5 page essay

o n s u i c i d e b o m b i n g

t h e w e l l e k l e c t u r e s

l i k e m o s t n e w y o r k e r s who were in the city on September 11,

2001, I encountered the events of that day largely through the media,

through the pall of smoke that hung over the south of the island,

and through the emotion infusing the conversation and demeanor

of ordinary Americans. For many Muslims living in the United States,

September 11 was the beginning of a long period of anxiety, during

which they found themselves associated, occasionally explicitly but

more often implicitly, with terrorism.1 For many non-Muslims in

the United States, Western Europe, and Israel, the suicide bomber

quickly became the icon of an Islamic “culture of death.”2 This led

me to try to think in a sustained way about the contemporary mode

of violence that is described by much of the Western media as “Is-

lamic terrorism.” Is there, I asked myself, a religiously motivated ter-

rorism? If so, how does it differ from other cruelties? What makes

its motivation—as opposed to the simple intent to kill—religious?

Where does it stand in relation to other forms of collective violence?

How is the image of the suicide bomber, bringing death to himself

and others, addressed by Christians and post-Christians? My ques-

tions, I stress, arose not primarily from ethical concerns but from

a curiosity about conceptual and material connections. Thinking

i n t r o d u c t i o n

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about suicide bombing, in its banality and its horror, was for me a

way of opening up some modern assumptions about dying and kill-

ing. The general thought I have pursued is that however much we

try to distinguish between morally good and morally evil ways of

killing, our attempts are beset with contradictions, and these con-

tradictions remain a fragile part of our modern subjectivity.

My focus on the United States and Israel in this book is deliber-

ate. There is terrorism in other places, of course: Sri Lanka, India, In-

donesia, Russia, to name only a few countries. And the United States

has long had its homegrown, institutionalized terror, although this

is not what people today remember when they refer to terrorism.3

Nevertheless, the idea of a war on terror is uniquely developed and

expressed in a particular place—the United States—and most of

the theorization about terrorism (and about just war) occurs there,

as well as in Europe and Israel. I am not interested in providing a

representative—let alone a comprehensive—survey of terrorism as

a unique phenomenon of our time. Put simply, I argue that the cre-

ation of terror and the perpetration of atrocities are aspects of mili-

tant action in the unequal world we inhabit, of our notions of what

is cruel and what is necessary, and of the emotions with which we

justify or condemn particular acts of death dealing.

The book itself has a simple structure. In the first chapter, I begin

by examining the “clash of civilizations” thesis that purports to ex-

plain contemporary Islamic jihadism as the essence of contempo-

rary terrorism, and I argue against the kind of history that assumes

self-contained civilizations having fixed values. I then discuss the at-

tempt by a distinguished philosopher to differentiate just war from

terrorism, and I speculate on the reasons for the prominence of a

public discourse on terror. Terrorism, I point out, is an epistemologi-

cal object in modern society, something that calls for theorization

(what is terrorism?) as well as for practical information gathering

(how can one forestall this danger?). These two tasks are dependent

on each other. Terrorism, however, is more than the object of these

tasks. It is also an integral part of liberal subjectivities (the urge to

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defeat political terror, the fear of social vulnerability, the horror and

fascination with death and destruction), although terror itself is dis-

missed as being essentially part of a nonmodern, nonliberal culture.

In the second chapter, I look critically at a range of current expla-

nations of suicide terrorism that are now being put forward, and I

question the preoccupation by writers on the subject with attribut-

ing distinctive motives (as opposed to the manifest intention to kill)

to perpetrators of suicide bombing. I say that motives in general are

more complicated than is popularly supposed and that the assump-

tion that they are truths to be accessed is mistaken: the motives of

suicide bombers in particular are inevitably fictions that justify our

responses but that we cannot verify. I then move away from writers

attempting to explain the phenomenon of suicide bombings who

address larger questions of killing and dying in relation to politics.

Drawing on the history of ideas, I emphasize that although liberal

thought separates the idea of violence from the idea of politics, mor-

tal violence is integral to liberalism as a political formation. More

significantly, I suggest that legitimate violence exercised in and

by the modern progressive state—including the liberal democratic

state—possesses a peculiar character that is absent in terrorist vio-

lence (absent not because of the latter’s virtue but because of the

former’s capability): a combination of cruelty and compassion that

sophisticated social institutions enable and encourage. In the third

and last chapter, I explore the idea of horror as a common reaction

to suicide and especially to suicide bombing. On the one hand, I turn

to anthropological writing to elaborate the notion that horror has to

do with the collapse of social and personal identity and thus with

the dissolution of form. On the other hand, I draw on some aspects

of Christian theology: the crucifixion is the most famous suicide in

history, whose horror is transmuted into the project of redeeming

universal humanity—again, through a combination of cruelty and

compassion. This is the most speculative part of the book, but it is

essential to the layered account I finally offer of what horror at sui-

cide bombing consists in.

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A brief warning against a possible misreading of this book: I do

not plead that terrorist atrocities may sometimes be morally justi-

fied. I am simply impressed by the fact that modern states are able

to destroy and disrupt life more easily and on a much grander scale

than ever before and that terrorists cannot reach this capability. I

am also struck by the ingenuity with which so many politicians,

public intellectuals, and journalists provide moral justifications for

killing and demeaning other human beings. What seems to mat-

ter is not the killing and dehumanization as such but how one kills

and with what motive. People at all times have, of course, justified

the killing of so-called enemies and others they deem not deserv-

ing to live. The only difference is that today liberals who engage in

this justification think they are different because morally advanced.

That very thought has social implications, and it is therefore that

thought that makes a real difference. Liberal thought begins from

the notion that everyone has the absolute right to defend himself,

in the full knowledge that the idea of defense is subject to consider-

able interpretation, so that (for example) liberation from the oppres-

sor in Iraq becomes part of defense for both the American occupier

and the insurgency. Many liberals also believe that people have a

moral obligation to attack evil, either in order to redeem themselves

or to redeem others who cannot do so for themselves. The notion of

evil is not conceived of as a principle essential to the world—as in

Manichaean and Zoroastrian teaching—but as a dynamic principle

that opposes divine will and is therefore eliminable. Consequently,

it is resistance to that will that defines evil, and all virtuous men

are urged to overcome it at any cost. (According to Christian belief,

Christ triumphed over evil, God reconciled the world to himself, by

the crucifixion.)4 Fighting evil is, of course, an old justification, but

it often finds new formulations today. I do not mean by this that to-

day’s modern world is, as many hold, simply an unfolding of Chris-

tianity. In my view there are continuities and also crucial ruptures

between secular modernity and its past.

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Finally, this book does not pretend to offer solutions to moral di-

lemmas about institutionalized violence. It makes no case for ac-

cepting some kinds of cruelty as opposed to others. Its hope, rather,

is to disturb the reader sufficiently that he or she will be able to take

a distance from the complacent public discourse that prepackages

moral responses to terrorism, war, and suicide bombing.

The following chapters were first given as the Wellek Library lectures

at the University of California, Irvine, on May 15–17, 2006. I am grate-

ful to the Institute for Critical Theory for inviting me to deliver them,

to the audience for their questions and comments, and especially to

John H. Smith, Director of the Institute, for his hospitality. My thanks

also to other members of the Institute—especially Gabriela Schwab,

Inderpal Grewal, and Bill Maurer, who welcomed me generously. A

number of friends and colleagues have offered helpful comments on

various drafts: Hussein Agrama, Partha Chatterjee, Veena Das, Maria

Pia Di Bella, Abou Farman, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Baber Johansen, Mah-

mood Mamdani, Tomaz Mastnak, Keith Nield, Gyan Pandey, David

Scott, Mohammed Tabishat, and David Wolton. None of them, of

course, is responsible for the opinions I have expressed here.

o n t h e e v e n i n g of the attack on the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon, President Bush made a statement in his address to the

nation:

Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very

freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly ter-

rorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretar-

ies, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms

and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly

ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying

into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled

us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. The

acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos

and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.1

The next day, Mr. Bush opened with another statement: “I have just

completed a meeting with my national security team, and we have

received the latest intelligence updates. The deliberate and deadly

attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were

more than acts of terror. They were acts of war. This will require our

country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve.”2 Later, both

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the Bush administration and the U.S. media fixed on the phrase War

Against Terrorism (or Terror).

Many commentators asked why the deployment of organized vi-

olence against terrorism was being described as a war. Among those

skeptical of this usage was Alain Badiou, who made the obvious

point that in the past, when governments responded to terrorism—

especially in the context of colonialism—they spoke not of war but

of police action. Governments that had had to deal with the Baader-

Meinhof group in Germany, the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the

Red Brigade in Italy, typically described their responses as “securi-

ty measures” or “police actions,” rather than using the term “war.”

Badiou proposed that in its capacity as a world power the United

States had privileged war as the sign of its presence. From the be-

ginning, he said, its political formation was achieved through a long

history of military encounters across the North American continent

and abroad.3

I want to take up the other half of the question, however: why is

the term “terrorism” so prominent today when talking about certain

kinds of contemporary violence—not only in the United States but

also in Europe, Israel, and other parts of the world? One suggestion

has been that the previous violent groups in Europe were all operating

within the framework of the nation-state and were therefore insid-

ers; the present adversaries (Muslim terrorists) are outsiders—even

when they are citizens of the liberal democratic state or inhabitants

of its governed territories. On the other hand, however reprehensible

it was to liberals, the violence of Marxists and nationalists was un-

derstandable in terms of progressive, secular history. The violence

of Islamic groups, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to many

precisely because it is not embedded in a historical narrative—his-

tory in the “proper” sense. As the violence of what is often referred to

as a totalitarian religious tradition hostile to democratic politics, it is

seen to be irrational as well as being an international threat.

The last written statements of the leading attacker against the

World Trade Center apparently contained Islamic themes. Religion

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was therefore a favorite explanation of what had happened, and the

stream of articles and television programs grew, claiming to lay bare

the Islamic roots of terrorism. The religious ideology behind terror-

ism that virtually everyone would come to hear about was jiha _ d, de-

scribed by university professors and journalists as the Islamic con-

cept of holy war against the infidel. The Anglo-American orientalist

Bernard Lewis popularized this view as a “clash of civilizations.” In

the first, conquering phase of Islamic history—wrote Lewis—the or-

ganized violence called jiha _ d was a culturally distinctive expression

of Muslim intolerance and arrogance towards non-Muslims. Subse-

quently, with the decline of Islamic civilization and the triumph of

the West, Islamist violence came to represent a fanatical resentment

against modernity. Many commentators who have followed this line

of thought have insisted that unless and until the Islamic world is

radically reformed, the extreme danger of terrorism in our so-called

age of jihadism will remain.

Yet another—more complicated—story can be told, one that

doesn’t lend itself so easily to the popular drama of a clash of civi-

lizations.

It is rarely noted in polemical accounts that for many centuries

after the early conquests the majority of the populations in coun-

tries with Muslim rulers remained Christian, active as such in many

spheres of public life, and that therefore public institutions and

practices in the early Muslim empire were largely continuous with

the Christian societies it incorporated. Indeed, in crucial respects,

the Islamic empire was the inheritor of Byzantium, and the histories

of both sides of the Mediterranean have always been intertwined

through the exchange of ideas, practices, and commodities. It is

true that in the earlier centuries Muslim armies penetrated Chris-

tian lands, but at first the European Christians did not regard the

battles between themselves and Muslims as expressions of a cos-

mic struggle between good and evil.4 It was only with the Crusades

that the papacy promoted the ideology of a unified Christendom at

war with a unified Islam. These were the first militant incursions of

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European Christians into Muslim lands, and some centuries later

they culminated in the great European empires of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries. The histories of Europe and Islam cannot

be completely separated.

The trouble with the clash of civilizations talk is not simply that

it ignores a rich history of mutual borrowings and continuous in-

teractions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is that the very

identity of a people as European (or Islamic) depends on the defini-

tion of a selective civilizational heritage of which most of the people

to whom it is attributed are in fact almost completely ignorant—a

heritage with which even individual members of the elite (the civi-

lization’s guardians) are only incompletely familiar. This legitimizes

the internal inequality of those embraced by the civilization as well

as their difference from other peoples. In other words, it is not sim-

ply that a heritage is invariably selective; it is that the people are

defined by the civilization that is supposed to be their heritage. And

yet, sociologically, the people who are said to belong to that civiliza-

tion are highly differentiated by class and region and gender.

All histories are selective, of course, but what they leave out and

how they interpret what they select are more interesting than the

mere fact of selection. Thus when polemicists speak of Christianity

as the essential core of Western civilization—or the origin of mod-

ern democracy—they do not have in mind the Orthodox churches

of Eastern Europe or the ancient Christian congregations of the

Middle East. And yet central doctrines of Christianity (the Trinity,

Atonement, etc.) as well as major institutions (monasticism) first

emerged there and not in Latin Christendom. This leaves it unclear

as to whether talk about Christianity as the essential midwife of our

modern secular world (“the point where, thanks to religion, a society

with no further need for religion arises,” as Marcel Gauchet puts it)5

is to be understood as a theological argument or a sociological one.

