Harsh state repression as a cause of suicide bombing: The case of the Palestinian - Israeli conflict

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 284-303

  Araj, Bader ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41749117061     PISSN: 1057610X     EISSN: 15210731     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10576100801925273     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Luca Ricolfi, "Palestinians, 1981-2003," in Diego Gambetta, ed., Making Sense of Suicide Missions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 77-116.
2. Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
4. Robert A. Pape, Dying toWin: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (NewYork: Random House, 2005).
5. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
6. Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj, "Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction: The Case of the Second Intifada," Social Forces 84(4) (June 2006), pp. 1969-1986.
7. Joyce M. Davis, Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in theMiddle East (New York: Palgrave, 2003)
8. Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Ecco/Harper Collins, 2003)
9. Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside theWorld of PalestinianWomen Suicide Bombers (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2003)
10. Christoph Reuter, My Life Is a Weapen: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
11. Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Continuum, 2003)
12. Pape, Dying to Win.
13. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
14. James J. Zogby, What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs and Concerns (Utica, NY: Zogby International/The Arab Thought Foundation, 2002).
15. Pape, Dying to Win, p. 210.
16. Ibid., p. 58.
17. Bloom, Dying to Kill, p. 191.
18. Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj, "Palestinian Suicide Bombing Revisited: A Critique of the Outbidding Thesis," Political Science Quarterly (forthcoming, 2008).
19. Pape, Dying to Win, pp. 58-60.
20. Bloom, Dying to Kill, p. 26.
21. Karl-Dieter Opp and Wolfgang Roehl, "Repression, Micromobilization, and Political Protest," Social Forces 69(2) (December, 1990 , pp. 521-547.
22. Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
23. Ekkart Zimmerman, "Macro-Comparative Research on Political Protest," in Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Hand Book of Political Conflict: Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1980), p. 191,
24. quoted in Mark Irving Lichbach, "Deterrence or Escalation? The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent," Journal of Conflict Resolution 31(2) (June 1987), p. 267.
25. Lichbach, "Deterrence or Escalation?," pp. 266-297;
26. Robert W. White, "From Peaceful Protest to Guerrilla War: Micromobilization of the Provisional Irish Republican Army," American Journal of Sociology 94(6) (May 1989), pp. 1277-1302;
27. T. David Mason and Dale A. Krane, "The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror," International Studies Quarterly 33(2) (June 1989), pp. 175-198
28. Marwan Khawaja, "Repression and Popular Collective Action: Evidence from the West Bank," Sociological Forum 8(1) (March 1993), pp. 47-71
29. Ronald A. Francisco, "The Relationship between Coercion and Protest: An Empirical Evaluation in Three Coercive States," The Journal of Conflict Resolution 39(2) (June 1995), pp. 263-282
30. Cathy Lisa Schneider, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995)
31. Will H. Moore, "Repression and Dissent: Substitution, Context, and Timing," American Journal of Political Science 42(3) (July 1998), pp. 851-873
32. Ruth Margolies Beitler, The Path to Mass Rebellion: An Analysis of Two Intifadas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004)
33. Charles Tilly, "Repression, Mobilization, and Explanation," in Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 211-227
34. Ronald A. Francisco, "The Dictator's Dilemma," in Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 58-81.
35. White, "From Peaceful Protest to Guerrilla War," pp. 1277-1302.
36. Khawaja, "Repression and Popular Collective Action," pp. 47-71.
37. Francisco, "The Relationship between Coercion and Protest," p. 277.
38. Francisco, "The Dictator's Dilemma," pp. 58-81.
39. Beitler, The Path to Mass Rebellion, pp.130, 143, and 169.
40. Pape, Dying to Win, pp. 58-60.
41. Gilda Zwerman and Patricia Steinhoff, "When Activists Ask for Trouble: State-Dissident Interactions and the New Left Cycle of Resistance in the United States and Japan," in Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 102.
42. All figures in this section are from the website of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (b'Tselem), available at http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/ Index.asp (accessed 7 January 2007).
43. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
44. Zwerman and Steinhoff, "When Activists" pp. 85-107.
45. Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (London: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), p. 36.
