The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber - Softcover

Oliver, Anne Marie; Steinberg, Paul F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195305590 ISBN 13: 9780195305593

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Don't expect to find here the usual clichés about suicide bombers and what drives them. In this unique study, Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg render the story of two intertwining, often clashing journeys. The authors lived for six months with a Palestinian refugee family in Gaza at the beginning of the intifada, and offer a gritty, poetic portrait of the time. They also provide an unrivalled documentary of the underground media they collected during the course of six years in the area. Although they could not have surmised as much at the beginning, they soon found themselves led through these media into the world of the suicide bomber. Their early study, notably, anticipated the spread of suicide missions years in advance.
Dispensing with the platitudes and dogma that typify discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the authors show that the suicide bomber is a complex, contradictory construction, and can be explained neither in terms of cold efficacy nor sheer evil. Theirs is the only book on the subject to illustrate the ecstatic, intoxicating aspects of suicide missions, and provide extensive access to materials that have remained largely unseen in the West despite the fact that they have served as indispensable tools in the construction and propagation of the suicide bomber. The book contains 86 illustrations drawn from the authors' archive as well as numerous conversations with leaders and followers of Hamas, including a rare interview with a suicide bomber whose bomb failed to explode on an Israeli bus in Jerusalem.
Here is an important and timely work that will challenge the way we think about the intifada, suicide bombers, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg are writers based in Portland, Oregon. They are Research Scholars in Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and former Visiting Scholars at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"When we first moved to Gaza in 1988, not long after the intifada had broken out, Sheikh Ahmad Yasin of the Islamic Resistance Movement--better known by its acronym Hamas--was virtually unknown. By the time we left the area five years later, a series of suicide bombings had made him famous around the world, and ordinary people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had begun to express some degree of sympathy with the man and the movement. Even good friends began to renounce the leftist ideology of their youth, gave up occasional drinking sprees, got married, and got religion. Getting religion obviously didn't mean you were necessarily a Hamasawi, a Hamas devotee, but in the highly politicized world of the Bank and Strip, the lines between the two were easily blurred."

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0195305590
• ISBN 13: 9780195305593
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304