In Western histories of Islam, jiha _ d has been a central theme, al-

though in Islamic thought jiha _ d is not a central notion. Neverthe-

less, it has been compared by Western historians to the medieval

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Christian concept of the Crusade. The only difference, we are given

to understand, is that while the Crusade is no longer part of Western

modernity, jiha _ d is integral to an Islamic civilization that is largely

rooted in religion. But the differences are more complicated than

this civilizational contrast would suggest. To begin with, the theory

and practice of the Crusade were closely connected with the rise of

the papal monarchy (and afterward with the sacralization of territo-

rially based kingship), and there is no parallel story for the Muslim

world in the case of jiha _ d. The Arabic word for “holy,” muqaddas, is

never applied to “war,” harb, in the classical texts. And because there

has never been a centralized theological authority in the Islamic

world, there was never a consensus about the virtue of religious

warfare. Thus in the first two centuries of Islamic history jurists re-

siding close to the revered sites of Islam (in Mecca and Medina) had

a different view from those who lived in Damascus and Baghdad,

the successive imperial capitals. The former maintained that the

pursuit of jiha _ d (and even stationing oneself in military camps at

the frontier far from the original centers of Islam) was not an obliga-

tory duty for all Muslims, that there was merely a requirement that

some Muslims undertake the defense of Islamic territory, and that

in any case other religious acts had greater merit. In later centuries

the legal theory of jiha _ d came to be articulated in the context of a

distinction between da _ r ul-harb (the domain of war) and da

_ r ul-Isla

_ m

(the domain of peace) making jiha _ d appropriate only to the former.

Of course, this theory didn’t prevent Muslim rulers from waging

war on one another in the domain of peace or from making treaties

with Christian neighbors. Muslims fought Muslims, sometimes with

Christian allies. But legal categories other than the ones I have men-

tioned were employed to legitimize or condemn such conflicts.

Islamic debates on this subject, in which jurists belonging to the

different schools engaged one another, evolved in complex relation

to historical events. The legal ideas put forward in these arguments

cannot be reduced to the simple doctrinal binary (unremitting

distance from and hostility toward all non-Muslims, unqualified

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solidarity among and loyalty to all Muslims) that recent polemical

writing in the West has made familiar. From very early on, another

juridical category was established, called da _ r ul-‘ahd (the domain of

treaties), that allowed for peaceful trade and social intercourse be-

tween Muslim and non-Muslim territories. Most premodern Islamic

jurists ruled that it was fully permissible according to the sharı̄’a (the

religious law) for Muslims to live as subjects to a Christian prince (as

in Spain), so long as they were able to practice Islam openly. The Ot-

toman Empire alone made a succession of treaties with Christian

powers over the centuries that allowed European merchants to es-

tablish themselves within imperial lands with extraterritorial privi-

leges. (The social situation of ordinary non-Muslim subjects within

Muslim-majority countries varied at different times and in different

places, but in general it tended to worsen when outsiders attacked

Muslims.)6

In colonial times, a further reformulation of the doctrine of jiha _ d

took place: Muslims living under a non-Muslim government (and

therefore technically in da _ r ul-harb) were not to undertake jiha

_ d as

long as they were able to practice Islam and allowed to maintain

its central institutions. Nevertheless, Muslim rebels against colonial

regimes sometimes invoked jiha _ d, and in recent years militant Is-

lamists have raised jiha _ d to the level of an individual religious duty

(fard al-‘ayn). But such usages have not had the support of most Mus-

lim jurists, for the legal preconditions of jiha _ d—it has been argued

by Muslim scholars—must include both the presence of a genuine

threat to Islam and the likelihood of success in opposing it. Terms

like jiha _ d, da

_ r ul-harb and da

_ r ul-Isla

_ m are therefore not parts of a

transhistorical worldview; they belong to an elaborate political-

theological vocabulary in which jurists, men of religious learning,

and modernist reformers debated and polemicized in response to

varying circumstances.

In brief, there is no such thing as a clash of civilizations because

there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational

values correspond. On the contrary, the penetration of European

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economic, political, and ideological powers in the Middle East—es-

pecially since the beginning of the nineteenth century—led to many

practices being changed. European states conducted their strategic

and commercial rivalries throughout the lands of a weakened—and

eventually a broken-up—Ottoman Empire, building and controlling

transport systems (the Suez Canal being the most important), prom-

ising and establishing a national home in Palestine to the Jews, di-

viding up the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence,

making unequal treaties with sovereign Arab polities, exploiting pe-

troleum resources, and so forth. The United States has simply con-

tinued in this interventionist tradition with its own strategic and

economic interests in the Middle East and has invoked new justifi-

cations for intervention in the present.

My concern, I stress, is not to find culprits but to point to a few of

the complicated connections that give us a better picture of contem-

porary problems in the area that Europeans first called the Middle

East. Thus Saddam’s cruelties were certainly his own, but the fact

that the United States supplied him with vital military intelligence

in his aggressive war against Iran and the Europeans helped him

manufacture chemical weapons that he used against Iranians as

well as Iraqi Kurds complicates the question of culpability—if culpa-

bility is to be assigned. Although the French support for the Algerian

coup that suppressed the FIS after its electoral victories in 1991 did

not determine the subsequent massacres, their support is not un-

connected with what followed. Similarly, although the brutalities of

the Islamic Republic of Iran are not caused by Western states, the

regime’s emergence is not unrelated to the CIA coup (supported by

Britain) that inaugurated the dictatorship of the shah in the 1950s.

And again, Mubarak’s political repression and use of torture are not,

of course, dictated by U.S. imperialism (although the Bush admin-

istration has made use of this skill by proxy), but the war against

terror has certainly supplied him and other regimes in the region

with greater justification for cruelty. As George Packer so nicely put

it in his interesting essay on liberal internationalism: “How can the

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U.S. fight jihadism without supporting dictatorships?”7 In the case

of Iraq, however, the United States decided to destroy a dictatorship

and dismantle a state for its own reasons. No person who has fol-

lowed the ensuing events can doubt that the rise in jihadism and

the vicious sectarian killings are closely connected with the U.S. in-

vasion and occupation.

In a densely interconnected world—more so than ever before—it

is not sensible, in my view, to talk about the overriding need for re-

form in so-called Islamic civilization without at the same time re-

appraising the attitudes, institutions, and policies in Western coun-

tries. Clearly, if reform is needed in Muslim-majority countries—and

reform is certainly being demanded by their populations—it is

needed no less in Europe and the United States, not least in the many

ways that their policies impinge on the Middle East. Yet the idea of au-

tonomous civilizations is difficult to shake.

It is in this connection that one might turn to Richard Rorty’s

recent worry.8 Another major attack by terrorists in the West, he

fears, would probably spell the end of historical democracy there:

“The measures [Western] governments will consider it necessary

to impose are likely to bring about the end of many of the socio-

political institutions that emerged in Europe and North America in

the two centuries since the bourgeois revolutions.” The connection

between external violence and the sociopolitical institutions inter-

nal to Western democracy is, however, more complicated than Rorty

suggests here. Long ago, Max Weber observed that European forms

of freedom and democracy were made possible in part by the forc-

ible expansion of the West over many centuries into the non-Euro-

pean world—and in spite of the simultaneous growth of a standard-

izing capitalism. This led him to fear that the ending of the West’s

territorial expansion in which the drive for freedom was deeply

embedded would seriously compromise its democracy.9 Weber did

not, of course, foresee the spread of neoliberal capitalism around

the globe—largely through the activities of financial institutions in-

ternal to today’s Western democracy (the IMF, the World Bank, the

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U.S. Treasury)—nor its fearful consequences in growing economic

inequality and political instability compounded by global warming

(aggravated if not caused by disproportionate energy use in the rich,

industrially advanced countries). He could not anticipate the serious

population dislocation and political instability in the poorer south

that now encourage waves of illegal migration toward the north or

the alarm and compassion that this would generate in Euro-Ameri-

can countries, leading to repeated calls for further military interven-

tion in the south—to restore political order, to provide humanitarian

aid, to punish so-called rogue regimes, to secure energy resources.

At any rate, the implications of these tasks for Western democracy

are at least as serious as the activities of terrorists, and both together

inhabit a space of violence that is far more inclusive than Rorty’s

account suggests. If Weber’s account of Western democracy is at all

valid (and I am persuaded that it is), then what one finds is a shift

in which the violence that yesterday facilitated freedom at home is

today facilitating a creeping unfreedom. I stress that my concern

here is not to blame the West but to substitute the idea of a historical

space in which violence circulates, in which our wider aims are too

often undermined by our own actions, for the simple agentive model

that many commentators employ, in which rational democrats in

the West react defensively to destructive terrorists from the East.

Critics who argue that the language of the clash of civilizations fa-

cilitates the discourse on terrorism are right. But the question re-

mains: why is the term “terrorism” so prominent today? Before at-

tempting an answer to this question, it is necessary to ask another:

How is the difference between terrorism and war defined in con-

temporary public discourse? I begin by looking at some arguments

by an eminent political philosopher who has tried to answer this

question: Michael Walzer.10 His most recent book on the distinction

between kinds of political killing, Arguing About War, is addressed to

a wide, educated audience.

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Walzer takes it as unproblematic that war is a legal activity when

it fulfills certain conditions (e.g., self-defense or fulfilling a treaty

obligation toward a state that is attacked). He affirms existing in-

ternational law (the law of force) that legitimizes certain types of

violence and stigmatizes others—even as domestic law does within

national boundaries. This immediately makes it quite clear what

terrorism is for Walzer: terrorism is not only illegal and therefore

morally worse than killing in war; it is worse even than the crime

of murder. “This, then,” he writes, “is the peculiar evil of terrorism—

not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear

into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of

public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution.”11 For Walzer,

of course, it is not merely the deliberate creation of fear for political

purposes that defines terrorism; the killing of innocents is a neces-

sary (though not a sufficient) criterion. What Walzer condemns in

war is excess and in terrorism its essence. States kill, too, of course,

although they claim to kill only legitimately. But whether states, un-

like terrorists, kill only those who are legitimately killable is partly

what the rules of war address.

Walzer doesn’t approve of generals who win by ruthless means:

“In all times, and in conventional as well as political wars, we ought

to require of officers that they attend to the value of civilian lives,

and we should refuse to honor officers who fail to do that” (p. 31).

Yet, in common with many who have written on this topic, Walzer

pays no attention to a curious contradiction at the heart of the lib-

eral West’s culture of war to which I shall return later: on the one

hand, the state’s need to legitimize organized violence against a col-

lective enemy (including civilians) and, on the other, the humanitar-

ian desire to save human lives.12 To “attend to the value of civilian

lives” is more ambiguous than appears at first sight.

It is in this context that Walzer argues for the limited character of

the humanitarian principle, for overlooking it in the event of a su-

preme emergency: “There are moments when the rules can be and

perhaps have to be overridden. They have to be overridden precisely

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because they have not been suspended. And overriding the rules

leaves guilt behind, as a recognition of the enormity of what we

have done and a commitment not to make our actions into an easy

precedent for the future” (p. 34). Now Walzer does not say so, but

there is no reason why, in the war against terrorism, this permission

cannot cover the use of torture against presumed terrorist captives,

on the grounds that, however reprehensible it may be to liberal sen-

sibilities, the extraction of information from the enemy by breaking

humanitarian rules is vital to the conduct of such a war.

Like Bernard Lewis, Michael Walzer believes that the cause of ter-

rorism is the failure of Muslim countries to modernize, a failure that

explains the scapegoating of the United States and Israel by Muslim

immigrants in Western countries and also the spawning of highly

dangerous conspiracies among them: “The important battle against

terror is being waged right here,” he warns, “and in Britain and Ger-

many and Spain, and in other countries of the Arab and Islamic di-

aspora” (p. 138). Walzer does not discuss what kind of politics might

be called for in a time of global crisis and instead supports an exten-

sion of the battle against terror into immigrant communities as a

priority, making the liberal assumption (which I discuss in my sec-

ond chapter) that the problem of politics is radically separate from

the problem of violence and that it is the primary task of the state

to exclude violence from the arena of politics and confine it to the

domain of war.

But Walzer wants to reassure his readers. He proposes that a pub-

lic transgression in the domain of war should (will?) be accompanied

by a sense of remorse and that when this happens, the feelings of

guilt about what has been done may make it more difficult to repeat

that transgression in the future. In this context, guilt is regarded as

a sign of grace. The moral drama in which this redemption is played

out is familiar to existential philosophy. “A morally strong leader,”

writes Walzer, “is someone who understands why it is wrong to kill

the innocent and refuses to do so, refuses again and again, until the

heavens are about to fall. And then he becomes a moral criminal

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t e r r o r i s m

(like Albert Camus’s ‘just assassin’) who knows that he can’t do what

he has to do—and finally does” (p. 45). How should one understand

this tale? Certainly, the leader who has to act like a criminal a sec-

ond time may do so with a bad conscience, and in greater anguish

than before. That is what makes him a “morally strong” leader. If he

killed the innocent without a flicker of conscience, he would simply

be an immoral criminal. Now, for a Christian who kills unjustly in

war, there is the theory of atonement that presupposes a life after

death; for a subject who kills unjustly in peace, there is the theory

of punishment that presupposes state law. When Walzer speaks of

guilt in the context of “a morally strong leader” at war, it is unlikely

that he has either of these theories in mind. Guilt here is not a legal

judgment but a sensibility.

