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By TRACY WILKINSON
LATIMES STAFF WRITER
GAZA CITY-The
three 14-year-olds were ranked No. 1, 2 and 3 in their
eighth-grade class. Smart boys, sharp. Ismail abu Nadi
helped friends with their homework. He always knew the
answers.
Ismail and his two classmates, Yusuf Zegout and Anwar
Hamdouna, stole from their Gaza City homes one night this
spring and crept toward a heavily fortified Jewish settlement
nearby. The boys-armed with knives, a small homemade pipe
bomb and a hoe to dig under the settlement's fence-were
spotted from a distance by Israeli soldiers and shot dead.
Ismail and his friends were not alone. On that same late-April
night, six other boys of similar age also set off to attack
the Netzarim settlement. They were stopped by Palestinian
police. And a few days earlier, a boy attempting to attack
a different settlement was shot dead by Israeli soldiers,
while a 14-year-old friend with him turned back at the
last minute and was spared. Hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of Palestinians have proclaimed their willingness to become
"martyrs," to die in the pursuit of killing
Israeli Jews. In a society increasingly supportive of
suicide bombings and similar attacks, what these children
did should not have been particularly surprising. Still,
for a time, it gave pause.
Gazans condemned the boys' deeds. Hamas, a Gaza-based
radical Islamic organization that normally extols the
virtues of dying in the struggle against Israel, branded
the acts as futile and banned boys from such missions,
though it was doubtful the group took any action beyond
its statement. It wasn't the attacks per se that angered
Hamas leaders but the performance of them by boys too
young to know what they were doing and how to do it effectively.
Ismail, Yusuf and Anwar left behind classmates at Salahudeen
School in a middle-class Gaza City neighborhood who, at
least publicly, professed horror at how the boys died.
"Maybe when we are old enough we can do these things,
like when we are 20," said Riad Muhemar, 14. "Now
we should be educating ourselves."
"I don't know why Ismail did this," added Saleh
Haib, 15. "He never told me what he was going to
do, and I would have told him not to do it if he had.
It drove me crazy when I heard."
Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Bamer sat next to Ismail in
class for the last three years. "Of course a martyr
is something good, but it's not for us," Mohammed
said. "Certainly he was under a lot of pressure.
But if he had thought more about it, he wouldn't have
done it."
Whatever revulsion was triggered in Gaza by the deaths
of Ismail and his friends was short-lived. The bomber
who blew himself up last month at a park in the Israeli
city of Rishon Le Zion, killing two Israelis, was reported
to have been 16. Another 16-year-old was stopped by Israeli
soldiers at a roadblock in the West Bank a couple of days
later and was found to be wearing a belt of explosives.
Palestinians are volunteering at an increasing rate to
serve as suicide bombers or to carry out other deadly
attacks against Israelis. The groundswell is fed by outrage
over what Palestinians
see as Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians,
by the grinding frustration over torturous roadblocks
and checkpoints erected by Israeli forces to impede Palestinian
attacks, and by despair over the future. A person who
dies in an act of "resistance" is assured a
place in heaven, as is his or her family, many Palestinians
believe. And that's not to mention economic benefits paid
to survivors.
Gazan psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, however, believes that
another phenomenon is giving rise to the increase: society's
glorification of
the "martyr," the person who dies fighting Israel,
be it in a simple
act of throwing a stone or in detonating a bomb in a crowded
discotheque.
With martyrdom, said Sarraj, come status, societal approval
and power. And nowhere is that equation more oversimplified
than for the young.
"We have here a cultural glorification of martyrs
in the eyes of children," Sarraj said. "If you
asked children 20 years ago what they wanted to be when
they grew up, they'd say a doctor or an engineer. Now
they say they want to be a martyr."
Celebration of Martyrs
Martyrs are given status unparalleled in Palestinian
society, Sarraj
noted. Their pictures are plastered on public walls,
their funerals
are emotional celebrations, their families often receive
visits from
state officials. They become almost holy, praised by
imams at mosques or over loudspeakers at rallies, where
children are often dressed as shrouded dead or as pint-sized
suicide bombers. A game called shahid, or martyr, is
popular among Gazan children. Many teens have become
experts in crafting homemade pipe bombs using elbow-shaped
pieces of plumbing.
Many Palestinian children also receive rudimentary weapons
training at summer camps sponsored by Hamas or mainstream
Palestinian organizations. It was unclear whether Ismail
and his classmates received such training, though their
crude weapons were easy to obtain or assemble from household
goods.
"A child likes to identify with heroes, heroes
who commit heroic acts, heroes who represent power,"
Sarraj said. "The martyr is fitting that model
for the child."
