When some people enter academia they are looking for a quite uneventful life, University of Toronto sociology professor Robert Brym is not one of those people. His latest research investigates Palestinian suicide bombers, their rationale and motivation. No matter what he found he was guaranteed to upset a few people and it is a fair bet that some of them will be Arabs and some will be Jewish.

It seems that the Hamas campaign of suicide bombing attacks against Isreal may well have been strategic in motivation however the motivations of the inidividual suicide bombers are quite different. To convince a human being to give up their life for a cause is a substantial achievement and it appears from Dr Bobs work that arguing strategic advantage is not going to deliver the suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are primarily motivated by a desire for revenge. By examining events that preceded each specific attack, he found that particular Israeli actions such as specific killings prompted most attacks.

He writes

For the most part bombers gave up their lives to avenge the killing of a close relative, as retribution for specific attacks against the Palestinian people or as payback for perceived attacks against Islam."

It is, of course, in the interest of the propaganda machine to portray these poeple as crazy, irrational and sick or that their culture led them to behave in ways that were crazy. It is far more difficult to view them as making a rational choice that was made to seem appropriate by the actions of others, in this case the Isreali army.

So what would happen if Isreal were to suspend all extra-judicial killings? What would happen if Isreal, a wealthy state by any measure, was to pour aid into Palestine? What would happen if Isreal were to offer the hand of peace in the certain knowledge that it would be bitten?

We can all speculate safely on those questions because it is pretty sure that they are entirely hypothetical. Isreal seems set on a course of quashing the suicide bombers through military action which is guaranteed to breed a whole new wave of suicide bombers.

So who's fault is it? The correct answer is, of course, "Who cares?" All right minded compassionate people want the confict to end and, like in all similar situations, there are guilty parties on all sides.

Sadly, The Green Man thinks that the situation is hopeless because the strength and wisdom that it would take to break the cycle is far beyond those who, driven by power, seek office in parliament.

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