The morally strong leader can turn, when necessary, to what

Walzer calls “emergency ethics.” “This is the essential feature

of emergency ethics: that we recognize at the same time the evil

we oppose and the evil we do, and that we set ourselves, so far as

possible, against both” (p. 49). What exactly Walzer intends by the

phrase “so far as possible” is not clear. Perhaps it is a vague sense

that in a war against an unjust enemy, one cannot condemn the

use of any available weapon as strongly as one condemns the evil

that confronts one without risking a wrong choice. But if the phrase

“as far as possible” is intended to nudge the just warrior in the right

direction, isn’t Walzer’s claim about the equal rejection of two evils

brought into question? If the moral scruple he endorses must never

be strong enough to inhibit successfully the use of evil means when

necessary, is there any need for it to be present at all?

What is it precisely that allows the leaders of a political commu-

nity to confront a potential evil by doing evil? According to Walzer,

it is the protection of the community itself. “Not, I want to stress, of

the state,” he observes, “the state is nothing more than an instru-

ment of the community, a particular structure for organizing collec-

tive action that can always be replaced by some other structure. The

political community (the community of faith too) can’t be similarly

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t e r r o r i s m

replaced. It consists of men, women, and children living in a cer-

tain way, its replacement would require either the elimination of

the people or the coercive transformation of their way of life. Neither of

these actions is morally acceptable” (p. 49, my emphasis). In those

situations, says Walzer, we may act immorally—but “only at the last

minute and under absolute necessity” (p. 50). I’ll return shortly to

this idea, but first I want to ask whether the license to kill can be

separated so casually from the state. The modern state is not, after

all, simply an instrument of the community. It is an autonomous

structure that regulates, represents, and protects a community of

citizens. The state authorizes the killing of human beings, demands

the ultimate sacrifice of its citizens when they are at war. It seeks to

maintain the correct demographic character and the desired territo-

rial extent for the community that is its object.

Walzer’s virtual dismissal of the state at this point is curious be-

cause his overall argument is essentially state-oriented. Thus he in-

sists that the militant who carries out acts of terror against civilians

is never faced by the “last resort” and he is therefore not coerced. It

is precisely a quality of the terrorist that he moves precipitately to

death dealing as a political means. “It is not so easy to reach the ‘last

resort,’ ” says Walzer. “To get there one must indeed try everything

(which is a lot of things) and not just once. . . Politics is the art of

repetition” (p. 53). But then why doesn’t this observation apply to

the state that launches a war? In the case of war, Walzer is reluctant

to apply the stringent conditions he imposes on the militant. He

pleads that by demanding that war be declared only as a last resort,

one is in effect making it impossible to declare war, because “we can

never reach lastness, or we can never know that we have reached it.

There is always something else to do: another diplomatic note, an-

other United Nations resolution, another meeting” (p. 88). Walzer is

right. But how does this plea for decisiveness on the part of the state

on the verge of war relate to his strictures against terrorist violence

on the grounds that the would-be terrorist can never claim to have

reached the limit? Is it plausible to assume—as Walzer evidently

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does—that the possibility of liberal politics is always a given? Thus

the recently elected Hamas government in occupied Palestine will

not be allowed by the United States, Israel, and the European Union

to practice “the art of repetition,” and the reason given for this is not

that Hamas does not recognize democratic politics but that it does

not recognize Israel.

Unlike Walzer, I am not interested here in the question, “When

are particular acts of violence to be condemned as evil, and what are

the moral limits to justified counterviolence?” I am trying to think

instead about the following question: “What does the adoption of

particular definitions of death dealing do to military conduct in the

world?” For example, if state killing is authorized on the basis of

due proportionality and military necessity (as humanitarian law re-

quires of conduct in war), and if the question of what is proportional

or necessary cannot be determined without regard to overall war

aims as well as military strategy (there are always war aims in every

war), every kind of forceful means can be—and is—used in war on

that basis, including the destruction of civilians and the terrorizing

of entire populations.

International law specialist David Kennedy has written a search-

ing study of the ways in which humanitarian policy making blends

into the strategic logic of warfare—although he remains, in the end,

surprisingly optimistic. At one point, speaking of state violence, he

observes:

We can easily call to mind historical examples of “wanton violence”

in war. And of course they have sometimes been sanctioned by mili-

tary leadership. But rare is the commander who orders “unnecessary”

“wanton violence” “disproportional” to any legitimate military objec-

tive. Far more often the tactics employed by other forces will seem ex-

cessive. The vocabulary in which this charge is made, and defended,

is the vocabulary of humanitarian law. Indeed, whatever tactics seem

extreme—carpet bombing, siege, nuclear first use, suicide bomb-

ing, terrorizing the civilian population—the condemnation and the

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t e r r o r i s m

defense seem to converge on the vocabulary of necessity, proportion-

ality, and so forth. Think of Hiroshima.13

Kennedy is right about the humanitarian vocabulary of necessity,

proportionality, and humanity that is now commonly used in ar-

guments over particular events in war in the attempt to subject

military conduct to transcendent rules. But it is worth bearing in

mind that terrorists themselves often talk about what they do in

the language of necessity and humanity. The Red Brigades in 1970s

Italy, for example, mirrored the judicial authority of the state and

challenged its monopoly of violence, trying kidnapped victims for

crimes against the people and then executing them. Such acts not

only transcend the limits of (state) law in the name of revolution-

ary justice, they do so by explicitly invoking a wider humanity. Thus

when the Italian prime minister was kidnapped and killed, the inci-

dent was described by a Red Brigade ideologist as “the highest act of

humanity possible in this class-divided society”14 and therefore as

necessary. The ruthlessness of terrorists often matches the effects

achieved in the strategic strikes made by state armies, even when

the latter use the language of humanitarian law in which a liberat-

ing or self-defensive purpose can be claimed.

Pointing out that the new law of force is a field of argument rather

than a set of absolute rules (e.g., civilians must not be harmed), Ken-

nedy suggests that the consequent flexibility makes for an advance

on the previous position. I would suggest, however, that the sense

that this constitutes an advance may be connected to the increased

importance given to the sovereignty of individual conscience in this

matter. Law is always a matter of argument because it requires in-

terpretation, but here emphasis is placed not so much on what the

military commander does (which is comparatively easy to determine

in relation to absolute rules) but on what he has judged necessary and

then chosen to do, an interpretive process that lies at the heart of

modern ethics. And yet what matters primarily here is not a vocabu-

lary of moral argument or the conscience of the virtuous warrior but

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t e r r o r i s m

the existence of an independent institutional structure that has the

ability to set a legal process into motion and apply its legal verdict in

relation to conduct in war regardless of who is to be judged. But it is

a banal fact that powerful states are never held accountable to such

institutions, that only the weak and the defeated can be convicted

of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Walzer is adamant that, unlike the aerial bombing of German ci-

vilians during World War II, suicide bombing is terrorism and that,

as terrorism, it is an evil in need not of analysis and understanding

but of moral condemnation and firm practical response. Particular

wars may be unjustly declared, wars may sometimes use immoral

means and be concluded in a vindictive way, but wars as such are

not in principle immoral. Terrorism, on the other hand, is always

and in principle evil. Thus the definition of war and terrorism as op-

posites makes it possible to speak of a war on terror and to assume

that the state can conduct itself freely toward the terrorist precisely

because he does not respect the law.

Walzer’s fundamental concern throughout his book is to artic-

ulate and clarify his moral intuitions rather than to question and

analyze them. Thus he believes that terrorist operations in Israel are

a product of evil (exactly like those of al-Qaeda against the West)

because they are part of the Palestinian war to destroy a sovereign

political community. The assaults of the Israeli army and airforce

in the West Bank and Gaza are therefore to be seen as preemptive

self-defense and thus in principle as just war. Walzer’s account of

the Palestine/Israel conflict provides, I think, a central example of

how some liberal intellectuals conceive of the difference between

war and terrorism. The century-long history of the conflict (expan-

sion on the one side, dispossession on the other) is set aside, and at-

tention is directed instead at present feelings. “For all their military

strength, Israelis feel terribly vulnerable” (p. 108), Walzer observes,

whereas “for the Palestinians, the years of occupation have been [felt

as] years of disgrace” (p. 107). Walzer doesn’t hesitate to convey his

own feelings about the settlements that he thinks make peace with

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t e r r o r i s m

Palestinians difficult: “the [Jewish] settler movement is the function-

al equivalent of the [Palestinian] terrorist organizations. I hasten to

add that it is not the moral equivalent. The settlers are not murderers,

even if there are a number of terrorists among them” (p. 119, italics

in original). The haste and emphasis with which this point is made

reveals some of the feelings behind the notion of terrorism: proud

identification with a flourishing political community—a liberal de-

mocracy—and with its military and economic successes and a fear

for its safety. What this rhetorical move does, of course, is to pro-

hibit the use of the appellation “terrorist” for the Israeli settlers and

to invest the Israeli army with the aura of defenders engaged in a

just war against Palestinian terrorists.

This is made formally explicit in Walzer’s classification of the

conflict into four concurrent wars: “The first is a Palestinian war to

destroy the state of Israel. The second is a Palestinian war to create

an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the

West Bank and Gaza. The third is an Israeli war for the security of

Israel within the 1967 borders. The fourth is an Israeli war for Great-

er Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories” (p. 113).

This simple classification presents readers with a balance between

the two sides—terrorists/extremists on one side and protagonists of

just war on the other—a political and moral equivalence between

occupier and occupied. One can recount the story of conflict in a

different way, however: there is a single unequal struggle (not four

wars) stretching over at least sixty years in which each side has pur-

sued different strategies and rhetoric at different times that have

not met with equal success. Thus the distinction between the third

“war” (for the settlements) and the fourth (for the security of Israel)

is not as clear-cut as Walzer’s classification suggests, because, on

the one hand, virtually no significant Israeli political party is pre-

pared to return conquered East Jerusalem and all its surrounding

settlements and, on the other hand, arguments for Israel’s security

are closely bound up with claims to large parts of occupied Pales-

tine, which accounts for the widespread popularity in Israel of what

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t e r r o r i s m

is known there as “disengagement”—whose visible symbol is the

wall. It is not clear how far disengagement is related to a sense of

desperation and how far to a desire not to be seen to be ruling over a

non-Jewish majority, but it has certainly been successful in isolating

the Palestinian population geographically and politically.

What is evident is that the feeling of vulnerability among Israelis

and their supporters is not equivalent to the objective gains (territo-

rial, military, economic, cultural, etc.) that the Jews have made in Pal-

estine over a century. By this, I don’t mean to say that Israeli feelings

should be dismissed or that they are insignificant but simply that

the two are literally incomparable. Indeed, the reality of such feel-

ings, their importance, must be recognized. How that feeling of vul-

nerability has been achieved is, of course, another matter, because it

is rooted not in an evaluation of contemporary Palestinian power but

in a collective trauma resulting from genocide—perpetrated against

Jews in Europe by European Christians. (But is there such a thing as

collective trauma? Or is there really only the traumatized condition

of several individuals represented down the generations as the expe-

rience of a unified nation?)15 It is also perhaps rooted in a suppressed

sense of guilt on the part of many liberal Israelis at the destruction

of Palestinian society wrought by the establishment of a Jewish state,

even if they justified this as historically necessary. After all, Walzer

himself proposed that when liberals act immorally in the conduct

of collective violence against enemies, this “leaves guilt behind, as

a recognition of the enormity of what we have done and a commit-

ment not to make our actions into an easy precedent for the future.”

What he does not say, of course, is that the guilt may be accompa-

nied by deep resentment against those whom one has wronged.

At any rate, it is evident that Walzer does not examine the de-

tailed interconnections between power and the emotions but the

so-called rational principles by which present violence should be

morally judged. He is right: most settlers are not murderers. But

from a Palestinian perspective their existence as settlers isn’t inde-

pendent of the Israeli government’s legal, administrative and mili-

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t e r r o r i s m

tary apparatuses, and that connection is what enables “the coercive

transformation” of the Palestinian “way of life.” I noted above that,

according to Walzer, a fatal threat to political community, whether

by ethnic cleansing or by “the coercive transformation of their way

of life,” could be the ground for engaging in otherwise morally unac-

ceptable violence. Walzer, alas, fails to relate this ground for Pales-

tinian militancy to his own argument.

In a review of the Spielberg film Munich published recently, Henry

Siegman tries to do what Walzer fails to do. He argues that the

bombings by Palestinian terrorists should be compared not with

the retaliatory strikes by the IDF but with “how Israelis acted dur-

ing their struggle for independence and statehood.” Drawing on the

archival researches of the Israeli historian Benny Morris,16 Siegman

cites the widespread massacres of Palestinian civilians perpetrated

by the Irgun in the 1930s and by the IDF in 1948. “Of course,” writes

Siegman, “Israel’s resort to ethnic cleansing and the massacre of ci-

vilians in its War of Independence does not confer any legitimacy

on the morally indefensible atrocities committed by terrorists in the

Palestinians’ ongoing struggle for their independence,” but—he goes

on—it does expose the double standard of many commentators on

the subject.17 My reason for citing Siegman here is not polemical,

however. It is not his call for even-handedness that interests me but

his distinction between the violence integral to the founding of a

political community and the violence used to defend and extend

it—as in the military assaults by the IDF against Palestinians. I will

pursue later the point that at a profound level the familiar separa-

tion between permissible and impermissible violence is more prob-

lematic than it appears at first sight.

