Suicide Bombing as a Strategic Weapon: An Empirical Investigation of Hamas and Islamic Jihad
2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09546550500189895
ISSN1556-1836
Autores Tópico(s)Bacillus and Francisella bacterial research
ResumoUsing twice-yearly data from 1991 to 2003, we analyze the incidents of suicide attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Israel and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Given the exploratory nature of the question, we have first estimated the relevant coefficients by using a Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Ratio and then checked their robustness by reestimating the model with the help of a Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) as an interrelated system. The results indicate that the two groups deliberately use suicide bombings as strategic weapons within the larger Israeli-Palestinian political milieu. With the Western world locked in an armed struggle with the militant extremists of Islam based on millenarian ideologies, this study emphasizes the need to develop appropriate analytical capabilities to distinguish among terrorist groups and their motivations, ideologies, and tactics. At times, Palestinian politics are dizzyingly incoherent,…at times bloody, at other times perfectly clear.—Edward W. Said Acknowledgments The research for this study was partially funded by the United States Institute of Peace. The authors are grateful to a number of colleagues and friends. However, our intellectual debt runs particularly deep to Professor Ariel Merari for sharing his data as well as his comments on the earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful to David Rapoport, Mia Bloom, Farid Abdel-Nour, and Ronald King. Notes At times, Palestinian politics are dizzyingly incoherent,…at times bloody, at other times perfectly clear.—Edward W. Said * denotes significance at 5% level. T = 26 ** denotes significance at 10% level *** denotes significance at 1% level. For Islamic Jihad the results are reported with no correction for overdispersion. Note: The standard errors are in parentheses * denotes significance at 5% level ** denotes significance at 10% level *** denotes significance at 1% level The variable PLOshoot is used as a control variable for the system 1. Walter Laqueur A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2001). 2. Richard Cohen, "Palestinian Suicide Signal Desperation, Irrationality," Washington Post, February 6, p. A14, 2002. 3. Scott Atran, (2003) "Who Wants to Be a Martyr?" New York Times, May 5, 2003. 4. Dagmer Hellman-Rajanayangam, The Tamil Tigers: Armed Struggle for Identity (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1994); Narayan Swamy, Rajat Ganguli, and Ian McDuff, eds., Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism in South and Southeast Asia: Causes, Dynamics, Solutions (New Delhi: Sage, 2003); Narayan Swami, Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerrillas (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2002). 5. For an excellent survey of current literature on the psychology of terrorism, see Jeff Victoroff, "The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches." Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 1 (2005): 3–42. 6. Lamis Andoni, "Searching for Answers: Gaza's Suicide Bombers," Journal of Palestine Studies 26, no. 4 (1997): 33–45; Ehud Sprinzak, "Rational Fanatics," Foreign Policy 79, no. 1, 66–75; (2000): Jerrold Post, Ehud Sprinzak, and Laurita M. Denny, "The Terrorists in Their Own Words: Interviews with 35 Incarcerated Middle Eastern Terrorists," Terrorism and Political Violence 15, no. 1, (2003): 171–184. 7. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 8. On this also see Linda Butler, "Suicide Bombers: Dignity, Despair and the Need for Hope., An Interview with Eyad el Sarraj." Journal of Palestine Studies, 31 no. 4 (2002): 71–76. 9. Reuven Konet, "Sexual Fantasies of a Suicide Bomber," http://www.israelinsider.com. Accessed 16 August, 2001. 10. Robin Morgan, "The Demon Lover Syndrome," Ms, 2002, 17. Also see Lina Sagaral Reyes, "Disempowered Palestinian Girls' Uncommon Death Wishes—Research Sheds Light." Women in Action. http://www.isiswomen.org/pub/wia/wia3-04/lina1.htm. 11. For an extensive discussion of repressed sexuality of the suicide bombers and Islamic imageries see Yotam Feldner, "72 Black-Eyed Virgins," MEMRI (The Middle Eastern Research Institute), October 30, 2001. 12. Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova, "Does Poverty Cause Terrorism? The Economics and the Education of Suicide Bombers," New Republic, June 24, 2002, 27–33. 13. Hilal Khashan, "Collective Palestinian Frustration and Suicide Bombings," Third World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003): 1049–67. 