The Palestinian H-Bomb: Terror's Winning Strategy

Gal Luft

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002

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Summary:  Suicide bombing, once the tool of religious fanatics, has won wide acceptance among Palestinians as a legitimate weapon. Neither retaliation nor a fence will stop the bloodshed. Only deploying Palestinian hopes of independence can do that.

Gal Luft is a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and the author of The Palestinian Security Forces: Between Police and Army.

Never in Israel's history, to paraphrase Churchill, has so much harm been inflicted on so many by so few. Since the onset of the second intifada in late September 2000, dozens of exploding humans -- Palestinian H-bombs -- have rocked the Jewish state and transformed the lives of its people. As little as a year ago, suicide bombings were seen as a gruesome aberration in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an expression of religious fanaticism that most Palestinians rejected. But in recent months a new, unsettling reality has emerged: the acceptance and legitimation of the practice among all Palestinian political and military factions.

Increasingly, Palestinians are coming to see suicide attacks as a strategic weapon, a poor man's "smart bomb" that can miraculously balance Israel's technological prowess and conventional military dominance. Palestinians appear to have decided that, used systematically in the context of a political struggle, suicide bombings give them something no other weapon could: the ability to cause Israel devastating and unprecedented pain. The dream of achieving such strategic parity is more powerful than any pressure to cease and desist. It is therefore unlikely that the strategy will be abandoned, even as its continued use pushes the Middle East ever closer to the abyss.

FROM MORTARS TO MARTYRS

The Palestinian endorsement of suicide bombings as a legitimate tool of war was not hasty. At the start of the second intifada, the Palestinians' preferred method of fighting was based on the strategy that Hezbollah used to drive the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) out of southern Lebanon after 15 years of occupation -- a mix of guerrilla tactics such as ambushes, drive-by shootings, and attacks on IDF outposts. It was thought that the "Lebanonization" of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would cause the Israeli public to view these territories as security liabilities (as they had with southern Lebanon), and to pressure the government to withdraw once more.

Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's division of labor was clear. His political wing, Fatah, authorized its paramilitary units, spearheaded by the Tanzim militias along with segments of the security services of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to carry out a guerrilla campaign against Israeli settlements and military targets in the West Bank and Gaza. The militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, meanwhile, were given the liberty to carry out attacks against civilian targets inside Israel.

From the Palestinian perspective, however, the results of the guerrilla campaign in the first year were poor, especially considering the duration of the fighting and the volume of fire. Palestinian forces launched more than 1,500 shooting attacks on Israeli vehicles in the territories but killed 75 people. They attacked IDF outposts more than 6,000 times but killed only 20 soldiers. They fired more than 300 antitank grenades at Israeli targets but failed to kill anyone. To demoralize the settlers, the Palestinians launched more than 500 mortar and rocket attacks at Jewish communities in the territories and, at times, inside Israel, but the artillery proved to be primitive and inaccurate, and ...

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