So, war is a legally sanctioned concept, and the hateful killing

perpetrated by unlicensed militants is not. And yet soldiers are

taught to hate the enemy they are required to kill; the fact of kill-

ing being legally sanctioned is an abstract irrelevance. In this re-

gard, soldiers are no different from terrorists. Of course, the latter

are often militarily incompetent, not to say politically infantile, but

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t e r r o r i s m

that’s not what is held against terrorism by state apologists, for the

use of terror as such is not always inept: think of the firebombing

of German and Japanese cities in World War II—in which hundreds

of thousands of civilian men, women, and children were terrified

and slaughtered—that accomplished exactly what it was designed

to do.18 What I want to stress is simply this: the sincerity of the ter-

rorist’s conscience, of the excuses he makes, is of no significance in

the categorization of his action; the military commander’s sincere

conscience, on the other hand, may be crucial to the difference be-

tween an unfortunate necessity and a war crime.19 That is why the

unresolved argument about the World War II strikes against civil-

ian targets tends to revolve around the question of its necessity—

around whether without them more innocents would have perished

in a war against an unjust and ruthless enemy.

So the word “terrorism” not only signifies culpability under state

law but also, as Walzer’s disquisition indicates, feelings of vulner-

ability: a terrorist is someone who creates a sense of fear and inse-

curity among a civilian population for political purposes. As such,

the term and its cognates are certainly valid. My argument, however,

is directed against thinking of terrorism simply as an illegal and

immoral form of violence and advocates an examination of what

the discourse of terror—and the perpetration of terror—does in the

world of power.

Although war is a defined activity in international law, an activity

that has a formal cause and a formal conclusion, this is clearly not

to be confused with the beginning and end of organized killing by

the state. The state’s violence against civilians may precede and suc-

ceed war in the formal sense—especially in a war of independence

(by whose unauthorized use of terror a sovereign state is founded)

or in a “small war” (against so-called uncivilized populations, in

which terror may be used precisely because they lack a sovereign

state). Such violence is inseparable from the primary duty and the

absolute right of the nation-state (or would-be nation-state) to de-

fend, or achieve, or deny the claim of others to sovereignty. But as

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t e r r o r i s m

a specific legal category, “terrorism” is difficult to define because in

doing so complicated political choices have to be made regarding the

limits to established state authority and the rights of popular move-

ments that challenge state authority. It was for this reason that the

International Criminal Court rejected pressure by India, Turkey, and

Sri Lanka to include terrorist acts as punishable offenses.20

In contrast, terrorism experts who are employed by the state, or

would like to offer their services to it, propose that the definition of

terrorism is an easy matter having nothing to do with politics. “Ter-

rorism,” writes one such expert, “is a generalized construct derived

from our concepts of morality, law, and the rules of war, whereas

actual terrorists are shaped by culture, ideology, and politics—spe-

cific inchoate factors and notions that motivate diverse actions.”21

In other words, the discourse of terrorism is dependent on a con-

structed object (not an imaginary object) about which information

can be collected.

Every war requires the making of human killing machines, and

the question of its legality tends to distract attention from this fact.

“Basic training itself was often extremely brutal, even for conscript-

ed recruits,” writes Joanna Bourke.

The most notorious training regimes were those conducted by the

U.S. Marine Corps, but even in the other branches of the armed forc-

es, violence was a common component of military training. In all

these training programmes, the fundamental process was the same:

individuals had to be broken down to be rebuilt into efficient fight-

ing men. The basic tenets included depersonalization, uniforms, lack

of privacy, forced social relationships, tight schedules, lack of sleep,

disorientation followed by rites of reorganization according to mili-

tary codes, arbitrary rules, and strict punishment. These methods of

brutalization were similar to those carried out in regimes where men

were taught to torture prisoners: the difference resided in the degree

of violence involved, not its nature.22

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The torture of prisoners is integral to the violence that the soldier in

training learns. The practice of terror thus produces efficient soldiers

and is an important part of the conduct of war, in the battlefield as

well as in interrogation centers where vital information is obtained.

The discourse of terror enables a redefinition of the space of vio-

lence in which bold intervention and rearrangement of everyday re-

lations can take place and be governed in relation to terror,23 a space

that presupposes new knowledges and practices. “Before the terror-

ist attacks of 9/11, there was no field called ‘homeland security,’ ”

writes Richard Falkenrath.

Today, homeland security is a multibillion-dollar enterprise and the

motivating force behind countless reforms across dozens of hereto-

fore separate government activities. The need for this enterprise is

not tied to the fate of al-Qaida or any other particular terrorist group;

instead, it derives from the structural—and hence, for all intents and

purposes, permanent—vulnerability of free and open societies to

catastrophic terrorist attacks. This vulnerability existed before 9/11

and will continue to exist indefinitely. . . . Homeland security has no

epistemic community to speak of, but needs one. Men and women

from dozens of different disciplines—regional experts, terrorism ana-

lysts, law enforcement officials, intelligence officers, privacy special-

ists, diplomats, military officers, immigration specialists, customs

inspectors, specific industry experts, regulatory lawyers, doctors and

epidemiologists, research scientists, chemists, nuclear physicists, in-

formation technologists, emergency managers, firefighters, commu-

nications specialists, and politicians, to name a few—are currently in-

volved in homeland security, but it is not enough merely to aggregate

specialists. . . . Only a team of individuals with genuine crosscutting

knowledge and experience will be able to understand the complex-

ity of any particular homeland security challenge, devise an efficient

and viable strategy for dealing with the problem, and implement this

strategy effectively.24

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The new epistemic community being called for is necessary to

name and deal with what is claimed to be a new object in the world

of liberal democracy—terror. Most of the activities of those already

involved in countering terror may appear quite familiar: mass sur-

veillance, individualized interrogation, transporting suspects to

domestic and foreign torture centers, targeted assassinations, and

military invasions on the grounds of preemptive self-defense. And

yet the fact that a new epistemological object can be constructed

through a war on terror is something new.

It is important to my argument that these actions not be seen

as simple abuses of the executive branch, partly because the judi-

ciary and the legislature can cooperate actively with the latter to

uphold the rule of law in an overarching national endeavor and also

because the constitutional scope of executive powers is subject to

legal interpretation and political contestation.25 In proposing that

the space of violence enables the state in its triple aspect to extend

its presence, I do not want to oppose the state to a passive civil so-

ciety. It is not only the executive branch that occupies this space.

All constitutional states rest on a space of violence that they call

legitimate. In a liberal democracy, all citizens and the government

that represents them are bound together by mutual obligations, and

the actions of the duly elected government are the actions of all its

citizens. When the government acts against suspected terrorists

and inferior military opponents, everyone is (rightly or wrongly) in-

volved in the space of violence. There may be criticism by particular

citizens of the government’s actions on moral or legal grounds, but

until these are conceded constitutionally by the government, all citi-

zens remain bound to the space of violence that its representative

government inhabits.

Terror is also integral to modern subjectivities that fear not only the

disruption of orderly life but also and especially the end of demo-

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t e r r o r i s m

cratic institutions under the assault of barbarians, whether immi-

grants or terrorists.

Acts of war are not disturbing to most civilians when the human

damage perpetrated by their armies occurs abroad. The Allied inva-

sion of Nazi Germany in World War II was applauded by civilians

at home. Terrorist acts, on the other hand, create anxiety because

they occur at home. Talk of terrorism and the need to defend one-

self against it can have a similar effect. When terrorists are seen

as people engaged in conspiracies, one is induced to look for signs

that point to something hidden (their motives are unexpressed).26

How might these be found? Alternatively, how can one do a proper

reading of signs to discover the threats posed by secret motives?

In the United States, the Patriot Act, passed to deal with terrorists,

provides the practical framework for undertaking such readings. Ac-

cording to many critics, the Patriot Act is an attack on constitutional

rights.27 But this kind of complaint rarely attends to the working

of power/knowledge in the modern state. The project of “Defending

America” calls for techniques aimed at discovering the objects that

threaten.28 The interrogation center is not merely a source of infor-

mation and a place where abuse may happen. It is the site where a

particular kind of identity is typified and dealt with and where the

secrets of a danger are laid bare in the war against terror, which is a

permanent state.

It has been widely reported that viewing the famous images of

the towers under attack on September 11 was traumatic for Ameri-

cans and that Americans have been understandably anxious ever

since. Anxiety regarding the real motives of people (especially anxi-

ety in Euro-America about Middle Easterners who are in process of

assimilating Western culture) rests on the polysemy of signs. Roland

Barthes once claimed that “traumatic images are bound up with an

uncertainty (an anxiety) concerning the meaning of objects or atti-

tudes. Hence in every society various techniques are developed [that

are] intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as

to counter the terror of uncertain signs.”29 But Barthes did not note

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t e r r o r i s m

that authority seeks sometimes to eliminate uncertainty in signs,

at other times to create it. Had he done so, he might have acknowl-

edged that uncertain signs do not in themselves cause anxiety or

terror—it is suspicion about their meaning that may do so. To take

people in familiar situations innocently is to live without suspicion.

It is to read people literally, to take their behavior as unproblematic,

as harmless. To do a literal reading of texts (of what people say and

do in their ordinary life) is not, of course, to repudiate figurative lan-

guage; it is to be so familiar with the relevant grammar that one is

unconcerned with the need to fix meaning. On the other hand, to

ask suspiciously about the real meaning of the verbal and behavior-

al signs displayed by people one knows is to enter into the world of

symbolic interpretation. And while hermeneutics doesn’t necessar-

ily spring from hostile suspicion, it always presupposes that what

appears on the surface is not the truth and seeks to control what lies

beneath. Through interpretation, it converts absences into signs.

A form of official hermeneutics—an official suspicion about

meaning—has flourished in the United States since September 11 as

part of the war against terror: namely, the interrogation of captured

Muslims by U.S. officials. Here fear, uncertainty, and the ambiguity

of signs are part of the space of violence to which I referred above.

More than that, they are its precondition, for they allow state power

to penetrate the density of ordinary life.

Much has been written about the fact that terrorism feeds off

the disclosure of torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment

in U.S. detention centers, that torture is illegal, immoral, and inef-

ficient. Less attention has been paid to the role the idea of torture

plays in the distinction between war and terrorism. For decades, the

CIA has produced and distributed interrogation manuals in Latin

America to personnel involved in counterinsurgency. Take, for ex-

ample, the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983.30 In re-

sponse to criticisms of abuse, it carefully distinguished noncoercive

from coercive methods. It now warns against using the latter and

then describes the former in detail. The manual’s overall concern is

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t e r r o r i s m

to teach interrogators ways in which the subject’s “internal motiva-

tional strength” can be “exhausted” so that he/she is made to yield

the necessary information.31 “Inwardness” is assumed, cultivated,

and targeted.32 One has to know the subject’s type well enough to

read the signs that are useful for the regulation of organized vio-

lence—one’s own and that of the enemy. One begins with a human

body having an appropriate appearance and origin: racial, sexual,

and religious categories are what give the interrogator his starting

signs. But he has to go beyond the words spoken by the subject to

other signs—mode of speech, gesture, posture, etc.—that indicate

hidden meanings. How should the interrogator draw out these

meanings given the constraints of humanitarian law?

The humanitarian discourse that denounces unnecessary suffer-

ing rests on assumptions both of what is unnecessary and of what

constitutes suffering. In effect, it invites interrogators to devise tech-

niques in which the suffering of detained subjects is necessary—

that is, techniques for getting prisoners to yield actionable informa-

tion efficiently. “Efficiency” is always contextual, and it presupposes

attention to detail: Should the techniques here be mental or physi-

cal? How intense or light should they be? What if they leave body

marks or lead to trauma—does either matter, and, if so, to whom?

These uncertainties parallel those that the military commander in

the field of battle faces and in relation to which he must make his

strategic judgments. The prisoner’s necessary suffering (which may

be glossed as “not really cruel treatment”) is directed at crippling his

motivational strength. Techniques in the conduct of the war against

terror—whether in the interrogation center or in the field of battle—

require the redefinition of “necessary violence.” Despite humanitar-

ian principles that forbid torture, however, the use of painful meth-

ods remains important. Whether the systematic torture of captives

is always inefficient is a topic of considerable debate in the liberal

media, but what it certainly does do is produce two categories of

human being: torturables and nontorturables.

3 3

t e r r o r i s m

These paired notions first appeared in Graham Greene’s novel Our

Man in Havana (1958), set in prerevolutionary Cuba. In a dialogue be-

tween Segura, the local chief of police, and Wormold, a British Secret

Service agent, the former refers casually to certain persons not be-

longing to the “torturable class.” Who does? asks Wormold. “The poor

in my own country, in any Latin American country,” replies Segura.

The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare

states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police

can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and

the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandi-

navia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more

torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. . . One

reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they

don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong

people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody

cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas,

but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your coun-

try a chaffeur had slept with a peeress.

