Why Women Turn To
Suicide BombingBy Kevin Toolis
The Observer
12 October, 2003
The blood red fruit was just beginning to ripen on the pomegranate tree when Israeli undercover soldiers came for Fardi and Salah Darajat in Jenin, the besieged 'city of martyrs', in the occupied West Bank.
After a burst of gunfire the cousins lay dying on the dusty track outside the family home. Their bodies were bundled into a Jeep and driven off. For Israeli special forces it was another successful hit against militants from Islamic Jihad. Another notch in the war against terror.
But before the pomegranates were ripe, Fardi's sister Hanadi Darajat would exact a terrible harvest of revenge by blowing herself up inside Haifa's Maxim's restaurant and murdering 19 civilians.
For Israel the carnage of last weekend's suicide bomb attack is all too familiar; shat tered limbs, broken bodies and whole families from grandchildren to grandparents wiped out as they celebrated the Jewish New Year. Lives randomly destroyed in one terrifying moment by an implacable human bomb. Among the dead were five Israeli Arabs who were working in the restaurant, including the security guard employed to deter suicide bombers.
Hanadi Taysser Darajat was the sixth female Palestinian suicide bomber, but by far the deadliest. She died not for the promise of 72 virgins in paradise but for the sure and certain reward that she would kill as many Jews as possible in the crowded restaurant. And her grim 'martyrdom' marks a further descent in the suicide bomber war now plaguing the Middle East.
Last Thursday in the Gaza Strip a pocket-sized card was handed out in girls' school celebrating Hanadi as the 'bride of the Haifa martyrdom operation'. And across the West Bank Islamic Jihad recruiters are at work in female colleges and universities to recruit more shaheed - martyrs. In life Hanadi Dara jat was ambitious - she was training to be lawyer - but in death she has trailed a path of martyrdom for a whole generation of Palestinian women to come.
The pomegranate tree where Fardi died remains, but the Darajat house in a ramshackle section of Jenin is gone - blown up as punishment by the Israeli army after the Haifa explosion.
In May 2003 Hanadi, 28, was in Jordan buying presents for Fardi's planned wedding when he was killed. But she rushed back to Jenin and was the first family member to identify him in the hospital morgue. 'She opened the fridge door and saw them and started screaming. She started hugging them and became covered with their blood,' says her mother, Rahmeh Darajat.
Hanadi was unusually independent. She was the oldest girl in a family of five girls and two boys, and had studied for a law degree in Jareesh University in Jordan. 'She was always ambitious even as a child. She said she wanted to be a lawyer even then. And she refused to get married because she wanted to continue her studies. She turned down a few suitors,' says Rahmeh.
By Palestinian standards the Darajats are poor. They are refugees, driven out of their village of Beit She'an during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the creation of Israel. Hanadi's father, Tayseer, suffers from hepatitis and is an invalid. Fardi, at 23, was the oldest boy and was the sole breadwinner, working as a vegetable seller.
But since the Israeli army's reoccupation of the Palestinian territories economic life in Jenin has collapsed. The city is ringed by checkpoints, and tanks rumble through the rubble-strewn streets. Jenin is cut off from the rest of the West Bank and it is almost impossible for residents to leave; Hanadi's father was denied permission to attend a Haifa hospital for his illness.
Inside, all the shops are shuttered and only a few skittish cars are driven by the brave or the foolhardy, who chance their lives on the streets defying the curfew. Violent death is an everyday occurrence and the city's walls are emblazoned with fading martyrdom posters of scores of Palestinian fighters.
Hanadi and Fardi were close. She was his unofficial matchmaker with his fiancée. Her trip to Jordan was to buy his wedding suit.
According to Rahmeh, the two men were sipping coffee under the shade of the pomegranate tree when two cars, full of strangers, appeared in the road. The doors opened and then the shooting started. 'If they wanted them the Jews could have taken them alive. They had no gun, no weapons. But the soldiers just started shooting, first in the leg and then in the arm.'
Rahmeh denies that her son was a militant, but Fardi's and Salah's faces soon appeared on Islamic Jihad martyrdom posters plastered to the city's walls. Salah, who the Israelis claim was a significant figure, is shown holding a copy of the Koran in one hand and a gun in the other. But Fardi's picture is just an ordinary family snap of a young man in a brown leather coat.
Hanadi took her brother's death hard. 'She used to wake up screaming at night saying she was remembering seeing Fardi in the morgue. And she was depressed, sometimes staying in bed all day. She felt paralysed. She had the whole world on her shoulders. As the oldest she felt she was responsible for the whole family,' says Rahmeh.
'She started taking home tapes of the Koran to listen to at night but I never got a hint of a relationship with Islamic Jihad. Instead she told me her dream was to open her own legal practice and put the family's name on the sign.'
