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Israel's leading researcher into suicide attacks finds some surprising elements at work. Among them: Group pressure, not religious fanaticism, is a driving force.
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 29, 2001
TEL AVIV -- Like millions of others, Dr. Ariel Merari was shocked and horrified by the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.
But in subsequent days, as the events in America were linked to a terrorist group 7,000 miles away, Merari also found himself puzzled by one aspect of the attacks.
"What surprised me was the long leash on which this operation was carried out," he says. "The fact that it was carried out at a great geographic distance after a long period of stay in a foreign milieu was very unusual.
"Is that frightening? Yes, I think it is, because it demonstrates the power of these kinds of commitments."
That Merari would be surprised by any suicide attack is startling itself, because the 62-year-old Israeli psychologist is the world's foremost expert on why people are willing to die in the act of killing others. In the 18 years he has been studying murder by suicide, his own thinking has evolved, leading him to new theories that shatter the common perception of attackers as religious fanatics.
Merari's research also helps explain how organizations such as Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida turn seemingly normal young men -- albeit those committed to a cause -- into suicide terrorists.
Certainly, there are few better places to study suicide attacks than in Israel. Over the past two decades, scores of Israelis have been killed by Palestinians blowing themselves up in buses, discos and pizza parlors in protest of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon.
However, Merari's interest actually began in the wake of the 1983 suicide attacks against U.S. targets -- the American embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon.
"Everybody then was astounded by the phenomenon, and the general perception was that it was a matter of religious fanaticism," he said. "Everybody was amazed to see on TV the lines and lines of young Shi'ites who were raising their fists and vowing to die for Allah."
Merari, head of the Political Violence Research Center at Tel Aviv University, had long studied terrorism. He too was amazed at this new phenomenon, but unlike others, he doubted that religious fanaticism was the driving force.
For one thing, many religions -- Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam -- have fanatical followers. "But only a very few of them are willing to hasten their arrival in paradise by blowing themselves up," Merari notes.
"There were probably hundreds of thousands of fanatics in Lebanon alone, so I thought there must be something else. Religious fanaticism alone certainly cannot explain the phenomenon."
His thinking was shaped by reports emerging from Iran, which by 1983 was two years into a war against neighboring Iraq. Tens of thousands of young Iranian men had shown their willingness to sacrifice their lives by walking across Iraqi minefields in "human wave" attacks. By the war's end in 1988, an estimated 500,000 Iranians had died out of a total population of 45-million.
Merari compared the toll to that in World War I and discovered that a proportionate number of French soldiers had died under similar circumstances.
"If you look at old footage, you see that Western soldiers were charging to almost sure death. Waves on waves of them were climbing out of their trenches, charging against machine gun fire. . . . So I thought, sacrificial tradition in battle is not the property of Islamic cultures, nor is it a matter of religious fanaticism."
Determined to understand the phenomenon of suicide attacks, Merari created a database in 1983 and began recording every incident. Since then, he has collected information on dozens of attacks.
Merari gets some cooperation from Israeli authorities but relies heavily on media accounts. He looks for details not just of the acts, but also the perpetrators -- what kind of families they came from, what radical organizations they belonged to.
He gets some help, albeit unintentional, from the organizations themselves. After an attack, they often release a statement and a videotape made of the "martyr" shortly before he died. When possible, Merari also interviews relatives of suicide attackers and, in rare cases, even would-be attackers who were caught and are now in Israeli prisons.
"So," Merari says, "I collect the information from a variety of sources to form what now seems to me to be a pretty cohesive picture, though over the years I've changed my mind."
For some time, Merari wondered if suicide attacks weren't simply the work of depressed young Muslim men who wanted to die but felt intense social and religious pressure not to take their lives in more conventional ways. Many religions prohibit suicide, and Muslim societies in particular scorn both the suicide and his family.
"Still, there are people who despite the condemnation still want to die, still want to commit suicide for private reasons of all kinds," Merari says.