That, interrupts Wormwold, doesn’t shock us any longer. To which

Segura responds: “It is a great danger for everyone when what is

shocking changes.”33 It is precisely such a shift in what is shocking,

when the U.S administration readily resorts to torture in contraven-

tion of the Geneva Convention and human rights law, that seems

evident today. But one should note that the torture of prisoners in

Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq (as well as the outsourcing of

torture to the Egyptian, Syrian, and Pakistani regimes) affects tor-

turables only. More remarkable than the use of torture by a U.S.

regime that is said to be undermining the rule of law in several

respects is the absence of any sustained public outrage in the demo-

cratic societies of the West. The liberal sensibility is more discrimi-

nating in this matter than one may have thought. In a war against

barbarians, the use of cruelty has always been more acceptable than

3 4

t e r r o r i s m

it has been against civilized enemy populations. And, even today,

there is no general sense of horror (as I elaborate that term in my

final chapter) at the numerous atrocities committed or condoned by

democratic governments. So perhaps there hasn’t been a shift after

all in popular Western notions of what is shocking.

The sensitivity to humanist criticism that is directed at interro-

gation procedures is also found in the conduct of war. The modern

Western army is concerned with engaging efficiently with danger-

ous, because underdeveloped, peoples, in ways that are at once

ruthless and humane, in which brutal attack may become a civi-

lizing sign. Nineteenth-century Europeans typically saw the world

divided into civilized and uncivilized nations, in which the former

should stand as a moral light for the latter. But this worked the other

way, too: it was held that the behavior of civilized nations should

not fall to the level of the uncivilized. Hence Gustave Moynier, one

of the founders of the Red Cross, could speak explicitly about the

organization’s “evangelical morality” in its effort to “civilize” Euro-

pean warfare. But this idea of achieving humane standards logically

required a contrast: “Compassion,” he wrote, “is unknown among

savage tribes that practice cannibalism. . . . It is said that even their

language doesn’t have the words to express the idea, so alien is it to

them. Savage peoples . . . make [war] to excess and give in without

a thought to their brutal instincts, whereas civilized nations, seek-

ing to humanize it, even admit that everything that happens is not

[morally] allowable.”34 Civilized nations, being refined in manners

and restrained by morality and law, are quite unlike the uncivilized.

They should not fight as savages do, in brutal and terrorizing ways.

But the savage was not merely an abstraction for purposes of log-

ical contrast; he was someone toward whom one could and should

behave appropriately in war. Writing in 1927, U.S. Army captain El-

bridge Colby noted: “The real essence of the matter is that devasta-

tion and annihilation is the principal method of warfare that sav-

age tribes know. Excessive humanitarian ideas should not prevent

harshness against those who use harsh methods, for in being over-

3 5

t e r r o r i s m

kind to one’s enemies, a commander is simply being unkind to his

own people.”35 Captain Colby belongs to a dominant line of thinking

and practice in Western colonial warfare. To him as to others, it is

self-evident that since uncivilized opponents do not abide by inter-

national law, they cannot be protected by it; today, of course, this is

said about those seen as, or suspected of being, terrorists.36

For many today, this seems to be vindicated by the claim that

“terrorism has become bloodier,” as it perpetrates “large-scale indis-

criminate violence.”37 At the same time, it is claimed that in this war

against an uncivilized opponent, the use of increasingly sophisti-

cated information technology has allowed the military to identify

its targets more accurately and thus to minimize collateral dam-

age. What is certain is that by fighting the enemy at a distance, it

has been able to minimize its own casualties. Unchallengeable air

supremacy and precision weaponry make virtual impunity of the

pilot possible. Furthermore, domestic public opinion in liberal de-

mocracies is critical of excessive war casualties in its armies. This

humanitarian concern means that soldiers need no longer go to war

expecting to die but only to kill. In itself, this destabilizes the con-

ventional understanding of war as an activity in which human dying

and killing are exchanged. The psychological effect of this unequal

killing is mitigated by the fact that there is a long-standing tradi-

tion of fighting against militarily and ethnically inferior peoples in

which it is proper that the latter die in much larger numbers. Since

they do not value human life as the civilized do, they will expose

themselves to greater risks, even undertake suicidal operations, and

therefore suffer more casualties.

In fact, little attention has been paid in the growing literature on

new military technologies and strategies to the continuities of the

new wars with earlier colonial wars that were often called “small

wars.” In them, Euro-American soldiers discovered that the oppor-

tunities for killing were much greater than the risks of dying in bat-

tle and that “uncivilized” enemies were not entitled to be treated

with the same restraint as “civilized” ones. A notable exception to

3 6

t e r r o r i s m

the contemporary literature on new wars is Max Boot’s The Savage

Wars of Peace,38 which argues that “small wars” have been—and still

are—essential to the spread of freedom, progress, and peace. There-

fore, insofar as military interventions by Western powers continue

this colonial tradition, it should be evident that their primary aim is

not the protection of life as such but the construction and encour-

agement of specific kinds of human subjects and the outlawing of

all others.39

Despite the civilizing project of many new wars, their conduct

produces contradictory results. Thus, in deference to humanitarian

law, the military of a liberal state—unlike the terrorist—does not

normally target civilians, unless it is compelled to do so, but overrid-

ing concern for its own military casualties (again, partly in response

to humanitarian sensitivities) means it must choose a strategy in

which more enemy civilians die. So, too, in the matter of dual-use

targets. Because of military necessity, the military must inevitably

target facilities such as electrical power plants that are crucial to the

enemy’s military but also to its civilians. The destruction of electric-

ity-generating centers cripples water purification plants, hospitals,

and so on, causing widespread death and disease among the civil-

ian population. One interesting consequence of this contradiction

(the killing of noncombatants that results from the new doctrine of

striving for zero military losses as well as from bombing dual-use

targets) is that motive becomes crucial to the distinction between

collateral damage and war crimes.40

The just modern soldier incurs guilt when he kills innocent peo-

ple; the terrorist does not. Or so modern theorists of just war tell

us. Thus, in a recent article defending the Israeli invasion first of

Gaza and then of Lebanon, Walzer writes: “When Palestinian mili-

tants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves

responsible—and no one else is—for the civilian deaths caused by

Israeli counterfire.”41 The political theologian Oliver O’Donovan has

explained why state armies are morally superior by making a dis-

tinction between what he calls terrorism and insurgency in terms

3 �

t e r r o r i s m

of motive: “The terrorist makes his point by slaughtering the inno-

cent intentionally; the insurgent makes his by forcing his opponent

to slaughter the innocent unintentionally.”42 This is precisely Walz-

er’s point. Zbigniew Brzezinski, however, has recently commented

on this matter by reference to the most recent Israeli invasion of

Lebanon: “I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis

are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect—maybe not in

intent—the killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people,

400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbol-

lah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent

to the scale of the collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the

hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate.”43 Walzer,

however, insists that there may be good reasons (“prudential as well

as moral”) for this kind of intimidation: “Reducing the quality of life

in Gaza, where it is already low, is intended to put pressure on who-

ever is politically responsible for the inhabitants of Gaza—and then

these responsible people, it is hoped, will take action against the

shadowy forces attacking Israel. The same logic has been applied

in Lebanon, where the forces are not so shadowy.”44 Punishing civil-

ians may be the only way to obtain results—given, of course, that an

appropriate sense of guilt accompanies the action, because unlike

barbarians civilized nations know what compassion is.

The moral advantage O’Donovan and Walzer give state armies

over insurgents is evident. If the motive of military commanders is

complex (they kill noncombatants but wouldn’t if they didn’t have

to), however, couldn’t the same be said of the terrorist whose killing

of civilians is at once deliberate and yet coerced? He has reached the

limit; he has no other option left—or so he claims, when he argues

that in order to try to prevent “the coercive transformation of [his

people’s] way of life,” he must carry out immoral killings. If he kills

enough civilians (so he reasons), perhaps those who are politically

responsible will respond in the desired way.

So: it is not cruelty that matters in the distinction between ter-

rorists and armies at war, still less the threat each poses to entire

3 �

t e r r o r i s m

ways of life, but their civilizational status. What is really at stake is

not a clash of civilizations (a conflict between two incompatible sets

of values) but the fight of civilization against the uncivilized. In that

fight, all civilized rules may be set aside. Captain Colby observes of

war with savage enemies: “If a few ‘non-combatants’ . . . are killed,

the loss of life is probably far less than might have been sustained

in prolonged operations of a more polite character. The inhuman act

thus becomes actually humane, for it shortens the conflict and prevents the

shedding of more excessive quantities of blood.”45

Clearly, Colby thinks the savage is incapable of such acts of hu-

manity, and he is probably right. But what is especially intriguing is

the ingenuity of liberal discourse in rendering inhuman acts humane.

This is certainly something that savage discourse cannot achieve.

2s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m i a r g u e d i n the previous chapter that the categories “war” and

“terrorism” are constituted according to different logical criteria, the

one taking its primary sense from the question of legality and the

other from feelings of vulnerability and fear of social disorder, and

that they are not therefore mutually exclusive. It is not correct to say,

as Walzer does, that “the peculiar evil of terrorism [is] not only the

killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday

life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces,

the endless coerciveness of precaution” because war, whether just

or unjust, does that, too. I also suggested that the brutality of a state

army and of a terrorist group have much in common, that although

in a formal sense state armies are subject to humanitarian law, this

does not constitute as much of an obstacle to deliberate cruelty as

might appear at first sight. To the extent that it is an obstacle to such

behavior as a matter of law, this applies to independent individuals

who act violently against states or to members of states that are

too weak to afford them protection. Strong states protect their own

and convict others as violators of humanitarian law of force. In this

chapter, I want to discuss suicide operations through some current

3 9

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 0

explanations that seek to distinguish them from acts of war. How

different are they from each other?

One might think that one undeniable difference consists in de-

stroying oneself in order to kill civilians one regards as one’s en-

emies, and that this above all requires a special explanation. Why

did he do this terrible thing? Terrible not simply because he killed in-

nocents or was prepared to die (that’s common enough in war) or

simply because he killed himself (that’s not uncommon in peace)

but because he killed himself in order to kill innocents. Trying to pin

down motives is difficult, however: When and how did the inten-

tion of undertaking a suicide mission come to be formed? Which

desire predominated—killing oneself or killing others? What exactly

did the suicide think the moment before he triggered the explosive:

“I’m going to kill these bastards: they killed my brother,” or “God

will reward me for dying in His cause.” or simply “I can’t bear to live

on under this cruel occupation”? Or was it perhaps something ut-

terly different? Were unconscious desires hidden by his conscious

language? Was he ecstatic? Or did he have second thoughts, doubts,

regrets, as he proceeded toward his objective? If so, in what way and

to what extent were they overcome? How does one set about an-

swering such questions if the perpetrator is no longer alive? I do not

say that such questions are always unanswerable but that the mat-

ter is far more complicated than is commonly supposed.

Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order

to die and someone who dies in order to kill? Thus the sociologist

Jean Baechler cites the case of the murderer Buffet who wrote to

the French president before his execution demanding the “grace” of

the guillotine: “To kill in order to commit suicide, that’s my moral-

ity!” Baechler also cites examples of the reverse, the most famous

being the kamikaze pilots in World War II who died in order to kill.1

Such categorizations tend to draw on psychological models accord-

ing to which suicide (“the solution to an existential problem”)2 can

be regarded either as an instance of individual psychopathology or

as a case of collective ideology. In both cases, there is a resort to

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 1

causal as opposed to purposive explanation. What examples like

Baechler’s show, however, is that the end of an action is not defined

merely by its ending: the end of suicide is killing oneself; the end of

suicide bombing is killing oneself and others at the same time. The

open-endedness of motive inevitably leaves considerable scope for

interpretation.

Suicide attacks are therefore, above all, histories. In recounting

plausible histories, they also employ fiction. Take the Columbia Uni-

versity professor of social science Jon Elster. Deferring to the author-

ity of “a widely respected expert on this topic, Ariel Merari,” Elster

writes: “The mental state that actually triggers the act of detonating

the bomb may therefore be ephemeral and something of an artifact

rather than a stable feature of the person. When asked [by the U.S.

Congress, before which he testified] how well he thought he under-

stood the state of mind of suicide attackers in the minutes before he

[sic] died, Merari answered: ‘Some of them were elated, apparently.

Ecstatic in the last moments’ (CBS News, 25 May 2003).”3 But how can

one possibly know what went on in the mind of a surprise suicide

attacker in the moment before she died? An interesting story about

suicide depends, however, on assumptions about interesting inter-

nal states, and the mythology of suicide as pathology encourages

fantasies of accessibility.

Explanations of suicide fighters tend to focus on the origin of mo-

tivation. It is not the effect of the bombing (which is plain for anyone

to see) that preoccupies most Western commentators but the bomb-

er’s reason for doing what he or she does. That reason is often—not

always—seen as being in some way pathological. Or as being alien-

ated—that is, as not properly integrated into Western civilization.

