In a 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault declared:
The proletariat doesn't wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war against the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power. When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert toward the classes over which it has triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can't see what objection could possibly be made to this. (emphasis mine)
Foucault's statement was no surprise given his later emphasis on 'limit experiences', by which he meant those experiences to which his own Nietzschean search for salvation had carried him. Foucault was concerned primarily with transgressing the strictures of power into something far deeper: cruelty, violence, madness, sadomasochism and suicide. As Foucault later wrote: "Through Sade and Goya, the Western world discovered the possibility of surpassing reason through violence."
Foucault popped to mind while reading Robin Kirk's (Duke Human Rights Initiative) review of 'The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey Into the World of the Suicide Bomber' (access to link not granted by publisher). Kirk finds it gripping - if not jumbled and exhausting. That the wave of suicide bombers employed throughout the second intifada was unable to excite much more than heavy sighs and consternation is a depressing reminder of how easily barbarism and violence are tolerated (and justified). But our failure to grasp the full weight of their cultural descent was likely as much a product of indifference as it was disbelief, a refusal to countenance the creation of a death culture, which is exactly what Oliver and Steinberg explore in their new book. Kirk writes:
Rather, they set out to examine how it is that extremists have managed to persuade so many Palestinians to sacrifice their lives to kill innocents, and so many more to accept this decision as normal.
The point here is essential, but easily overshadowed by the horror of these acts. A suicide bomber is not, as Oliver and Steinberg convincingly demonstrate, created with a few fiery speeches, even when they are combined with the crushing desperation of the Occupied Territories. Neither is it an endemic Palestinian or even Middle Eastern trait.
During a six year stay in the region, Oliver and Steinberg collected a treasure trove of materials used by the radical Islamic group known as Hamas and rival factions, showing how the suicide bomber is an intricate painstaking creation, a product of a vast cultural engine of propaganda, myth-making, religion, ideology, technology, and art. While the extremists who created the suicide bombers are a miniscule group, their power is magnified through the deliberate use of culture to create a supply of fresh recruits.
Without having read the book, I can only say that Oliver and Steinberg seem to have meticulously documented what many Israelis and some Middle East experts have been telling us for years: that the Palestinians moved from what had been labeled a liberation struggle into a full-blown culture of death. Though groups like Hamas represent a small minority of the Palestinian people, they now appear to have gone mainstream, carving out a place in the cultural consciousness of the Palestinian public. That's no easy task. Cultivating a death culture requires more than a soldier's ethic, it requires more than engendering a patriotism that may lead one to give ones life to a country or a cause - it requires a glorification of death for death's sake, a revelry in bloodshed and gore, a fascination with limit experiences, a desire to surpass reason through violence.
The inverse, of course, is a love and celebration of life. A soldier's ethic, in fact, is based on a love for life, or at least a way of live; and his death is offered as something regrettably sacrificed to preserve that way of life. For the suicide bombers there was no such love or celebration. Life was, in fact, little more than a vehicle by which to strategize and plan for death, to reap destruction, to finalize the gory details.
Oliver and Steinberg document the way in which Palestinian popular culture fed and glorified the cult of death. But glorification doesn't quite capture it. Glorification implies that the particular details are subsumed to the greater abstraction, that they are glossed over in a way that commemorates a 'heroic resistantce', in the same way that the details of a soldier's death are subsumed to the outcome of the battle or to a particular achievement, e.g a bridge being saved, hostages released, etc... The Palestinian extremists, however, chose opposite. They chose instead to subsume the presumably lofty ideal to the bloody details, celebrating every blown limb, every chunk of flesh. The Palestinian media even created re-enactments of the torture and murder of kidnapped Israeli soldiers and collaborators for public release. Violence was everywhere - in the art, the graffiti, the commemorations, the posters. It was in the air. Even state run television exhorted the youth to surrender to the martyrs urge, an urge Foucault would have presumably recognized. A death culture - with its highest value being death - must by its nature up the ante, it must move toward increasing brutality and carnage, which is why the Palestinian youth have become increasingly brutal and barbaric, preferring to inflict more painful forms of death over those forms more strategic or even logistically simpler. Mobs have, been disturbingly eager to wade into 'limit experiences' of their own, to use their own hands to literally rip their enemies apart (as was the recent fate of two Israeli police officers), limb from limb, chanting and singing while clutching entrails and bloody body parts.
A culture of death is by definition self-defeating. It cannot last long. Its success is its own demise. Politically, of course, - and despite the best efforts to interpret its murderous intention as political resistance - it is a non-starter, bankrupt and useless.
The Palestinians know that now, or seem to be finally absorbing the bloody lessons of the past few years. Extremist groups like Hamas are still struggling to push the culture at large back from the center, back toward something more violent and sinister. But their task has been made more difficult by world opinion, by the Israeli military, by the Bush administration, by common sense, by luck, and by the natural course of events. Yasser Arafat and Sheik Ahmad Yasin (the founder of Hamas) were the two most public voices welcoming the culture of death, glorifying the unique contribution of the Palestinians to the world. Fortunately, both are now dead - Arafat of natural causes and Yasin by Israeli rocket (what a spectacular tangle of limbs and wheelchair parts that was).
The Palestinians now have a choice: To move back from the abyss of barbarism into the political and relevant, or forward further still into the dustbin of oblivion.