"Suppose you wanted to do it. If you just jump from a high-rise, you are going to be pitied and your family ridiculed and despised maybe. But if you do it for a socially justified cause, you're going to be revered and your family is going to get rewarded in money and other material ways and also social rewards. If you look in Gaza at the houses of suicides, you can see lots of graffiti praising them.
"So I thought, this is pretty simple to explain. If he wants to commit suicide anyway, then he makes contact with an organization. A so-called contract is made that's mutually beneficial."
For several years, Merari held to the theory that Palestinian organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad used suicidal young men to further their own political aims. But as he interviewed friends and relatives of suicide attackers, he came to a surprising realization.
"These were not suicidal types. They don't have a record of suicidal behavior, there are no previous suicide attempts, most of them don't show signs of depression, and other risk factors, like drug or alcohol abuse, are nonexistent."
Merari started revising his theory again. This time he focused on the organizations themselves -- what was it about Hamas and the others that enabled them to take mentally healthy young men and make them want to die?
"One important thing to mention is that there have been no individual terrorist suicides. . . . There was no case in which a person said, 'Gee, I want to do this,' and got himself a hand grenade and killed himself with an enemy. In all cases, it was an organization that recruited the person. It was an organization that took him and prepared him for the mission.
"It's an organizational phenomenon."
With this new insight, Merari began studying how the organizations operate and found that terrorist groups worldwide -- from those in the Mideast to the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka -- use similar techniques to ensure that recruits carry through with their acts. Some of the techniques, in fact, are derived from those used in getting Japanese kamikaze pilots to deliberately crash their planes onto U.S. Navy ships during World War II.
There are three basic elements to preparing for a suicide mission, Merari found:
"First of all, you have to build up motivation and give pep talks because even if a person is really suicidal, there's nobody who's 100 percent suicidal and still alive. At one point, a person who wants to die feels very strongly about it, but the next day the sun shines and life seems beautiful. So you have to make sure they don't change their minds from the point of recruiting to the point of actually committing the act."
In Palestinian groups, there are lengthy discussions between the recruit and the trainer, usually an important person in the organization.
"There is much talk about the humiliation of the Palestinians, the wrongs of the Israeli occupation, the suffering of the Palestinians. There's lots of talk about the early days of Arab glory and conquest, lots of talk and descriptions of the acts of heroism in battle by the prophet Mohammed, so this is what we have to aspire to."
Another key element in ensuring that a recruit sticks to his mission is group pressure, Merari says.
"In more ordinary form, you see this in the behavior of soldiers in combat units in battle. What drove the person in the first world war or the second war or any war to get up and charge against terrible fire? It wasn't the homeland, it wasn't ideology, it was really the fear that he cannot possibly stay back while his comrades on the right and left are charging forward. What will they think of him?
"It's group pressure, this is very important."
The third element, Merari found, is to get a direct commitment from the suicide candidate. In Lebanon and Israel, the Palestinian organizations take photographs and videos of the recruit, who is also told to write letters to families and friends expressing his joy at becoming a martyr and urging them not to mourn.
"Right after they make this kind of final statement, they are referred to as 'the living martyr.' It's kind of an official title. In their own minds, as well as in the minds of their comrades, they are already considered dead. They are only temporarily here for a few more days and weeks.
"And again, this is a point of no return. After making this kind of statement in public, you can't possibly now say, 'Gee, I have second thoughts.' "
Despite two decades of studying suicide attacks, Merari was surprised by the ones on Sept. 11. Normally, attacks occur within a short distance of where they were planned; those in September were carried out by men thousands of miles from home, operating in Western countries where they were subject to numerous temptations that easily could have diverted them from the mission at hand.
But, as with other cases, "It's probably the group commitment and also the personal commitment that made them do these attacks," Merari says.
There is, however, one notion that Merari wants to dispel. Among the reasons often cited for Muslim "martyrdom" is that 72 black-eyed virgins await the martyr in paradise.
"They do talk about the virgins, but it's not the main point," Merari says. "Nobody commits suicide to have sex. It's the Western dirty mind that makes much out of a relatively marginal matter."
- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.