But I think here of such unpredicted massacres as the one that

occurred at Columbine High School when two heavily armed stu-

dents killed and maimed a large number of their schoolmates and

then shot themselves; the debate on what motivated them has been

endless and (not surprisingly) remains indecisive.4 A suicide bomb-

ing can be said to be more calculated than the school shootings: the

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 2

combatant appears to be at once more in control of himself (he is

disciplined in what he does) and less so (ruthless men have trained

him). Yet these are conditions, not motives. The reason the combat-

ant kills others by dying is often traced to the systematic depriva-

tion and humiliation he has suffered—to his sense that, in confront-

ing an overwhelming and ruthless adversary, common destruction

is the only possible response (an expression of despair and rage?)—

or to deep personal unhappiness. It is also ascribed to Islamic dis-

course because of his recorded proclamation before the operation,

which typically uses a religious vocabulary—thus the highly ritual-

ized proclamation is taken to correspond to his real motives. The

motive and the action to which it leads are together regarded by

most Western commentators as perverse because the agents have

chosen death. But death here is an effect not a motive. “Intention,”

as I use the term, occurs at a causal level; “motives” do not. Motives

are therefore often indeterminate. Why and when do people search

for them? How do they recount the motives of suicide bombers?

What signs do they take as visible indicators of invisible truth? And

of what truth?

In the following discussion of some typical explanations of the

suicide bomber, I suggest that they tell us more about liberal as-

sumptions of religious subjectivities and political violence than they

do about what is ostensibly being explained.

The well-known theorist of religious studies Ivan Strenski makes

the point that explaining suicide operations in terms of “personal

psychological motivation” isn’t enough and urges that one needs a

sociological and theological perspective. Drawing on the writings of

the Durkheimian school, he proposes that the phenomenon is bet-

ter understood through the religious concepts of sacrifice and gift

than through theories seeking to explain suicide. Strenski reminds

us that Halbwachs was perhaps the first theorist to distinguish ana-

lytically between suicide and sacrifice in his development and mod-

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 3

ification of Durkheim’s thesis on suicide. For Halbwachs, the distinc-

tion turns on society’s attitude, something most clearly evident in

its ritual form. When self-immolation is expressed in a ritual form,

it is to be read as sacrifice; without that form, it is suicide. “Sacrifice

is a profoundly social action,” Strenski echoes Halbwachs, “essen-

tially involving a network of relationships, typically . . . actualized

in terms of systems of social exchange. Sacrifice is not something

to be understood solely in terms of the dynamics of an individual’s

psyche. What is more, sacrifice is not just a social deed. It also has

potent religious resonance. . . . It is also a ‘making holy,’ as the Latin

origins of the term indicate—sacri-ficium. Sacrifice for the Durkheim-

ians is indeed a giving up, or a giving of, that makes something holy.”5

The sacrifice of oneself in the case under discussion, says Strenski,

is made as a gift to and for the nation that is thereby sanctified:

all suicide bombers believe they are giving their lives for the Pales-

tinian nation, to the umma. “Without minimizing the importance of

the utilitarian jihadist conception of these bombings [as a militarily

tactic], as well as their multivalence,” writes Strenski, “some of the

many strands of meaning can be picked up that hang from the claim

that these so-called suicide or martyrdom bombings need also to

be considered carefully as sacrificial gifts [to Palestine].”6 Strenski’s

analysis thus proceeds from the claim that since sacrifice is the es-

sence of religious subjectivity, violence is integral to it.

Three comments are in order here, however. First, for Durkheim,

virtually all acts are social, including suicide. Durkheim would al-

most certainly have included suicide bombing in his category of

“altruistic suicide.” Indeed, Durkheim was the first theorist to prob-

lematize the notion of “the individual” through an identification of

the social determinants of that most personal of acts: suicide. In

Strenski’s account, we are still in the realm of looking for motives,

of asking “what impels them to do it?” only now the motive is called

“ritual,” a theme that easily allows us to speak of the religious.

My second comment is that, in the Islamic tradition, sacrifice in-

volving the slaughter of an animal (dhabı̄ha) is made in response to a

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 4

divine command (e.g., on the annual pilgrimage), or as thanks to the

deity (e.g., on returning safely from a journey or recovering from a se-

rious illness), or as a sign of repentance (called kaffāra) for particular

transgressions. None of these criteria apply to the suicide bomber.

Third: Strenski’s use of the idea of “making something holy”

through sacrifice is less clear than it appears. I have written else-

where about the problematic character of the concept of “the sa-

cred,” but, in the Islamic tradition at least, sacrifice does not make

the recipient (God), or for that matter the sacrifiant (the person in

whose name the sacrifice is made) or the victim, “holy.” The rite it-

self—the words and movements necessary to it—might be glossed

as “sacred,” and it is true that the moral status of the sacrifiant is

altered by the act of sacrifice, but that does not make him or her sa-

cred. Strenski seems to have taken the Christian concept of Christ’s

supreme gift of himself as the model for sacrifice in general. But

the Arabic for “gift,” hadiyya, is never used to describe sacrifice, and

qurba _ n—an Arabic word for sacrifice that is treated as central in

Strenski’s analysis—is more commonly used by Arabic-speaking

Christians for Communion than by Arabic-speaking Muslims for an-

imal sacrifice. In fact, the Qur’an uses the word qurban three times:

at 3:183 to refer to burnt offerings according to Mosaic rites (there

are no burnt offerings in Islam), at 5:27 to refer to the biblical story

of Cain and Abel, and at 46.28 to refer to pre-Islamic beliefs about

ritual mediation (the Qur’an rejects such mediation).

I will say more on the difference of the classical Islamic concept

of martyr (shahı̄d) from the concept of sacrifice (dahı̄yya), but here

I stress that if we pay closer attention to the way the concept of

shahı̄d is deployed in historical as well as contemporary usage, we

will see that its connection with sacrifice is contingent and that it

doesn’t fit with Strenski’s use of that term. If one is to talk about reli-

gious subjectivities, one must work through the concepts the people

concerned actually use.

A difficulty I have with Strenski’s approach is that it is a foren-

sic reading of motive. Its explanatory concern, like that of others, is

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 5

with identifying culpability that can be established through the re-

construction of a particular type of motive: According to this account,

Palestinian suicide bombers are not sick, they do not perform their

terrible acts because they are driven by an insupportable environ-

ment. The suicide bombers are fully responsible—answerable—for

their acts because they choose to justify their violence in terms of a

discursive religious tradition, in which they choose to offer individual

lives (their own and the lives of others) in exchange for a transcen-

dent value. It is the free intention of the perpetrator that leads to the

criminal act and not (as is often alleged) brutal subjection to Israeli

occupation. That, at any rate, is how this kind of reading is made.

By finding the culprit as well as the religious sources that feed his

criminality, a danger to Israeli society is identified with precision; the

state’s extension of the space of violence in the cause of security is

seen to be necessary. Thus although for the law it is the unlicensed

act of killing civilians that defines the crime, for journalists and se-

curity experts it is his motive for doing this terrible thing that is of

primary interest. And yet, because the actor dies in the event, his

motives are not fully retrievable. Ironically, it is only at the trial of

someone who has failed to complete the operation that the motive of

suicide bombers can be adduced. So the social scientist, novelist, and

filmmaker endow the dead terrorist with the motives of the living.

Strenski’s redescription of motive in terms of the concept of sacrifice

offers a religious model by means of which suicide bombing can be

identified as “religious terrorism.” And that appellation defines the

bomber as morally underdeveloped—and therefore premodern—

when compared with peoples whose civilized status is partly indi-

cated by their secular politics and their private religion and whose

violence is therefore in principle disciplined, reasonable, and just.

But one can do the reading in other ways, define and separate types

of violent acts and the subjectivities to which they are attached,

differently. Much will then depend on the overriding hermeneutic

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 6

principle one adopts to reconcile apparent inconsistencies in the

reading required by the explanation one favors. The result may not

be incontestably better, but it can be more complicated than the one

Strenski offers.

In a recent unpublished article,7 May Jayyusi insists that suicide

fighters must be understood in relation to new forms of political sub-

jectivity that have been formed in the context of resistance to the

particular powers that circumscribe them. To describe these powers

(the Israeli military, the Jewish settlements, the Palestine Authority,

and Islamic Jihad and Hamas), she draws on Carl Schmitt’s idea of

“the state of exception” via Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer and stress-

es the importance of a developing political-ideological field—includ-

ing Israeli policies of occupation and settlement, the Palestinian re-

sistance, and international developments (the Iranian revolution) and

agreements (the Oslo Accords). This is a larger story than the one told

by Strenski, and it doesn’t begin by trying to explain a religious act.

Oslo, Jayyusi writes, was an attempt to institute a local authority

over the Palestinian population, charged with containing and sub-

jecting it to a variety of exceptional regulations. In effect, the result

of Oslo was that an entire occupied population was held hostage to

the policing performance of the Palestine Authority. As the overarch-

ing state power, Israel was at once beyond the Palestinian zones and

yet sovereign over them. (The ambiguity of where its unstated bor-

ders lie—what is inside Israel and what is outside—have long been

part of its strategic advantage.) This means, Jayyusi points out, that

the Palestine Authority was caught in an irresolvable contradiction:

on the one hand, seeking national sovereignty and, on the other,

conceding it indefinitely to the occupying power by agreeing uncon-

ditionally to carry out its policing function. Nevertheless, Jayyusi

claims that something new did emerge with Oslo for the general

population, something she calls “an imaginary of freedom.”

It seems that at first the Palestinian population as a whole re-

ceived Oslo favorably despite the misgivings of many. Thus, ac-

cording to the polls, support for the militant Islamist movements

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 7

dropped to about 13 percent when first the agreement was signed.

But as it became clear that the secular political elites in the Author-

ity were unable to develop an adequate politics in the contradictory

conditions established by Oslo, popular support for the Islamists

rose to about a third. But, of course, more was involved here than

a response to public opinion polls. There was also the welfare func-

tion of the Islamists, in which care and assistance were provided

to all on a neighborhood basis and regardless of party affiliation.

Furthermore, the mosque became the site of an Islamic discourse

in which subjectivity was increasingly individuated, moralized, and

linked to the movement as its collective representative.

Incompetent and corrupt, the Palestine Authority came to be gen-

erally seen as lacking legitimate leadership and incapable of stand-

ing up to Israeli power that had seemed in Oslo to recognize the

possibility of a Palestinian state and that now easily denied it. The

expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza contin-

ued, control of the water supply was withheld from the Authority,

the pattern of new roads responded to the needs of the settlers and

not to those of Palestinians. More land was confiscated by the state,

more houses destroyed, militants as well as their kin punished.

Add to all that the daily humiliation of all Palestinians at the many

army checkpoints. Insupportable rage, says Jayyusi, was the con-

sequence—and she cites Hannah Arendt’s statement at this point

(“rage arises ‘only when there is reason to suspect that conditions

could be changed and are not’ ”), relating it to the national struggle

after Oslo. I suggest, however, that the relevance of Arendt’s state-

ment is not its reference to uncontrollable anger (planned suicide

bombing is not an instance of uncontrollable rage) but its concern

with an act of death dealing that reacts to injustice by transgress-

ing the law. The stress here should be not on violence as such but

on spontaneous action when legal political means are blocked. Be-

cause, for Arendt, we may recall, the possibility of acting politically

is part of what makes men individual and therefore human. It is

also what offers them a secular form of immortality.8

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 8

The second uprising started in October 2000 after Ariel Sharon’s

provocative entry into the holy shrine of al-Aqsa to demonstrate

Israeli sovereignty over it. This gave Hamas its opportunity to dem-

onstrate its political initiative. On January 1, 2001, it launched the

first suicide operation. Subsequently, suicide operations began to

be undertaken by the other—secular—political factions and even-

tually by members of the population at large. It was Fathi Shikaki,

founder of Islamic Jihad, who had launched, in the early eighties,

what many Palestinians call the second round of armed resistance

against Israel.

So there is an important Islamic dimension in the suicide opera-

tions, according to this story, but it is placed in a wider context than

the one appealed to by Strenski and others. Islamic militancy is

characterized by the fusion of two elements: the centrality of mar-

tyrdom (inspired by the Iranian example) and the individuating pro-

cess (initiated and promoted by Hamas) centered on the mosque.9

Jayyusi’s conclusion is a neat inversion of Agamben: “If ‘homo

sacer’ is he who can be killed and not sacrificed,” she writes, “then

the martyr here inverses this relation to sovereignty, transforming

himself into he who can be sacrificed but not killed. Many testa-

ments of martyrs are signed with the words ‘the living martyr,’ ash-

shaheed al-hayy. They can be sacrificed but cannot be killed, the

koranic verse ‘Do not count those who are martyred for the sake of

God dead but alive with their lord’ is the signature of every bayan.”10

So Jayyusi, too, draws on the religious idea of sacrifice, as well as on

Palestinian politics, in her explanation of the suicide fighters’ mo-

tives. But she includes an expressive element: the martyr demon-

strates something by his violent death. The explanation itself is an

optimistic one in which the Palestinian snatches the responsibility

for his own life and death from the Israeli occupiers. This is arrest-

ing, but Jayyusi’s explanation in terms of shaha _ da needs to be com-

plicated further.

Actually, Palestinians, when employing a religious vocabulary,

call all their civilians who die in the conflict with Israel shuhada _

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

4 9

(plural of shahı̄d)—including innocents killed in Israeli operations

against militants and stone-throwing boys shot by the Israeli army.

