“The message for Israel, and the rest of the world, is clear: Terrorism is not just a fringe phenomenon. Terrorists are not just strange young men whispering in dark rooms. Terrorists are high-school students, terrorists are women—and terrorists are all around you. No one—not the old man on the bicycle or the young girl walking to school—can be discounted. All Palestinians are potential terrorists, and terrorism will never go away. Whether or not all of this is actually true is immaterial: The point is to make the Israelis think it is, and thus give up, withdraw, quit the Middle East—or else undertake a massive and potentially disastrous military operation of the sort that may have begun this week.” — Anne Applebaum Slate
That the Palestinians sponsors of the suicide bombing campaign are branching out from the use of typical malleable, futureless male zealots, I agree with Applebaum, tells us on the most pedestrian level something about the effectiveness of the Israeli border checkpoints in excluding ‘the usual suspects’. But while Applebaum concludes that the ‘girl bombers’ represent the radicalization of more pedestrian, non-fanatic Palestinian discontent, one might just as easily speculate that they are the exception that proves the rule. I don’t think anyone knows how many young women are lining up to detonate themselves for the cause, how plausible the claim of the al Aqsa Brigade that they are training 200 female suicide bombers is — although, as Applebaum points out, it makes perfect sense for al Aqsa to claim they are. The distinction Applebaum tries to draw, between a ‘political’ war and a ‘religious’ one, is too simplistic, especially in the Middle East, to be a basis for answering questions crucial to anyone troubled by events in the Middle East — how inexhaustible a supply of potential suicide bombers the Palestinians have at their disposal and whether any measures to prevent their attacks can be effective.
