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The Cultures and Practices of Violence
The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance
In The Making of a Human Bomb , Nasser Abufarha, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains the cultural logic underlying Palestinian martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) launched against Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–06). In so doing, he sheds much-needed light on how Palestinians have experienced and perceived the broader conflict. During the Intifada, many of the martyrdom operations against Israeli targets were initiated in the West Bank town of Jenin and surrounding villages. Abufarha was born and raised in Jenin. His personal connections to the area enabled him to conduct ethnographic research there during the Intifada, while he was a student at a U.S. university. Abufarha draws on the life histories of martyrs, interviews he conducted with their families and members of the groups that sponsored their operations, and examinations of Palestinian literature, art, performance, news stories, and political commentaries. He also assesses data—about the bombers, targets, and fatalities caused—from more than two hundred martyrdom operations carried out by Palestinian groups between 2001 and 2004. Some involved the use of explosive belts or the detonation of cars; others entailed armed attacks against Israeli targets (military and civilian) undertaken with the intent of fighting until death. In addition, he scrutinized suicide attacks executed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad between 1994 and 2000. In his analysis of Palestinian political violence, Abufarha takes into account Palestinians’ understanding of the history of the conflict with Israel, the effects of containment on Palestinians’ everyday lives, the disillusionment created by the Oslo peace process, and reactions to specific forms of Israeli state violence. The Making of a Human Bomb illuminates the Palestinians’ perspective on the conflict with Israel and provides a model for ethnographers seeking to make sense of political violence.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 23, 2023
I want to change my rating of this book to five stars. I stick by my critique below but I have not stopped thinking of this book in the last 11 years. It remains the most insightful book I have read on this topic. It couples well with an article by Ghassan Hage, "Comes a Time We Are All Enthusiasm": Understanding Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia," Public Culture, Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 65-89. Below is my review from 2012:
This is a dissertation turned into a book. The work is jam packed with academic defensiveness because the topic is so volatile. I think Abufarha wants to make the work "stick." We find lots of writing in the passive voice, large numbers of references, huge literature review, explanations and justifications of his methodology, and a tone that says, "look, I am playing this game according to your rules about science, objectivity, and all that." This tactic does make the book "stick" but it also takes away a bit from its passion.
I skimmed chapter 1, read chapters 5-7. Chapter 5, "Dying to Live is built around the biographies/profiles of 3 "suicide bombers" -- a term that Abufarha rejects because it makes little sense within the culture he explores. He prefers "itishhadi" or "itishhadiyya" -- masculine and feminine terms meaning "martyr mission carrier." His cultural analysis is rich and reveals how the usual theories accounting for suicide bombers' motives are either wrong or indeterminate.
In chapter 6, "The Strategies and Politics of Martyrdom in Palestine," Abufarha moves to his central thesis: that "martyr missions" are kind of poetic or aesthetic performances with two audiences. The first is Palestinian. The purpose of the performance is to create and sustain life through dying; to make the Palestinian landscape, culture, and memory live through martyrdom actions. Abufarha shows that most everyone in Palestine understands this meaning of such performances. The second audience is the Israeli State. Here the message is mimetic or imitative but also confronting. It says to the State: "anything you can do to us with your powerful military weapons, we can match with with our convictions, courage, and culture." Apparently, there are few moral or ethical questions about martyrdom operations. The cultural consensus -- expressed in poems, plays, songs -- understands these operations as sacrifices, as investments in the future, and as forms of cultural reproduction.
The killing of "innocent civilians" resulting from martyrdom operations is seen as a necessary response to the perception that the Israeli State is bent on the total destruction of Palestinian culture and thereby targets all Palestinians -- men, women, children. Again, martyrdom operations are seen as responsive, reciprocal, and imitative.
Surprisingly, the world community is excluded from the audience. Palestinians, apparently, have completely rejected hopes of an appropriate response or even the possibility of adequate understanding from the world community.
Chapter 7, "Conclusion: An Anthropology of Violence" summarizes but also points to future directions. The take away is that culture cannot be destroyed. Specifically, Palestinian culture cannot be destroyed. Further, a living culture must express itself. When a living culture finds itself under threat of extermination, the way it expresses itself is through the poetics and aesthetics of the human bomb.
