NUMBER OF WOMEN SUICIDE BOMBERS EXPECTED TO GROW

by Fawzia Sheikh

(IPS) JERUSALEM -- Researchers estimate between 20 and 60 suicide bombings in Israel have been carried out by women in the four years since 27-year-old nurse Wafa Idris, a resident of the Amari refugee camp in Ramallah, killed one person and wounded 90 in a Jaffa Street attack in the heart of Jerusalem.

Idris's fateful act that day in January, in the throes of the second Intifadah, or uprising against Jews, changed the dimensions of the battle because it made Israel even more vulnerable to attack -- this time from an unsuspected source.

"As time progresses, more and more girls will blow themselves up," Yoram Schweitzer, a researcher at Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, told IPS. He has interviewed would-be Palestinian suicide bombers over more than two years. "More people are influenced when others are doing it."

Women comprise 16 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers, including attacks thwarted by the Israeli military, Schweitzer said.

He said these young women for the most part are motivated by "the occupation, the need to defend their nation," which are the same factors spurring men. Some are "regular girls"; others are particularly religious.

According to Schweitzer's research, it is not necessary for women to have a personal problem from which they must purify themselves via suicide bombing. This is contrary to research on the subject undertaken by Israeli security forces that suggested the perpetrators almost always had emotional baggage, and killing themselves and Jews was the only way to boost their status.

In Idris' case, Israeli security forces at the time had noted her husband rejected her for being unable to conceive, and as a result she was alienated by a conservative society in which marriage and children are the norm.

Moreover, Israeli officials argued, her work as a health-care worker put her on the bloody frontlines of the daily clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinian gunmen. She was hurt twice by rubber bullets while treating Palestinians during volunteer work at the Palestinian Red Crescent.

In line with this theory centering on personal motives and redemption, some researchers told IPS that other women executing suicide bombings or involved in other ways with attacks were at times promiscuous, so-called spinsters, women entangled romantically with militant organization members, or survivors of family who had been killed by the Israeli military.

"Sometimes you get the sense they have personal problems" or hear about it from other sources. "But ... they will never mention it," said Schweitzer of interviews conducted with women whose fatal plans were foiled.

Through extensive discussions undertaken with Palestinian women, Anat Berko, author of a book on suicide bombers and a criminologist at the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism in Herzliya in Israel, told IPS she learned about some of the psychological techniques terrorist groups employ to sign up young women.

One strategy is promising that in the afterlife they will become one of the virgins male Palestinians are awarded following their suicide deaths, Berko said.

Many women who approached militant groups were initially rejected because Palestinian society was reluctant to condone the violence, Schweitzer said. But after Idris' death, radical religious leaders were quick to applaud suicide bombing as an equal opportunity venture for all, although some terrorist groups still oppose the idea.

Women who don an explosive belt or pack their bag with nail bombs must cross more mental bridges than their male counterparts, noted Schweitzer, such as being forced to leave the family home without permission.

But when they are enlisted, one advantage for female bombers is that they may refuse to remove their shirt in front of a male soldier at a checkpoint, in which case a female soldier will be dispatched, Berko explained. "Sometimes it's too late," she said, noting that a bomb can be detonated in a matter of seconds.

The world is often surprized by stories like Idris' violent end, and the scores who followed her, yet observers of the trend argue they should not be. "The concept is women are more soft and unlethal," said Schweitzer.

But the actions of female suicide bombers are well documented around the world, whether in Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Iraq or among the Kurds.

A suicide attack may seem empowering to some Palestinian women, but Berko said the same male oppression in everyday life is evident in the bombing culture, as women fail to achieve a sense of liberation amidst male superiors exercising the brunt of power. "The women are just the bullet of the gun."

In the end, after applause has waned for another so-called female martyr, discussions that Berko said she has had with Arabs about the young bomber -- regardless of whether she lived or died -- reveal a double standard. A young man may be heralded, but a woman who elected to become a human bomb is treated as an enigma in Palestinian society and finds few suitors.

Not everyone agrees with that view.

"Palestinian society regards female suicide bombers the same way as they regard the men, which is they are heroines," Maha Abu-Dayyeh Shamas, director of the Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling in Jerusalem, told IPS. "They have sacrificed their lives for the public good. They have made a statement about the inhuman and intolerable situation."

Most people feel sad that young people have to pursue this approach, she said, "but the situation is so difficult that people understand why a young person has to do this. It's so frustrating. It's so de-humanizing. It's so hopeless."