46. Brym and Araj, "Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction," pp. 1969-1986.
47. Mohammed M. Hafez, "Rationality, Culture, and Structure in the Making of Suicide Bombers: A Preliminary Theoretical Synthesis and Illustrative Case Study," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006), pp. 165-185.
48. Rema Hammami and Salim Tammari, "The Second Uprising: End or New Beginning," Journal of Palestine Studies 30(2) (Winter, 2001 , pp. 5-25
49. Amal Jamal, The Palestinian National Movement: Politics ofContention, 1967-2005 (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2005);
50. Ricolfi, "Palestinians, 1981-2003," pp. 77-116.
51. The Israel Security Agency's 2006 Report, available at http://www.instituteforcounterterrorism.org/(accessed 18 February 2007).
52. Ricolfi, "Palestinians, 1981-2003," p. 94.
53. Leslie Susser, "We are saving many, many lives," The Jerusalem Report, 15 January 2001, quoted in Hafez, "Rationality, Culture, and Structure," p. 179.
54. Ricolfi, "Palestinians, 1981-2003," p. 94.
55. Hafez, "Rationality, Culture, and Structure," p. 180.
56. Eitan. Y. Alimi, "Contextualizing Political Terrorism: A Collective Action Perspective for Understanding the Tanzim," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006), p. 272.
57. Aluf Benn in Ha'aretz, 6 December 2005. Available on the website of al-Quds al-Arabi, http://www.alquds.co.uk:8080/archives/pdf/2005/ 12Dec/07DecWed/qds09.pdf (accessed 4 March 2007).
58. Ricolfi, "Palestinians, 1981-2003," p.88.
59. Bloom, Dying to Kill, p. 27.
60. Alimi, "Contextualizing Political Terrorism," p. 273.
61. Although Hezbollah's effect on the second wave of Palestinian suicide bombing (2000s) was limited its effect on the first wave (1990s) was strong and even direct.
62. All the interviews were translated by the author.
63. Hamas leaders referred to an interviewwith Hamas first leader AhmedYassinwith theDutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published 25 November 2000. They also referred to similar positions expressed by Hamas representatives in the Palestinian internal dialogue in Cairo, February-March 2006.
64. Brym and Araj, "Suicide Bombing as Strategy and Interaction," pp. 1976-1978.
65. Jamal, The Palestinian National Movement, p. 160.
66. Alimi, "Contextualizing Political Terrorism," p. 274.
67. Brym and Araj database (2006).
68. "Kata'eb al-Aqsaa Tutemured Ala Qurar Huliha" (Arabic: "al-Aqsaa Brigades Rebels Against the Decision to Dismantle it") al-Quds al-Arabi (12 February 2002), p. 1.
69. The website of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), available at http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2002/ p5a.html#peace (accessed 10 February 2007).
70. Nasra Hassan, "Letter from Gaza: An Arsenal of Believers," The New Yorker (19 November 2001)
71. Basel A. Saleh, "Socioeconomic Profile of Palestinian Militants from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade," Paper presented at the Graduate Research Forum, Kansas State University, 4 April 2003;
72. Avishai Margalit, "The Suicide Bombers," New York Review of Books 50(1) (2003), pp. 36-39. On theWorldWideWeb at http://www.nybooks.com/article/15979 (1 September 2004);
73. Shaul Kimhi and Shmuel Even, "Who Are the Palestinian Suicide Bombers?" Terrorism and Political Violence 16(4) (Winter, 2004), pp. 815-840.
74. Margalit, "The Suicide Bombers," pp. 36-39.
75. For those eleven cases, the first factor was "love for jihad and martyrdom" and "to fulfill one's duty to liberate the homeland," whereas one case seemed to be motivated by a personal crisis.
76. b'Tselem's Website, available at http://www.btselem.org/english/ Statistics/Casualties Data.asp?Category=13 (accessed 9 January 2007).
77. Ariel Merrari, "The Readiness to Kill and Die," in Walter Reich, ed., Origins of Terrorism (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
78. quoted in Ehud Sprinzak, "Rational Fanatics," Foreign Policy 120 (September/October 2000), p. 68.
79. Pape, Dying to Win, p. 30;
80. Bloom, Dying to Kill, p. 192.
81. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, G. Simpson, ed., J. Spaulding and G. Simpson, trans. (New York: Free Press 1951 [1897]), p. 219.