Does that mean there is nothing that can be done about suicide bombers? In one sense, yes, nothing can be done. This seems to be the message to those who fail to understand martyrdom operations as the living embodiment (double pun, please excuse it) of cultural expression. In another sense, something can be done: If cultures cannot be exterminated and if they must express themselves to live, then they must be given the space and the opportunities for expression that makes martyrdom operations unnecessary.
If we are looking for short term solutions, this is a most unsatisfactory conclusion because it means there is no defusing this bomb. But if we think that the knot(I shift from the metaphor of "bomb" to "knot") of the Palestine problem is but a microcosm of the larger structural problem of colonialism's undoing, then Abufarha gives us a rich analysis. He starts with a clear eyed assessment of the many threads that make up the knot, the tightness and durability of the threads, and the enormous skill it will take to undo the knot.
There is also something here if we are interested in "human bombs" beyond Palestine: grasping human bombs requires understanding the cultural context of their production as meaningful, as culturally thick. In sum, Abufarha makes a cultural argument with a universal significance. Or, a universal argument that requires cultural specificity.
This is a dissertation turned into a book. The work is jam packed with academic defensiveness because the topic is so volatile. I think Abufarha wants to make the work "stick." We find lots of writing in the passive voice, large numbers of references, huge literature review, explanations and justifications of his methodology, and a tone that says, "look, I am playing this game according to your rules about science, objectivity, and all that." This tactic does make the book "stick" but it also takes away a bit from its passion.
I skimmed chapter 1, read chapters 5-7. Chapter 5, "Dying to Live is built around the biographies/profiles of 3 "suicide bombers" -- a term that Abufarha rejects because it makes little sense within the culture he explores. He prefers "itishhadi" or "itishhadiyya" -- masculine and feminine terms meaning "martyr mission carrier." His cultural analysis is rich and reveals how the usual theories accounting for suicide bombers' motives are either wrong or indeterminate.
In chapter 6, "The Strategies and Politics of Martyrdom in Palestine," Abufarha moves to his central thesis: that "martyr missions" are kind of poetic or aesthetic performances with two audiences. The first is Palestinian. The purpose of the performance is to create and sustain life through dying; to make the Palestinian landscape, culture, and memory live through martyrdom actions. Abufarha shows that most everyone in Palestine understands this meaning of such performances. The second audience is the Israeli State. Here the message is mimetic or imitative but also confronting. It says to the State: "anything you can do to us with your powerful military weapons, we can match with with our convictions, courage, and culture." Apparently, there are few moral or ethical questions about martyrdom operations. The cultural consensus -- expressed in poems, plays, songs -- understands these operations as sacrifices, as investments in the future, and as forms of cultural reproduction.
The killing of "innocent civilians" resulting from martyrdom operations is seen as a necessary response to the perception that the Israeli State is bent on the total destruction of Palestinian culture and thereby targets all Palestinians -- men, women, children. Again, martyrdom operations are seen as responsive, reciprocal, and imitative.
Surprisingly, the world community is excluded from the audience. Palestinians, apparently, have completely rejected hopes of an appropriate response or even the possibility of adequate understanding from the world community.
Chapter 7, "Conclusion: An Anthropology of Violence" summarizes but also points to future directions. The take away is that culture cannot be destroyed. Specifically, Palestinian culture cannot be destroyed. Further, a living culture must express itself. When a living culture finds itself under threat of extermination, the way it expresses itself is through the poetics and aesthetics of the human bomb.
Does that mean there is nothing that can be done about suicide bombers? In one sense, yes, nothing can be done. This seems to be the message to those who fail to understand martyrdom operations as the living embodiment (double pun, please excuse it) of cultural expression. In another sense, something can be done: If cultures cannot be exterminated and if they must express themselves to live, then they must be given the space and the opportunities for expression that makes martyrdom operations unnecessary.
If we are looking for short term solutions, this is a most unsatisfactory conclusion because it means there is no defusing this bomb. But if we think that the knot(I shift from the metaphor of "bomb" to "knot") of the Palestine problem is but a microcosm of the larger structural problem of colonialism's undoing, then Abufarha gives us a rich analysis. He starts with a clear eyed assessment of the many threads that make up the knot, the tightness and durability of the threads, and the enormous skill it will take to undo the knot.