The last time Rahmeh Darajat saw her daughter was at 7.30 on the morning of the bombing as she left as usual for her office job. Hanadi never even said goodbye. But instead of going to work she secretly passed through the army checkpoints that isolate Jenin from coastal cities such as Haifa 30 miles away. At 2.15pm she stepped into Maxim's and destroyed it.
Islamic Jihad, funded largely by Iran, is an intensely secretive organisation dedicated to a worldwide Islamic revolution, and to suicide bombing. It has one simple aim: the destruction of the state of Israel.
'For Islamic Jihad there is a clear need to pass on the message that for those Palestinians imbued with its version of Islam death is not so important. And to leave that impression of Islam on the hearts of the enemy and cause demoralisation,' says Dr Meir Hadina, an Israeli expert on Islamic politics at Tel Aviv University.
Two years ago Hanadi's 'martyrdom' operation would have been unthinkable. In traditional Palestinian society a woman is the responsibility of her male relatives. Terror organisations could not recruit women as would-be suicide bombers without transgressing the honour codes that require women to seek permission for every action they take outside the family home. To secretly recruit a woman would be seen as an insult to the family's male honour.
Previous female suicide bombings were carried out by Fatah, the secular movement loyal to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. But the women were either divorced or rejected by their immediate family group.
But as the occupation intensified, and the Palestinian death toll mounted, the recruiting pool for female candidates widened. In May, Islamic Jihad recruited 19-year-old Hiba Azzam Daragme to blow herself up in a northern Israeli shopping mall, killing six Israelis. Hiba was too young to be rejected or divorced. Her motivation, like Hanadi's, was simple revenge for the shooting of her brother by Israeli troops.
In practice, Islamic Jihad, and possibly Hamas in the future, have overcome the internal cultural constraints that stopped them turning women into human bombs.
'Martyrdom is a central ethic of the al-Aqsa intifada. It has created a balance of power between Palestinians and Israel and it will not be easily removed from the Palestinian political agenda. From the Israeli point of view it is difficult to counter because of the infrastructure and indoctrination. You cannot just rely on your military capacity alone,' says Dr Hadina.
On the Palestinian street female suicide bombings are immensely popular. 'The Israelis have women in their army. We do not have F-16s, rockets or tanks. But these girls are our rockets. It's OK for our girls to fight the Jews,' said a Palestinian teacher.
Each 'martyrdom' operation has its own grim protocols, including a pre-recorded video with the 'living shaheed ', bearing the flags of the terror group behind the bombing. Immediately after the attack the video is released to Arabic television stations to take credit for the butchery.
Hanadi's video is unusually short, just over two minutes, and the camerawork is amateurish - the work of students. There is none of the usual robotic chanting of the Koran and long-winded speeches. Hanadi, modestly dressed in a tight-fitting white headscarf, appears nervous as if auditioning for a part in a local dramatic society play. Behind her are the black and gold flags of Islamic Jihad and a poster of her law degree graduation with her ruby lips and heavy Western-style make-up.
'By the will of God I decided to be the sixth martyr who makes her body full with splinters in order to enter every Zionist heart who occupied our country. We are not the only ones who will taste death from their occupation. As they sow so will they reap.'
This bride of death's language is suffused with sexuality but the real woman in the video timidly puts her face in her hands out of embarrassment and blushes as her set piece ends. The camera pulls back to show she is standing under her brother's martyrdom poster. And thus is the blood red fruit of martyrdom complete.
The next image the world has of Hanadi is her severed head on the floor of Maxim's amid the gruesome destruction she inflicted in the mixed Arab-Jewish restaurant.
At her brother-in-law's house Hanadi's mother seems neither unduly sad or happy at her daughter's death. 'Yes it was revenge. Fardi was her favourite. I pray to God to bless her. May God accept them all, Fardi, Salah and Hanadi as martyrs.'
There is little sympathy for the lives taken by Hanadi. 'How can the Jews expect to live in comfort when they dispossessed us from our homes in 1948? Do they have sympathy for us when our children are killed or when they demolish our houses?'
The police are still unsure if Hanadi removed her headscarf and posed as a Western-style Israeli to get past the guard or else hid her explosive vest beneath bulky clothes. Most of her body was destroyed. But they are certain that somewhere on it she hid over 15kg of explosive laced with ballbearings.
'Palestinian suicide bombers will do anything to blend in and get as close to people as possible to kill them. They dress as soldiers, as Orthodox Jews. Some have dressed as party girls,' says Gil Kleiman, an Israeli police spokesman.
For the first time last week the military deployed female soldiers in northern Israel to start body searching Pales tinian women crossing through checkpoints along the new Berlin Wall-style security fence, supposedly designed to halt suicide bomb attacks.
But no wall or checkpoint search will ever be able entirely to stop a wounded creature like Hanadi Darajat, with revenge in her heart, from killing herself and as many Israelis as she can. In the Middle East another terrible harvest of martyrdom and death is just beginning.