14. See, for example, Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Also see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002). 15. Edwin S. Shneidman, Definition of Suicide (New York: Wiley, 1985). Also see Edwin S. Shneidman, "Petrubation and Lethality," in ed. D. G. Jacobs, The Harvard Medical School Guide to Suicide Assessment and Intervention, (San Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers, 1999), p. 83–97. 16. For one of the most comprehensive studies on individual motivations for taking part in suicide bombings, see Ariel Merari, "Social Organizations and Psychological Factors in Suicide Terrorism," in Root Causes of Terrorism: Proceedings from an International Expert Meeting in Oslo, 9–11 June, 2003, ed. Tore Borgo, 81–98 (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2003). Also see Nasra Hassan, "Letter from Gaza: An Arsenal of Believers," The New Yorker, November 19, 2001. 17. Robert A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 343–61. 18. Andrew Kydd and Barbara Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace: The Politics of Extremist Violence," International Organization 56, no. 2, (2002): 263–96. 19. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, "Conciliation, Commitment, and Counter-Terrorism: A Formal Model" (paper presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association under the title "An Adverse Selection Model of Terrorism," Washington, DC, September 2003). 20. Rui De Figueiredo and Barry Weingast, "Vicious Cycles: Endogenous Political Extremism and Political Violence," (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 1998). 21. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Global Phenomenon of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Also see Mia Bloom, "Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share and Outbidding," Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 1, (2004): 61–88. Mia Bloom, "Ethnic Conflict, State Terror and Suicide Bombing in Sri Lanka," Civil Wars, 6, no. 2, (2003): 54–84. 22. Walter Enders and Todd Sandler "The Effectiveness of Antiterrorism Policies: A Vector-Autoregressive-Intervention Analysis," American Political Science Review 87, no. 4 (1993): 829–44; Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, "What Do We Know about the Substitution Effect in Transnational Terrorism?" in Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements, and Failures, ed. Andrew Silke, 119–37 (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Walter Enders, Applied Econometric Time Series (New York: Wiley, 1995); Will Moore, "Repression and Dissent: Substitution, Context, and Timing," American Journal of Political Science 42, no. 3 (1998): 851–73; Dipak K. Gupta, Harinder Singh, and Tom Sprague, "Government Coercion of Dissidents: Deterrence or Provocation?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 37, no. 2 (1993): 301–39. 23. Suicide attacks for collective causes have been known since antiquity—see Walter Laqueur, "Terror's New Face," Harvard International Review 20 (1999): 48–51. He points out that "suicide missions have been carried out for as long as wars have been fought." For instance, the kamikaze attacks by Japanese pilots during World War II (see Albert Axel and Hideaki Kase, Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods, (Harlow: Longman, 2002); Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History,(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)) are very well documented. However, few groups until recently have used suicide attacks as part of a sustained campaign. 24. We should note here that although the first suicide attack within Israel was carried out by Hamas on April 16, 1993, near Mekhola in the Jordan valley, we start our data from 1991. This is because we wanted to capture the full impacts of the independent variables, including the lagged ones. 25. Yasir Arafat, "A Discussion with Yasir Arafat," Journal of Palestine Studies 11, no. 2 (1982): 3–15; Issa Al-Shuaibi, "The Development of Palestinian Entity-Consciousness: Part II," Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. 2 (1980): 50–70; Mamdouth Nofal et al., "Refelections on Al-Nakba," Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 1 (1998): 5–35; Avraham Sela and Moshe Ma'oz, eds., The PLO and Israel: From Armed Conflict to Political Solution 1964–1994 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). 26. See for example Jamal R. Nassar, The Palestine Liberation Organization: From Armed Struggle to the Declaration of Independence (New York: Praeger, 1991). 27. It is important to note here that in this article we are using the term PLO, although after 1994 the organization transformed itself into the Palestinian National Authority with commonly used acronym PA. 28. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1970), 160. 29. Michael C. Hudson, "Developments and Setbacks in Palestinian Resistance Movements, 1967–71," Journal of Palestine Studies 1, no. 3 (1972): 64–84. 30. Although the DFLP was, like the PFLP, a pro-Soviet socialist group, it broke with the latter over its agenda of creating a class struggle among the poor and working-class Palestinians. 31. Before this date, Hamas was more of a charitable organization serving poor Palestinians primarily in the Gaza Strip. 32. Article 1 of its charter proclaims, "The basis of the Islamic Resistance Movement is Islam. From Islam it derives its ideas and its fundamental precepts and views of life, the universe, and humanity; and it judges all its actions according to Islam and is inspired by Islam to correct its errors." (Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p.177). And it adds the Islamic Brotherhood motto in Article 5, "Allah is its [Hamas's] goal, the Prophet is its model, and the Qur'an is its constitution" (178). 33. Article 11 states: "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [endowed] to all Muslim generations until the day of resurrection. It is not right to give it up or any part of it. Neither a single Arab state nor all Arab states, neither a king nor a president, not all the kings and presidents, nor any organization or all of them—be they Palestinian or Arab—have such authority, because the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [endowed] to all Muslim generations until the day of resurrection." (Ibid., 181). 34. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of Hamas, the Israeli authorities directly and indirectly encouraged its inception as a counterbalance to the PLO (Mishal and Sela, 36). There had been a persistent rumor among the supporters of the PLO that Hamas was a creation of Israel to divide and conquer the Palestinian community. In fact, Arafat claimed that "we must remember that these organizations were created by Israel, which also distributes arms to them." Quoted in Bloom, "Ethnic Conflict," chapter 2. 35. Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 3. 36. Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 37. Mark Huband, Warriors of the Prophet (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 38. Abu-Amr Ziad, Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 39. Although the murder of Shiqaqi remains unsolved, there is a strong but unfounded suspicion within the Palestinian community that it was the work of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. 40. See International Counter–Terrorism (ICT), http://www.ict.org.il/. 41. In terms of the calculation of costs and benefits, the jihadi groups all over the world have found suicide attacks to be the most cost-effective weapon. Thus Ayman al-Zawahiri, the close aide of Osama bin Laden, wrote, "The method of martyrdom operations [is] the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahaidin [organization] in terms of casualties." Quoted in Benjamin and Simon, Sacred Terror, 28–29. Also see Dan Radlauer, "An Engineered Tragedy: Statistical Analysis of Casualties in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Sepetember 2000– September 2002." ICT, http://www.ict.org.il/. 42. By this time, an overwhelming portion of the Palestinians were supportive of the suicide attacks against the Jewish state (see Gal Luft, "The Palestinian H–Bomb." Foreign Affairs. July/August, 2002, p. 2–7). 43. Although the PLO had officially eschewed violence against Israel, the entire time period saw continued armed attacks by PLO-affiliated groups, although they did not stage any suicide attacks before the peace process came to an end (see Ali Jarbawi, "Palestinian Politics at a Crossroad," Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 4 (1996): 29–39). 44. Any discussion of the Palestinian rebel groups must include the Syrian- and Iranian-backed radical Shiite group Hizbullah (Party of God). Established during the Lebanese political chaos of 1982 with the ideological guidance of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hizbullah quickly established its radical credentials through a series of spectacular acts. However, for our current study, Hizbullah holds limited interest since it has been involved in only one suicide attack within the political boundaries of Israel and the territories controlled by the PA during the study period—and also because of its history and ethnic composition, it follows a different cycle from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, the central focus of this study. 45. Dipak K. Gupta, Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). Gupta expands the utility maxim of a "rational" actor and suggests that rational actors maximize their self-utility as well as the utility of the groups in which the actor claims membership. 46. Although the estimated equations with quarterly data show very similar patterns, we decided to use biannual data since, in our judgment, it provided us with a clearer picture. The results of estimation with quarterly data are available from the authors. 47. Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1970). For the latest testing of Gurr's hypothesis, see G. D. Saxon, "Repression, Grievances, Mobilization, and Rebellion: A New Test of Gurr's Model of Ethnopolitical Rebellion," International Interactions 31, no. 3 (2005): 87–116. 48. Dipak K. Gupta, Economics of Political Violence: The Effects of Political Instability on Economic Growth (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1990), 157–62. 49. Note that if this negative value of the composite coefficient α*′ is the result of a negative value of the government reaction coefficient β′, then it may signify a mollifying effort by the government or its inability to mount a proper action following a terrorist attack. Neither of these are applicable to Israel. 50. Although it may appear as if suicide attacks are instantaneous in response to Israeli acts of provocation, their strategic use points to much more careful planning, which requires such activities as choosing (and surveillance of) the target, drawing up a detailed plan of action, manufacture of the bomb pack, selection and mental training of the attacker, transportation of the human bomb to its target, etc. Given such a complex process, it is difficult to determine a single time period for retaliation. Therefore we decided to treat it as an empirical question and allow the data to show the average time of retaliation. For a detailed discussion of the organizational steps leading up to a suicide attack, see Assaf Moghadam, "Palestinian Suicide Terrorism in the Second Intifada: Motivations and Organizational Aspects," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26 (2003): 65–92. Also, as circumstantial evidence we may point out that on September 1, 2004, Hamas carried out two consecutive suicide bus attacks in Israel. Nearly six months after the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (March 22, 2004) and four and a half months after Abdel Aziz Rantisi's (April 17, 2004) killing, Hamas claimed the attacks in their names (see Steven Erlanger, "Twin Blasts Kill 16 in Israel: Hamas Claims Responsibility," New York Times, September 1, 2004). 51. Richard N. Lebow. Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Ma'oz (2004a, 2004b); Bloom, Dying to kill. These all have argued that when national leaders cannot afford to launch a war for fear of being labeled as "aggressors," they often initiate events which are designed to provoke others to react violently. The opposition's reaction then provides justification for the authorities to launch a full-scale assault. 52. Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001). 53. These incidents include the following: the spring 1996 opening of the Hasmonean tunnel under the Al Aqsa Mosque; in October 2000, Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon makes a symbolic visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque; from January 2001 to 2003, the end of the Oslo Agreement and the election of Ariel Sharon and his administration. We have used the entire period of the Sharon administration as political provocation because Sharon, more than anyone else in Israeli politics, is an object of nearly universal Palestinian derision. From his role as the officer in charge of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon, Sharon's political career has been a lightning rod for Palestinian opposition. See Bloom, Dying to kill, chapter 2. 54. These include the following incidents: in February 1994 an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque; the October 1995 assassination of Fathi Shiqaqi; the January 1996 assassination of Yahiyeh Ayyash (the "Engineer"); the July 2002 assassination of Salah Shehad and his family; and the June 2003 attempted assassination of the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. 55. Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1951). 56. Kydd and Walter, "Sabotaging the peace." 57. Israeli elections took place in June 1992 and May 1996. Then an early election was called in May 1999, and Ehud Barak was elected. His government failed in February 2001, when a special election was held only to elect the prime minister. The Israeli citizens chose Ariel Sharon and his Likud Party. However, facing increasing challenges from the opposition Labour Party, Sharon called for a general election in January 2003. 58. The peace accord events in this variable include: in September 1993, the signing of the Oslo Agreement; in May 1994, the beginning of Palestinian self-rule; in September 1995, the implementation of the Oslo Agreement; in January 1996, the election of the Palestinian self-governing authority; in January 1997, the signing of the Hebron Deployment Agreement; in October 1998, the Wye Memorandum signed; and in December 1998, the PLO recognizing Israel. 59. See Alan Krueger and David Laitin, "'Misunderestimating' Terrorism," in Terrorism and Homeland Security, ed. Dipak K. Gupta, 38–44 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005). 60. See Pape, "Strategic Logic." 61. The complete dataset used in this article can be obtained from Dipak Gupta. 62. It is important to keep in mind that the PA and Arafat consistently denied having any role in attacks against the Jewish state and its citizens, while the Israeli government held them responsible. Without taking any stand in this controversy, we are simply referring to these groups as "PLO affiliated." 63. The Granger Causality Test for the periods 2001–3 show statistically insignificant results. However, since this period contains a limited number of observations, we are not discussing the results. 64. See Bloom, Dying to kill, chapter 2. 65. Accurate discrete change in the expected value from 0 to 1 is given by exp(α1) − 1. 66. See A. Colin Cameroon and Pravin K. Trivedi, Regression Analysis of Count Data (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998). 67. It is well known that the Poisson distribution is determined entirely by its mean, in particular the conditional variance is equal to the conditional mean, which is often violated in many applications. A common correction for the heteroskedasticity is that the variance is proportional to the mean, requiring the procedure of Quasi-Maximum Likelihood for estimating the model. See Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 68. Kydd and Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace." 69. For a detailed discussion of suicide attacks and Israeli elections, see Bloom, Dying to kill, chapter 2. 70. Kydd and Walter, "Sabotaging the Peace"; Bueno de Mesquita, "Conciliation, Commitment, and Counter-Terrorism." 71. Hillel Halkin, "Bye, Bye Bibi," New Republic, June 7, 1999. Also see Bloom, "Palestinian Suicide Bombing." 72. Zeev Maoz, "The Unlimited Use of the Limited Use of Force: Israel and Low Intensity Warfare, 1949–2004" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 17–20, 2004). Also see Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land? A Critical Assessment of Israel's National Security and Foreign Policy, 1949–2004 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 73. On March 22, 2004, (outside of the period under consideration in this article) Israeli Defense Forces assassinated Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, outside a Gaza mosque. An enraged Hamas declared that Israel had "opened the gates of hell" and promised to kill "hundreds of Zionists." It renewed its menacing promise after the killing of Abdel Aziz Rantisi a month later. Yet the threats failed to materialize immediately (see Erik Shechter, "Where Have All the Bombers Gone?" Jerusalem Post, August 5, 2004, 4). 74. Gal Luft explained the absence of suicide attacks in the aftermath of these two extremely high profile targeted assassinations by stating that these and other such acts had a cumulative effect on the command structure of the terrorist organizations (Ibid., 4). 75. The error for the system is given by ϵ = [ϵ H ′, ϵ I ′, ϵ P ′]′ where the mean of the ϵ is 0, hence E(ϵ) = 0 and the covariance is given by E(ϵϵ′) = V. In the above SUR specification the errors are considered to be heteroskedastic and contemporaneously correlated so that the covariance matrix of the above system is given by In the covariance structure above there is heteroskedasticity because σ H ≠ σ I ≠ σ P . The contemporaneous correlation between Hamas and Islamic Jihad is σ HI , where E(ϵ Ht ϵ It ) = σ HI = σ IH for all t. Similarly, contemporaneous correlation between Hamas and PLOshoot is σ HP = σ PH and contemporaneous correlation between PLOshoot and Islamic Jihad is σ PI = σ IP . It is well known that in the SUR structure above each equation is auto-regressive of order 1 and hence ϵ is treated to be serially independent—in other words, we rule out any serial correlation for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and PLOshoot. In the SUR methodology we do nonlinear least squares at the first stage to estimate ϵ and then construct an estimate of Vˆ and perform nonlinear Generalized Least Squares. These iterations are repeated until the coefficients and the error weights converge. See Arnold Zellener, "An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests of Aggregation Bias," Journal of the American Statistical Association 57 (1992): 500–9; Ernst R. Berndt, The Practice of Econometrics: Classic and Contemporary (New York: Addison-Wesley); William H. Greene, Econometric Analysis (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003). 76. William Landes, "An Economic Study of US Aircraft Skyjackings, 1961–1976," Journal of Law and Economics 21, no. 1 (1978): 1–31. 77. See Enders and Sandler, "What do. we know." 78. Martha Crenshaw, "The Logic of Terrorism: Terrorist Behavior as a Product of Strategic Choice," in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, ed. Walter Reich, 7–24 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). This points out that "efficiency is the primary standard by which terrorism is compared with other methods of achieving political goals." 79. Although there is no explicit mention of an objective criterion for terrorist activities, which aim at maximizing the number of killed and wounded, it may be worth recalling that facing unconventional warfare in Vietnam, the U.S. military under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara accepted "body count" as its goal. 80. Hisham H. Ahmed, "Palestinian Resistance and 'Suicide Bombing': Causes and Consequences," In Proceedings from "Root Causes of Terrorism": An International Expert Meeting in Oslo, 9–11 June, Tore Bjorgo, ed., 124 (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2003). 81. For a discussion of cost effectiveness of suicide bombings from the perspective of the dissident groups, see Benjamin and Simon, Sacred Terror. 82. John F. Muth, "Rational Expectations and Theory of Price Movements," Econometrica (1961): 413–29. Muth defined "rationality" as the ability to explain actual behavior with a set of independent variables. 83. For a discussion of the Palestinian view of suicide bombing as a strategic instrument of protest, see Lori Allen "There Are Many Reasons Why: Suicide Bombers and Martyrs in Palestine," Middle East Report 32, no. 223 (2002): 34–37. 84. Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research http://www.pcsr.org. Also see Gal Luft, "The Palestinian H-Bomb," Foreign Affairs, 81, no. 4 (2002): 5–7. 85. National Commission on Terrorism, Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism: Report of the National Commission on Terrorism (Washington DC: GPO, 2000). This report concluded that fanaticism, rather than political interest, is more often the motivation for terrorism. A similar conclusion was reached by Laqueur, "Terror's New Face." 86. Bloom, Dying to kill. 87. The perceived threat of a "demographic bomb" has created a lively debate in Israel and elsewhere. For a discussion of the "threat," see Linda S. Head, "Arab Demographics Worry Israel," Gulf News, August 25, 2004. For the perspective of those who see the entire debate as masked racism against the Arabs, see Samah Jabr, "What Does Israel's 'Demographic Balancing Act' Hold in Store for Palestinians?" Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2004, 19–20; Donald G. McNeil Jr., "Demographic Bomb Is Fizzling to a Pop," International Herald Tribune, August 30, 2004. 88. Sara Roy, "Hamas and the Transformation(s) of Political Islam in Palestine," Current History (no. 102, 660 (2003): 13–20). This author points out that the Hamas leadership is well aware of their central role in Palestinian politics, particularly in view of the weakening role of the PA. Roy argues that while an Islamic alternative is still unacceptable to the majority of Palestinians, the Islamic movement has shown pragmatism—which may allow its inclusion in the peace process. 89. Donald L. Horowitz, "Making Moderation Pay: The Comparative Politics of Ethnic Conflict Management," in Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies, ed. Joseph V. Montville, 451–76 (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1990). Furthermore, by using cross-national data, Gupta, Singh, and Sprague ("Government Coercion") have argued that while dictatorships are sometimes able to suppress rebellion by the use of brutal force, conflicts within democratic nations are best solved by finding political solutions. 90. For a fuller discussion see Dipak K. Gupta, "Tyranny of Data: Linking Data to the Advancements in the Theoretical Understanding of Terrorism" (paper presented at the Social and Psychological Factors in the Genesis of Terrorism Conference at Il Ciocco, Castelvecchio Pascoli, Italy, September 2005).
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