Sarraj, whose iconoclastic views often get him in trouble
with Palestinian authorities, does not discount other
motivations for the child who undertakes a suicide mission:
hatred and the desire for revenge; an opinion, reinforced
in Islamic teachings, of death not as an end but as
a passage to a better life.
Most Palestinian children have had to watch their fathers
humiliated at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers, or have
heard the tales of their uncles' time in Israeli prisons.
In Ismail's class of about 35 boys, 15 raise their hands
when asked if a close relative has been killed in the
current 20-month-old uprising, or the earlier intifada
that lasted six years and ended in 1993.
But Sarraj sees the child's quest for approval in a
culture that values martyrdom as the overriding motivation,
and a phenomenon with potentially disastrous consequences
for Palestinian society in the long run.
Ahmed Nasser, a veteran Gaza-based activist in the Fatah
movement of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat,
was alarmed to learn recently that his 11-year-old son
was going around telling people he wanted to become
a martyr.
"My associates were saying to him, so, you'll grow
up to be a Fatah leader like your father," Nasser
recalled in his Gaza City office. "And he said,
no, I want to be a martyr. It's the quickest way to
fight for Palestine."
'He Is Still a Child'
Nasser blames the entire environment, from the military
actions of
Israel to the endless, violent images on Palestinian
television.
"There are a lot of events stamped in his head
that make him think this way," Nasser said of the
boy. "I tried to convince him that he is still
a child, that he should wait until he understands the
whole picture. And then when he is old enough he can
decide for himself. But a child cannot make these decisions."
Um Nidal Farahat, a Gazan mother of four, has a very
different attitude. She says she encouraged her sons,
from a young age, to
attack Israeli targets and become martyrs. One son,
Mohammed, 17, was killed in March when he attacked Atzmona,
a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip, and
killed five youths there. Mohammed had been active with
Hamas' military wing since he was 7, Um Nidal told the
Saudi newspaper Asharq al Awsat last month.
"In this atmosphere, Mohammed came to love martyrdom,"
she said. "As a mother, I re-enforced this love
for martyrdom in the mind of Mohammed and of all my
sons." [This is the kind of family that Israel
should be expelling from the country. - Ed.].
She said she discussed the Atzmona operation with Mohammed
before he embarked on it and posed with him for keepsake
photos.
According to Israeli researchers, the average age of
the suicide bomber has declined slightly from 22 in
the 1990s to about 20 or 21 now.
Bassem Wahidi, the headmaster at Salahudeen School,
said he and the staff will call the police, and then
a boy's parents, if they learn that the boy is planning
a suicide attack.
"You can't blame them for doing this, what with
everything they see on TV, but we oppose it because
they have a future," Wahidi said. "They can
be a doctor, an engineer, a soldier to kill Israelis.
But at this age they should be educating themselves."
[Good influence, isn't it? - Ed.]
Ismail's father, Mohammed abu Nadi, a 47-year-old civil
engineer,
cannot see beyond blaming Israel and its policies for
his son's
decision.
Ismail, he recalled, was an extremely bright child who
spoke English and wanted to be an engineer and earn
a doctorate. Ismail's bedroom in the large apartment
he shared with his parents and four siblings is well-
stocked with a computer, photo scanner and printer.
[Hint-he didn't do it because of poverty. - Ed.].
"I wanted to take my heart from my body when I
learned the news, because he is more valuable than I
am," Abu Nadi said. "On the other hand, he
chose his way, to be a martyr and go to paradise."
The father said the son grew especially angry when the
family attempted weekly visits to Ismail's grandfather
in the town of Mughazi, several miles south of Gaza
City. Palestinians traveling Gaza's main north-south
road are often forced to wait for hours while a single
settler, or an army patrol, passes on the east-west
road that cuts across the Gaza Strip to the Jewish settlement
of Netzarim. "He often said he wanted to remove
that settlement, and he asked why it had to be there,"
Abu Nadi said. [That's not the question.
The question is why inspections like that should be
necessary in the first place. If the "Palestinians"
weren't intent on killing as many Israelis as possible,
there wouldn't be any inspections. No checkpoints. -
Ed.].
Ismail, like his two companions, left behind a letter
for his parents. He asked that Hamas "adopt"
him in death and supervise the mourning over him, and
he urged his brothers to obey the rules of Islam.
"Mom, Dad," Ismail wrote. "Those are
the two words that a child speaks when he starts his
life, and so I say them now. I want you to be happy
with me. After I die in this operation, do not be sad,
because I will be a martyr, God willing. Your son, Ismail."
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