Strenski’s claim that shaha _ da (glossed as “martyrdom”) is essentially

connected to the ritual of sacrifice—that it is a form of sacrifice—

cannot account for this wider category of shuhada _ . What matters ac-

cording to this latter usage is neither personal motive nor political

expression but the fatal effect of a violent encounter with the occu-

pying enemy. The violent death of all Palestinians in confrontation

with Israelis, so one might suggest, is regarded as a sign that they

have died as witnesses (shuhada _ ) to their faith—although there is no

ritualized form to most of these deaths. As such, the shahı̄d’s death

constitutes a triumph rather than a sacrifice.11

This usage fits with older conceptions of a death that needs

special explaining. For over the centuries the Islamic tradition has

described several ways of dying as shaha _ da that are not connected

with war:

To the Prophet is ascribed the saying that not only those who are

slain for the faith are to be regarded as martyrs. Seven other causes of

death are enumerated which make the sufferers worthy of the hon-

orable title of a shahı̄d, and these are mainly calamitous or pathologi-

cal causes, which have nothing to do with voluntary self-sacrifice for

a great cause. In later times other causes have been added to these

seven. He who dies in defense of his possessions, or far from his

home in a strange country; he who meets his death in falling from

a high mountain; he who is torn to pieces by wild beasts, and many

more, are to be counted in the category of shuhada _ .12

Thus to be struck by a fatal calamity, whether natural or human,

is to be constituted as a sign of human finitude in the world cre-

ated by an eternal deity. I therefore suggest that the reason Palestin-

ian civilians who are destroyed under the Occupation are regarded

as shuhada _ is twofold: first, they have been struck by a catastrophe,

and, second, their mode of death gives them immortality. The idea

of immortality here is not strictly speaking physical because every-

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 0

one recognizes that the individual’s physical existence is ended by

death. At any rate, to be struck dead by an external force has nothing

to do with motives. But it does have to do with violence—violence

not as it appears in the spectacular act of killing others by killing

oneself (whether this can properly be accounted istisha _ d is a matter

of dispute among Muslim scholars) but as it relates to the idea of

mortality. All untimely death that is not the result of legitimate pun-

ishment is a violation. The believer who dies in a so-called justified

war (actively or passively) belongs to that category, but the category

itself is not defined by participation in “justified war.”

So one problem I have with Jayyusi’s account is that in its empha-

sis on sacrifice it concedes too much to current fashions in explain-

ing suicide operations as a perverse form of national politics and

permits unhelpful references to a unique “culture of death.” This

doesn’t mean that such a term is unusable but that it is used too

crudely for the simple purpose of designating an illiberal perspec-

tive. Liberalism, too, I shall argue later, has its own culture of death.

But can one nevertheless regard suicide bombing as an expression

of the political culture—the culture of death—that has emerged in

modern times in the Middle East? Some commentators who have

addressed this point do think so.

Bruno Étienne, a well-known French political scientist who spe-

cializes in North Africa, has tried to place suicide operators in the

context of a long history of violence: precolonial repression (the Ot-

tomans and then the modern Turks, as he points out, were scarcely

gentle toward those of their coreligionists whom they dominated);

colonial wars of conquest (in which ears and testicles were trium-

phantly collected by the French); colonial violence (of which Frantz

Fanon wrote); wars of decolonization (in which both sides used

torture, assassination, and systematic mutilation); the brutality of

dictatorial regimes (whether nationalist or Islamist); the violence,

finally, since the creation of the state of Israel, inflicted by the Is-

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 1

raeli army on the Palestinian people at whose expense the state

was established.13 It is not clear whether Étienne is suggesting that

the cumulative effect of historical violence in the Arab world caused

the outburst of suicide bombing or whether he views such bombing

simply as a continuation of the history of Middle Eastern violence.

In either case, he takes it for granted that suicide bombing requires

special theoretical attention.14 Psychoanalysis might combine the

two in the idea of sacrifice, which it explains as an unconscious

desire for parricide. For Freud, it will be recalled, totemic sacrifice

is the unconscious repetition of a primeval crime;15 for others, like

Money-Kyrle, the unconscious desire for parricide, acquired by each

individual in his own development, is bound to the idea of gift.16 My

argument throughout has been that to take suicide bombing as sac-

rifice is to load it with a significance that is derived from a Christian

and post-Christian tradition. Although in my view this makes it in-

appropriate as an explanation, I shall later suggest that as an idea it is

an important part of the political imaginary of modern nationalism.

In the case of Palestinian combatants, Étienne points out, the en-

emy’s force is far more powerful, and add to that the contempt they

sense in the verbal charity of their Arab brothers, as well as the Israeli

contempt symbolized by the wall and the many checkpoints. “These

things have manufactured contempt and hatred, transformed ha-

tred for the self into hatred for the Other. Absolute.”17 But where in

all this is the mechanism of a hatred for the self to be located?

What is especially striking is how the widespread belief about

tendencies inherent in monotheism allows Étienne to assimilate

Islamic discourses on the subject to a Christian one—as Stren-

ski does.18 Yet compared with medieval Christian literature, there

are actually very few medieval Islamic texts that deal exclusively

with what is called in European literature “martyrdom.” In any case,

the concepts are not the same even if the words used (martyr and

shahı̄d) are etymologically connected. I have already referred to the

range of meanings for shahı̄d, including unintentional death, that

sets it apart from Christian understandings of “martyr.” The Qur’an,

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 2

incidentally—and perhaps significantly—doesn’t make explicit use

of the word shahı̄d to signify someone who dies in God’s cause. The

verse most often cited in support of it (9:52) speaks of husnayayn,

“the two best things,” a phrase conventionally interpreted as “either

victory or death in God’s cause.”19 The concept of istishha _ d as a tech-

nique of jiha _ d in which the combatant (muja

_ hid) annihilates himself

is an entirely modern idea.20

Étienne’s attraction to psychoanalysis is more interesting, how-

ever, even if his formulation of the Freudian idea of the death wish is

not: “The death wish results from an overflowing of energies set free

by the failure of the capacities to make representations: when there

is no longer anything, no political model, no utopia, no hope, no

solution—when the representations of the possible are frustrated,

one explodes! This overflowing of excitation brings about a rupture:

the actor, or the agent, as Pierre Bourdieu would say, is emptied of

his own desires. He is then the object of a movement of disconnec-

tion for which the neurosis of war is the outlet.”21 Étienne’s sugges-

tion that the suicide fighter wishes to die because she lacks politi-

cal imagination is not only implausible (consider the evidence that

Jayyusi’s account provides), it also rests on the assumption—which

I will examine at the conclusion of this chapter—that politics and

violence are mutually exclusive.

According to Freud, the pressure to prolong life and the pres-

sure toward death are both permanent, contradictory drives in all

living organisms. One need not agree with every shift in Freud’s

argument (or subscribe to Freudianism) to see that this idea raises

questions about every individual’s approach—now deliberate, now

unconscious; now willing, now reluctant—toward her end. There is

in Freud’s account no simple way in which a death decided by the

individual for himself can be explained. One may say that the sui-

cide fighter is driven to annihilate herself in the enemy or that she

chooses to destroy her enemies that way. But how to account for the

difference between laying hands on oneself and making war? For

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 3

Freud, both are aggressive instincts, and the death instinct (like the

instinct to extend life) is a transcendent power beyond the conscious

subject while being at the same time his own desire. The playing

out of this instinct—of the ability and willingness to wage devastat-

ing wars—appears most impressively among the so-called civilized

nations, in spite of Freud’s claim that the disciplining mechanism

of guilt serves more and more to internalize aggression as civiliza-

tion progresses. But guilt, I argued in my first chapter, is no bar to

the repetition of transgression. And, contrary to Étienne (and Freud),

war is not a neurosis but a collectively organized, legitimized, and

moralized game of destruction that is played much more savagely

by the civilized than the uncivilized. Nor is it suicide in any but a

metaphorical sense. In fact, there is consistent evidence to the ef-

fect that rates of suicide tend to decline significantly in wartime.22

Étienne goes on: “But at what moment does an actor—whether

manipulated or not—go on to the act of self-destruction? And in

what ‘objective’ conditions does an entire society become ‘mad’ to

the point of massacring its own children, as was the case in Alge-

ria in the 1990s? . . . Self-hatred was going to be transformed into

hate for the Other. All the more so in that Algeria, like most Arab

countries, had lost its Other: the native Jew and the foreign (and

foreign-tongued) European. Brother was thus alone face to face with

his different brother, Kabyle, Berber, Arab, Islamist. This then pro-

duced a civil war that was to cause more than a hundred thousand

deaths.”23 Here we seem to have an answer to the question I asked

earlier about where the mechanism of self-hatred resides: according

to Étienne, self-hatred is generated within and by the conduct of a

vicious civil war, and the self is the nation in process of murdering

itself. A complicated history of civil war is in danger of being re-

duced to a metaphor of suicide and equated with the real suicide of

Palestinian militants—and then both are presented as expressions

of an Islamic culture of death.24

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 4

Robert Pape, a political scientist, collects figures. He insists that sta-

tistics show suicide bombers must be understood as employing a

strategy of war.

I have spent a year compiling a database of every suicide bombing

and attack around the globe from 1980 to 2001—188 in all. It includes

any attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself

while attempting to kill others, although I excluded attacks autho-

rized by a national government, such as those by North Korea against

the South. The data show that there is little connection between sui-

cide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that

matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Ti-

gers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from

Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion (they have

committed 75 of the 188 incidents). Rather, what nearly all suicide

terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and stra-

tegic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces

from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Re-

ligion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by

terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of

the broader strategic objective.

Pape points out that these attacks are not random incidents but

part of organized campaigns and that in terms of casualties they are

the most efficient form of terrorism: Thus although only 3 percent

of all terrorist incidents consisted of suicide attacks, they caused

about half of all the fatalities, even excluding the large number who

died on September 11.25 To signal to the citizens of liberal democra-

cies that they face an intolerable cost is to compel their armies to

withdraw. Because they are widely mediatized, says Pape, terrorist

incidents “make a statement.” One should add, however, that per-

formatives are a feature not only of terrorist incidents but also of

contemporary small wars (the 1991 and 2003 U.S. attacks against

Iraq are famous examples of political theater)—and indeed of all

popular politics that employ and respond to media images.

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 5

Pape is right to suggest that these incidents must be set in the

context of what are in effect miniwars of rebellion. But he does

not mention something about the states attacked that I think is

more important than their liberal democratic status: their powerful

armies. The insurgents are faced with an adversary that possesses

formidable military weaponry as well as methods of controlling ci-

vilian populations in occupied territory that are often very effective,

and this superiority cannot be met directly. Contrary to Pape’s claim

about the effectiveness of suicide bombings, however, Palestinian

operations have in fact been counterproductive: militarily insignifi-

cant, they have strengthened public support in Israel for continued

occupation, legitimated the Israeli government’s strategies for fur-

ther land expropriation, and evoked much Western sympathy for its

war against terror.

Jayyusi, whom I have already cited, insists that

the SB operations must be seen as acts that are performed as part of a

continuum of resistance that has a history. According to IDF statistics

the attacks that actually targeted the ’48 territory represent only 4%

of the total number of attacks, of which only a minority are SB opera-

tions. In comparing different testaments and checking it against the

data, it clearly emerges that, within the discourse of Hamas and the

practitioners themselves, there is not a strict demarcation between

those who actually use their body as human bombs and those who

go out to attack either settlements or army patrols with the intention

of not coming back alive. Both are Istishhadiyyun, martyrdom-seek-

ers where martyrdom itself is seen as the highest value.26

Unfortunately, Jayyusi, writing in 2004, doesn’t say what period these

statistics relate to, but the two claims she makes are worth ponder-

ing: (1) that the overwhelming majority of attacks against Israelis

have been directed against West Bank settlers and the Israeli army

and (2) that of these most have not been suicide bombings. If that is

the case, then is the enormous attention given to the phenomenon

of suicide bombings in Palestine and its roots in an Islamic culture

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 6

of death simply a discursive construct of the Western media? In part

perhaps, but not entirely—for reasons I will give in my final chapter.

While Pape’s statistical data are intended to make the case that

suicide bombers are motivated by strategic concerns, however, this

does not satisfy everyone because it does not respond to the ques-

tion that preoccupies so many: why do individuals agree to be re-

cruited? The question presupposes the desire for an explanation

in terms of motive—with the assumption that there must be a

single clear answer to the question of motivation. Explanations in

terms of religious (and especially Islamic) motive are still favored,

partly because they provide a model that combines psychological

elements (familiar from criminal trials) and cultural signs (distin-

guishing them from us), a model that lends itself to the discourse of

the protection of civilization (committed to life) against barbarism

(a love of death).

