Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
9 November
FIRST PALESTINIAN SUICIDE ATTACK IN ISRAEL
This day in 1994 saw the first Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel. Nineteen-year-old Ra'id Zaqarna detonated a bomb, killing himself in the process, at a bus top in the centre of Afula, eight miles south of Nazareth. Eight Israeli civilians were killed in the attack, including a child of 13, and 55 injured. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack and said it was carried out in retaliation for the killing of 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on February 25.
أول عملية انتحارية فلسطينية في إسرائيل
9 نوفمبر
شهد هذا اليوم من عام 1994 أول عملية انتحارية فلسطينية في إسرائيل. فجر رائد زقرنة ، البالغ من العمر تسعة عشر عامًا ، قنبلة ، مما أسفر عن مقتل نفسه وهو في أعلى حافلة في وسط العفولة ،التي تبعد ثمانية أميال جنوب الناصرة.. قُتل ثمانية مدنيين إسرائيليين في الهجوم ، بينهم طفل يبلغ من العمر 13 عامًا ، وجرح 55 آخرين. وأعلنت حماس مسؤوليتها عن الهجوم وقالت إنها نُفِّذت انتقاما لمقتل 29 فلسطينيا أثناء الصلاة في المسجد الإبراهيمي في الخليل في 25 فبراير / شباط.
What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?
Study of a comprehensive database gives a surprising answer by Riaz Hassan
The Suicide Terrorism Database in Flinders University in Australia, the most comprehensive in the world, holds information on suicide bombings in Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The evidence from the database largely discredits the common wisdom that the personality of suicide bombers and their religion are the principal cause. It shows that though religion can play a vital role in recruiting and motivating potential future suicide bombers, the driving force is not religion but a cocktail of motivations including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism. The configuration of these motivations is related to the specific circumstances of the political conflict behind the rise of suicide attacks in different countries.
On October 4, 2003, 29 year old Palestinian lawyer Hanadi Jaradat exploded her suicide belt in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa killing 20 people and wounding many more. According to her family, her suicide mission was in revenge for the killing of her brother and her fiancé by the Israeli security forces and in revenge for all the crimes Israel had perpetrated in the West Bank by killing Palestinians and expropriating their lands. The main motive for many suicide bombings in Israel is revenge for acts committed by Israelis...
Typically, most suicide bombers are psychologically normal and are deeply integrated into social networks and emotionally attached to their national communities. Randomly attached labels such as “mad” denote one’s inability to fathom the deeper reasons but don’t advance our understanding of the causes of the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Rather, they impede us from discovering its real nature, purpose and causes...
Revenge is also a response to the continuous suffering of an aggrieved community. At the heart of the whole process are perceptions of personal harm, unfairness and injustice, and the anger, indignation, and hatred associated with such perceptions.
Men attach more value to vengeance than women; and young people are more prepared to act in a vengeful manner than older individuals. It is not surprising, then, to find that most suicide bombers are both young and male...long periods of collective suffering, humiliation and powerlessness enable political organizations to offer suicide bombings as an outlet for their people’s feelings of desperation, deprivation, hostility and injustice.
4-minute trailer for Julian Mer Khamis' film Arna's Children, which shows the trajectory of the lives of some Palestinian children in Jenin Refugee Camp, from their joy in the Camp's children's theatre group towards armed resistance to Israel's brutal apartheid regime.