process. Her lover provided the explosive belt, and her husband drove her to the place where she blew herself up. Some might call this the Jihad version of ménage à trois, but it is not funny at all. Imagine the tragedy of this woman! On hearing such stories, it’s impossible not to wonder whether these are real human beings, whether this is the twenty-first century, and whether you’re awake at all. The unfortunate answer to all three questions is yes.
The only way to fight the newly popular weapon of suicide is the same way one fights organized crime or pirates on the high seas: through offensive measures. As with organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offense be united, and that they take the battle all the way the top of the crime pyramid. Organized crime cannot be eliminated by arresting the little drug dealer on the street corner. It can only be brought down by going after the head of “the Family.”
As long as part of the public supports it, and others tolerate it, trying to explain it away in terms of poverty or miserable childhood experiences, organized crime will thrive. So will terrorism. After September 11, the United States seems to understand this. Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it. I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it, and that this will not change until suicide murder arrives in Europe. In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the civilized world in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved. •
About the author
Haim harari, a theoretical physicist, is the chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education. He was the president of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science from 1988 to 2001. In his career he has made major contributions to three different fields: particle physics research, science education, and science administration and policy. He lives in Israel.