There is also something here if we are interested in "human bombs" beyond Palestine: grasping human bombs requires understanding the cultural context of their production as meaningful, as culturally thick. In sum, Abufarha makes a cultural argument with a universal significance. Or, a universal argument that requires cultural specificity.
January 13, 2025
Great ethnographic research on an extremely sensitive, and heavily misunderstood topic. Nasser does a great job of humanizing Palestine without falling for Western thinking traps and actively calling them out. The book is a bit too wordy at times and I skimmed some subsegments since they were translated poems and interviews that I would rather read in Arabic. The chapter about the three resistance fighters hits hard and you cannot be the same afterwards.
I feel I've read so much about these topics that I've hit an ideological brick wall, my next book should switch it up a bit.
I feel I've read so much about these topics that I've hit an ideological brick wall, my next book should switch it up a bit.
June 11, 2015
I think the real heart of his book is in the last two chapters. I understand that he perhaps had to frame martyrdom because of its controversial representation in Western media, but I wish he went into greater detail into the martyrs' narratives.
February 20, 2012
Changed my way of thinking about this.
October 13, 2024
Really a great study of martyrdom operations during the Second Intifada. The drawbacks for me were the disciplinary parts of the text, with significant parts of the front and back ends allotted to somewhat boilerplate language about the social construction of cultural practices typical of the anthropology I’ve read.
Abufarha situates the advent of martyrdom operations in the historical context of Israeli attempts at territorial gains during the Oslo “peace process” and the capitulation to these strategies by Fatah. The Islamic parties of Hamas and PIJ introduced the martyrdom operation, forging a deep connection with Palestinian meaning-making since the time of the Israeli occupation. This in turn led other resistance groups to adopt the tactic, including paradoxically Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, though Abufarha argues their use of ishtishhadiyeen to take a more complex role in reinforcing the Palestinian Authority’s actions.
Abufarha analyzes the martyrdom operation through several different lenses, distinguishing it from Durkheim’s classical sociological interpretation of suicide. He looks at the daily life of the individual in the occupied West Bank, poetics and writing concerning ishtishhadiyeen, their individual lives and histories, the groups which organize the operations, as well as western theory on the subject, with a productive critique of the work of Robert Pape. Altogether, it’s very compelling, especially the deeply personal aspects of the poetic writings and Abufarha’s own childhood experiences under occupation.
Now that the martyrdom operations have themselves been laid somewhat to the wayside as rockets and eventually more traditional fida’iyin tactics were adopted by a resurgent Palestinian resistance, perhaps we can consider them a strategy of a movement at a nadir in its military capabilities. There is also more to it than that certainly. By now, the subject is a matter of interest more historical than contemporary, though its shapes and tenors still inflect the resistance and Palestinian society presently and the overall outlook of both.
Abufarha situates the advent of martyrdom operations in the historical context of Israeli attempts at territorial gains during the Oslo “peace process” and the capitulation to these strategies by Fatah. The Islamic parties of Hamas and PIJ introduced the martyrdom operation, forging a deep connection with Palestinian meaning-making since the time of the Israeli occupation. This in turn led other resistance groups to adopt the tactic, including paradoxically Fatah’s own Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, though Abufarha argues their use of ishtishhadiyeen to take a more complex role in reinforcing the Palestinian Authority’s actions.
Abufarha analyzes the martyrdom operation through several different lenses, distinguishing it from Durkheim’s classical sociological interpretation of suicide. He looks at the daily life of the individual in the occupied West Bank, poetics and writing concerning ishtishhadiyeen, their individual lives and histories, the groups which organize the operations, as well as western theory on the subject, with a productive critique of the work of Robert Pape. Altogether, it’s very compelling, especially the deeply personal aspects of the poetic writings and Abufarha’s own childhood experiences under occupation.