My final example is an article on contemporary jiha _ d and martyrdom,

in which Roxanne Euben explores some ideas of Arendt. While most

commentators on the subject have tended to give either a political

or a religious explanation of suicide terrorism, Euben avoids posing

terrorism as the primary object of discourse and instead traces con-

nections and tensions among public action, immortality, violence,

and death in any political community. “I want to argue,” she writes,

“that, properly contextualized, jiha _ d is a particularly illuminating

way to investigate the implications of mortality and death for poli-

tics[,] . . . that in the hands of contemporary Islamic ‘fundamental-

ists’ (or ‘Islamists’), jiha _ d is neither simply a blind and bloody-minded

scrabble for temporal power nor solely a door through which to pass

into the hereafter. Rather, it is a form of political action in which, to

use Hannah Arendt’s language, the pursuit of immortality is inex-

tricably linked to a profoundly this-worldly endeavor—the found-

ing or recreating of a just community on earth.”27 Euben discusses

the writings of Mawdudi and Qutb, two modern theorists of jiha _ d for

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 7

whom the concept of jāhiliyya is central. Jāhiliyya referred histori-

cally to the period of pagan beliefs and customs of pre-Islamic Ara-

bian society and has since acquired the sense of moral savagery (the

Arabic root jahl signifies “ignorance” and “uncouthness”). Hence, ac-

cording to these two writers, the elimination of ja _ hiliyya—by force

where necessary—is essential to the establishment of an umma, the

just community of Muslims. It is this community that “immortalizes

human deeds” (as Arendt would put it) while realizing God’s plan on

this earth. The immortality that those who engage in jiha _ d seek is at

once secular (of this world) and religious (of the next).

Euben’s essay, like Étienne’s book, doesn’t distinguish among the

very different situations—Egypt, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so

on—in which jiha _ dis have fought. It is not obvious that all jiha

_ dis have

the same idea of the umma—or even that they all think they must

establish the umma as opposed to defending in a particular time and

place one that already exists or demonstrating their supreme loyalty

to it. In fact, it is not clear how many of the al-Qaeda jiha _ dis are mo-

tivated by idealism or ressentiment—or just plain love of fighting and

killing.28 Nevertheless, Euben’s discussion does have the great merit

of moving away from trying to explain suicide bombing in terms

of motivation—a religious sacrifice (Strenski), an escape from politi-

cal oppression (Jayyusi), a death wish (Étienne)—and moving toward

more difficult, less moralistic questions regarding relations between

personal mortality and political action. Her analysis of jiha _ d and

shaha _ da is neither an apologia nor an indictment but a discussion

of the violence of those who endorse it as “a form of political ac-

tion that endows human struggle to remake a common world with

existential weight. . . . While the mujāhidı̄n may seek the ever-elusive

rewards of the afterlife, jiha _ d against modern ja

_ hiliyya entails the

political struggle to realize the umma in a particular historical mo-

ment; in turn, it is the continued existence of the earthly umma that

immortalizes their efforts. I have suggested,” she continues, “that

this recalls Arendt’s elegiac evocation of a time and a place where

‘men entered the public realm because they wanted something of

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 8

their own or something they had in common with others to be more

permanent than their earthly lives.’ ”29

For Arendt, of course, this world disappeared with the fall of Rome

and the rise of Christianity, and it cannot be resurrected. But she

saw in the replacement of the pagan investment in a worldly and

collective immortality by the Christian emphasis on individual sal-

vation not only an obvious ideological change but also the end of a

certain attitude to politics—of political life as the space of an earthly

permanence that can compensate for human mortality. It is neither

the religious beliefs nor the military techniques of the mujāhidı̄n that

finally interest Euben but the stimulus their political action affords

for a reflection, not often found in liberal theory, on connections

linking human finitude, violent death, and political community.

Euben ends by observing that a wide range of liberal theorists

who otherwise disagree with Arendt’s view of politics have this as-

sumption in common with her: that politics, however it is to be de-

fined, cannot have anything to do with violence. And yet—Euben

reminds us—Athens itself was founded in violence, and its political

sphere maintained by the violent exclusions of slaves, women, and

foreigners. And so were all liberal democratic states in the modern

world—and especially the United States—founded in massive vio-

lence and exclusions. “Augustine saw in this mutual implication of

violence, death, and politics an other-worldly imperative,” writes

Euben in her concluding sentence, “the suggestion here is that these

Islamist understandings of jiha _ d recall less Augustine’s lament than

Machiavelli’s suggestion, not that all politics is violent but that the

violence of a founding may be the precondition to all politics.”30

Thus the evil of a founding violence is at the same time the good

that the foundation brings forth.

Euben’s elaboration of Arendt’s idea about the connection be-

tween individual mortality and politics as immortality is helpful. But

it should be pointed out that violence, in constituting the political

sphere to which Euben alludes, extends beyond the moment of the

founding of liberal states—which after all is a unique event in the

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

5 9

history of each state, uniquely free in its constitutive violence, but

an event in the past, something that, while it may give many liberals

a bad conscience, is felt to be redeemed by the progressive elimina-

tion of political exclusions. More difficult is the question of the role

of mortal violence in the continuing maintenance of the good po-

litical life. For in liberal secular society, one that apparently abjures

political metaphysics, the morally autonomous individual has the

right to choose his own life, and the sovereign state has the right to

use violence in defense of the conditions for the good life. The right

to punish enemies at home and abroad is fundamental to law,31 and

state law gives the individual his/her identity as a modern citizen.

Richard Tuck, historian of early modern political thought, has ar-

gued persuasively that “there is a kind of violence within liberalism

of the Lockean type, which goes back to its origins in the violent

politics of the Renaissance, in which liberty and warfare (both civil

war and international conflict) were bound together.”32 A concep-

tion of politics as the pursuit of war by other means—inverted by

Clausewitz later in his famous aphorism—was born in that epoch,

as the state gradually acquired exclusive power to wage war exter-

nally and to impose punishments internally. That violence, Tuck

thinks, underlies liberal doctrine and practice today. It is not sim-

ply that the liberal state requires armies to defend itself and pris-

ons to maintain order. It is rather that violence founds the law as

it founds the political community. Violence is therefore embedded

in the very concept of liberty that lies at the heart of liberal doc-

trine. That concept presupposes—so Tuck maintains—that the mor-

ally independent individual’s natural right to violent self-defense is

yielded to the state and that the state becomes the sole protector of

individual liberties, abstracting the right to kill from domestic poli-

tics, denying to any agents other than states the right to kill at home

and abroad.33 The right to kill is the right to behave in violent ways

toward other people—especially toward citizens of foreign states at

war and toward the uncivilized, whose very existence is a threat to civi-

lized order. In certain circumstances, killing others is necessary, so it

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

6 0

seems, for the security it provides. The arguments about preemptive

versus preventive war surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq are a

consequence of this doctrine.34 But while arguments go on intermi-

nably, decisive military action can be taken without its being held

accountable under humanitarian law—so long as the military be-

longs to a strong enough power.

The political interests of liberal democratic states are not con-

fined to their sovereign territory, especially when the welfare of

populations depends on changing political, economic, and cultural

relations in other parts of the world. Whether military engagements

beyond sovereign territory are conducted for legitimate reasons

or not, they have always constituted an integral part of the right

to defend oneself and one’s way of life. It is a truism that indus-

trial capitalism since the nineteenth century has been increasingly

destructive of forms of social life, that its markets have dislocated

persons and things throughout the world, that the pollution of its

factories and transport systems had disastrous effects on the natu-

ral environment and global climate that all humans inhabit. And yet

industrial capitalism is the volatile condition in which Western lib-

erties have been constructed, defended, and gifted to the world. The

violent freedoms of industrial capitalism can be said to have consti-

tuted political life as the space of an earthly permanence that can

compensate for the death of the past—at the cost of a fatal threat

to the future. For the modern sovereign state has an absolute right

to defend itself, a defense that may—as the International Court of

Justice has held—legitimately involve the use of nuclear weapons.35

Suicidal war with incalculable global consequences exists in the lib-

eral world as a legitimate possibility.36

But there is another, less dramatic aspect of modern state vio-

lence to which I want to draw attention and that informs liberal

politics. The mobilization of individuals within and by the sover-

eign democratic state and the care devoted to its population have

been at the heart of the liberal conception of the good life. And a

guarantee of that life is the citizen-soldier who is prepared to kill

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

6 1

and die for it, yet whose health, longevity, and general physical

well-being are objects of the democratic state’s solicitude. Taken

together, these well-known facts hint at something unique about

the violence intrinsic to modern liberty. This has to do partly with

advanced technologies for death dealing. The fact that modern war-

fare has given birth to numerous inventions is well known. These

include improved techniques for destruction, of course, but also for

the restoration of human life. Important developments in surgery,

psychiatry, and psychology, as well as in nursing and hospital ad-

ministration, are famously connected with the demands and conse-

quence of modern war.

I quote at length from the military historian John Keegan:

Weapons have never been kind to human flesh, but the directing prin-

ciple behind their design has usually not been that of maximizing the

pain and damage they can cause. Before the invention of explosives,

the limits of muscle power in itself constrained their hurtfulness; but

even for some time thereafter moral inhibitions, fuelled by a sense

of the unfairness of adding mechanical and chemical increments to

man’s power to hurt his brother, served to restrain deliberate barbari-

ties of design. Some of these inhibitions—against the use of poison

gas and explosive bullets—were codified and given international force

by the Hague Convention of 1899; but the rise of “thing-killing” as op-

posed to man-killing weapons—heavy artillery is an example—which

by their side-effects inflicted gross suffering and disfigurement, inval-

idated these restraints. As a result restraints were cast to the winds,

and it is now a desired effect of many man-killing weapons that they

inflict wounds as terrible and terrifying as possible. The claymore mine,

for instance, is filled with metal cubes . . . , the cluster bomb with jag-

ged metal fragments, in both cases because that shape of projectile

tears and fractures more extensively than a smooth-bodied one. The

HEAT and HESH rounds fired by anti-tank guns are designed to fill

the interior of armoured vehicles with showers of metal splinters or

streams of molten metal, so disabling the tank by disabling its crew.

s u i c i d e t e r r o r i s m

6 2

And napalm, disliked for ethical reasons even by many tough minded

soldiers, contains an ingredient which increases the adhesion of the

burning petrol to human skin surfaces.37 Military surgeons, so success-

ful over the past century in resuscitating wounded soldiers and repairing

wounds of growing severity, have thus now to meet a challenge of wounding

agents deliberately conceived to defeat their skills.38

Keegan points to a double passion. It is as though advances in the

surgeon’s healing art, on the one hand, and the production of ever

more ingenious ways of wounding and maiming, on the other, were

locked in an endless game of mutual provocation, of death and of

life, which rich and technically advanced liberal states can play with

endless variation.

I return finally to Euben’s point about the violence necessary to

the founding of liberal political community. Violence, I argue, is not

only a continuous feature of such a community. The absolute right

to defend oneself by force becomes, in the context of industrial capi-

talism, the freedom to use violence globally: when social difference

is seen as backwardness and backwardness as a source of danger

to civilized society, self-defense calls for a project of reordering the

world in which the rules of civilized warfare cannot be allowed to

stand in the way. The political theorist Margaret Canovan has ex-

pressed this view by way of a memorable metaphor: “Liberalism is

not a matter of clearing away a few accidental obstacles and allow-

ing humanity to unfold its natural essence. It is more like making a

garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching. . . . But it is pre-

cisely the element of truth in the gloomy pictures of society and

politics drawn by critics of liberalism that makes the project of real-

izing liberal principles all the more urgent. The world is a dark place,

which needs redemption by the light of a myth.”39 The violence at

the heart of liberal political doctrine makes this clear: the right to

self-defense eventually calls for a project of universal redemption.

Another way of putting this is to say (although Canovan is not so

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explicit) that some humans have to be treated violently in order that

humanity can be redeemed.

But there is something else. The right of liberal democratic states

to defend themselves with nuclear weapons—and this seems to be

accepted by the international community—is in effect an affirma-

tion that suicidal war can be legitimate. This leads me to the thought

that the suicide bomber belongs in an important sense to a modern

Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of a free political

community: To save the nation (or to found its state) in confronting

a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound

by ordinary moral constraints. As Walzer writes: “A morally strong

leader is someone who understands why it is wrong to kill the in-

nocent and refuses to do so, refuses again and again, until the heav-

ens are about to fall. And then he becomes a moral criminal (like

Albert Camus’s ‘just assassin’) who knows that he can’t do what he

has to do—and finally does.”40 In this reasoning, can the killing of

innocents by taking one’s own life be the final gesture of a morally

strong leader?

So how unique is suicide bombing? If it is special—and I believe that

in a sense it is—this is not because of the motives involved. Inten-

tions may be validly deduced from actions in the sense that they

define the primary shape of the action (the agent deliberately kills

himself together with others, and that is what makes it a particu-

lar kind of action), but motives are to be distinguished from causes,

because we speak of motives when we demand an explanation in

terms of reasons: “Why did he do it?” Not everything that is done

has a motive, by which I mean that we ask for an explanation in

terms of motive only when we are suspicious of what the action

means. We are not satisfied with “He did it because he wanted to kill

others (whom he regards as his enemies) by killing himself.” We ask:

Why?—and assume that there is something bizarre about the action.

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But motives themselves are rarely lucid, always invested with emo-

tions, and their description can be contested. They may not be

clear even to the actor. Most important, explanations in terms of

motives depend on typologies of action that are conventionally rec-

ognized and to which individuation is central: for example, by the

judicial system that determines (by using one or other psychologi-

cal theory) guilt and innocence, or by theologies of salvation that

trace the origin and consequence of sin, or by a secular theory of

the unconscious that claims to make us understand our perplexed

unhappinesses. The uniqueness of suicide bombing resides, I think,

elsewhere. It resides, one might say, not in its essence but in its con-

tingent circumstance.