Now that the martyrdom operations have themselves been laid somewhat to the wayside as rockets and eventually more traditional fida’iyin tactics were adopted by a resurgent Palestinian resistance, perhaps we can consider them a strategy of a movement at a nadir in its military capabilities. There is also more to it than that certainly. By now, the subject is a matter of interest more historical than contemporary, though its shapes and tenors still inflect the resistance and Palestinian society presently and the overall outlook of both.
April 21, 2022
This book responds to the idea that non-Palestinians have of martyrdom operations: that they are a disconcerting and unimaginable response to Israeli violence. Abufarha clearly reflects his thesis throughout the book: to explain how martyrdom operations in Palestine are culturally legitimate with respect to Palestine's early history of land dispossession, and the conceptions of martyrdom that have involved there since the al-Aqsa Intifada. He does a great job of making this argument explicit. I love the book!
December 27, 2024
Incredibly insightful and clarifying. It's definitely a more academic read (so the prose doesn't always read fast or easily) but I'm so glad I read it. Pairs well with Palestine Inside-Out and Hamas Contained (both must-reads imo). Will be thinking about this one for years to come, no doubt
February 18, 2017
Powerful and clear
This book is a sober and holistic approach to understanding how acts of terrorism/suicide bombings manifest in Palestine. The author uses history, ethnography and case studies to create picture that demonstrates how and why these things manifest. This book, in my mind also goes a long way to forcing the reader to think about current "solutions" to terrorism and present a picture that demonstrates that these methods just make the problems worth.
I often say, you don't have to like something but if you want to really address a problem you have to understand it. This book goes a long way to doing just that.
This book is a sober and holistic approach to understanding how acts of terrorism/suicide bombings manifest in Palestine. The author uses history, ethnography and case studies to create picture that demonstrates how and why these things manifest. This book, in my mind also goes a long way to forcing the reader to think about current "solutions" to terrorism and present a picture that demonstrates that these methods just make the problems worth.
I often say, you don't have to like something but if you want to really address a problem you have to understand it. This book goes a long way to doing just that.
October 6, 2009
I probably have a better understanding of the history and reasons behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the average American, but I learned a lot from "The Making of a Human Bomb." It's the best book I've come across on explaining the source of conflict. I knew the least about what apparently most Palestinians-in-occupied-areas assume Americans know: what daily life is like for the average person in Israeli-occupied Palestinian areas. Reading this book really helped me understand the deeper reasons behind the conflict, why peace seems unreachable, why suicide attacks are used, and why they're used against civilian populations.
While parts of this book are rather technical in language (especially the introduction and conclusion, which basically state what aspects the book covered and how the author went about his research), the great majority of the book is in conversational language and easy to follow. I found the conversational parts extremely interesting and enlightening.
Since the book intentionally focuses on how Palestinians view the conflict with Israel, Israel doesn't come off as looking very good. However, the author simply presents the facts and does a good job of leaving it up to the reader to judge whether the actions on either side are moral or not. I never felt like this was a "bash Israel" or "pro resistance" book. It came across as an objective look at the problem, how it developed, and the underlying cultural motivations behind the popularity of suicide bombs as a means of Palestinian resistance.
The author does a very good job of presenting a complex situation and making it understandable. It's a powerful book. I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the core reasons behind the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, understanding the Palestinian use of suicide attacks on civilians, and/or understanding some factors which drive the acceptance and use of suicide bombs in any culture.
While parts of this book are rather technical in language (especially the introduction and conclusion, which basically state what aspects the book covered and how the author went about his research), the great majority of the book is in conversational language and easy to follow. I found the conversational parts extremely interesting and enlightening.
Since the book intentionally focuses on how Palestinians view the conflict with Israel, Israel doesn't come off as looking very good. However, the author simply presents the facts and does a good job of leaving it up to the reader to judge whether the actions on either side are moral or not. I never felt like this was a "bash Israel" or "pro resistance" book. It came across as an objective look at the problem, how it developed, and the underlying cultural motivations behind the popularity of suicide bombs as a means of Palestinian resistance.
The author does a very good job of presenting a complex situation and making it understandable. It's a powerful book. I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested in the core reasons behind the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, understanding the Palestinian use of suicide attacks on civilians, and/or understanding some factors which drive the acceptance and use of suicide bombs in any culture.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews