Wafa Idris was the first of her kind in modern Palestine. She was featured on the cover of Time magazine at the young age of 28. Saddam Hussein ordered a memorial erected in her honor in one of Baghdad’s central squares. Newspapers in Egypt, Jordan, and London praised her courage. Women named their daughters after her. “Allah willing, we will all become like Wafa Idris,” taught a good-natured sheikh on a Lebanese children’s broadcast. A song was written about her and played on Palestinian Authority Television:
Oh blossom who was on Earth and now in Heaven/ Allah Akbar/ Oh Palestine of the Arabs/ Allah Akbar, Oh Wafa!/ But you chose Shahada/ In death you have brought life to aspiration.
The lyrics tell the story well. Idris became a star as a shaheeda—a female martyr—setting a precedent that many would follow.
On January 27, 2002, the beloved daughter, aunt, academic, and ambulance medic set out from her home in the Amari Refugee camp in the Palestinian Authority. She slipped past security checkpoints undetected and a few hours later reached her target: a shopping complex in the center of Jerusalem. An 81-year-old man was killed and more than 100 people were wounded in the ensuing suicide blast.
In the four years following Wafa’s martyrdom, a staggering 67 Palestinian women attempted similar attacks. They were part of a global trend of expanded participation in terror by women and children, who became key recruits for organizations like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Hamas, Fatah, and the Tamil Tigers. To take a recent example, on January 10 Boko Haram deployed a young girl, identified by witnesses as about 10 years old, on a suicide bombing mission that killed 20 shoppers and injured at least 18 others in a crowded market in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri.
Dispatchers, be they Nigerian, Iraqi, or Palestinian, see similar advantages in recruiting females. Women and girls garner significant publicity and convey an image of population-wide participation in a movement. Additionally, females more easily pass through security checkpoints, as it is taboo in some traditional societies for male officers to physically examine women. Even in more developed countries females are often assumed to be bystanders or victims and thus elude suspicion. Their attacks shock the public and unhinge traditional assumptions about civilians and combatants—everyone suddenly represents a potential threat.
Thus, Idris’s participation was clearly advantageous in several respects to the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the extension of Fatah that employed her. Some claim that her deed also heralded concurrent benefits for Palestinian women. They perceive Idris’s attack and others by Palestinian women as self-empowering acts that demonstrate female leverage and influence in a patriarchal society. But in reality Idris was a victim. Palestinian women have been increasingly exploited by extremist organizations and a culture of martyrdom that offer them short-lived glory and ersatz equality in exchange for their lives.
Equality for All?
For those like Shefa’a al-Qudsi, the exchange is a rewarding escape from “doing nothing,” as the would-be shaheeda asserted in a media interview. Idris inspired Al-Qudsi to volunteer for a suicide mission of her own in April 2002. “[Until] Wafa, women had just helped [extremist] jihad by making food.” Of course, her claim is only partially accurate. Jihadists Atef Elian and Ahlam Tamimi both planted bombs in Jerusalem prior to Idris’s example—in 1987 and 2001, respectively—so Idris was by no means the first female terrorist in Palestine. Nevertheless, female involvement in Palestinian terrorism spiked notably in 2002 and grew to encompass a multitude of suicide attacks during the Second Intifada, a period of heightened Israeli-Palestinian tension. This trend contrasts with the First Intifada a decade earlier, during which the highest accolade for a woman was becoming “Mother of a Shaheed” by bearing sons who fought and died for the movement.
In the Muslim world, women’s escalating participation in the conflict raised eyebrows. The dearth of Palestinian women in respected positions of authority in 2002 contributed to their image as weak-willed and incapable. Only 10.4 percent of females participated in the Palestinian labor force in 2002, compared to 65.5 percent of males. Furthermore, women who did work were concentrated in so-called “caring occupations,” such as teaching, rather than medicine, engineering, or law. These proportions only equalized slightly by 2013. Women also continue to be virtually absent from the public sector, with males comprising 87.2 percent of Palestinian legislators and 95.7 percent of ambassadors as of 2012.
In fact, according to research by the School of Advanced Military Studies, an improved avenue for female political representation and economic participation might have curbed women’s involvement in terror in the first place. Women “increasingly participate in acts of terrorism in patriarchal societies” compared to “Western” ones which offer alternative outlets for self-expression and determination, documents the Journal of International Women’s Studies.
Thus, in an otherwise unequal society, Idris supposedly found a forum for women to take a putatively equal role “Palestinian women have torn the gender classification out of their birth certificates, declaring that sacrifice for the Palestinian homeland would not be for men alone,” asserted Samiya Sa’ad al-Din, a columnist for the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar, in 2002.Egypt’s Al-Shaab newspaper painted Idris as a bulwark of Islamic feminism, crediting her with having “exploded all the myths about women’s weakness, submissiveness and enslavement.” Six months later, one in every five Palestinian suicide bombers was female. The idolization of Idris and of successive shaheedas rendered involvement in terrorism a culturally acceptable alternative to homemaking and engendered a new place for Palestinian women in the public eye, leading some to suggest Idris’s activism paved the way to “achiev[ing] gender equality.” This is, however, far from the reality.
Sacrificial Lambs
A closer examination of women’s roles in extremist groups unravels the myth of their empowerment through terrorism. The Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies pronounces that there is no indication of a “fundamental shift in attitudes toward women in radical Islam” versus those who do not participate in extremist organizations. Women have yet to permeate the higher ranks of terrorist organizations, ranks comprised of dispatchers and operatives who coordinate missions. Firsthand accounts indicate that they have little contact with male leaders other than to receive directions on executing attacks.
The abundance of would-be martyrs in Israeli prisons has created an unparalleled opportunity to understand their paths to extremism through interviews with the prospective shaheedas and shaheeds themselves. Dr. Anat Berko of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism found many instances of domination and intimidation of women by male operatives in her investigation. In one interview a woman recounted how she was summarily slotted for a bombing attack and “begged the older man who was in charge of military affairs to release [her from the operation].” Her pleas were disregarded. The secretive nature of terrorist operations leaves power in the hands of male dispatchers, enabling abuse of female recruits to go undetected and undeterred.
Another interviewer, Yoram Schweitzer, a NATO counterterrorism consultant, believes Palestinian women are no more than “pawns and sacrificial lambs.” The prevalence of females as suicide bombers rather than administrative leaders is itself demonstrative of their exploitation, he says. After all, operational strategists are not encouraged to self-detonate. Recruits for suicide operations therefore occupy society’s outermost rings, often comprising the weak and vulnerable.
A Desperate Escape
The participation of Palestinian women in suicide bombings serves more as an escape from societal pressure than as an expression of female liberation. Idris is an instructive model. Was she really the devoted martyr as eulogized in song, sacrificing her life to fight Israeli occupation? Interviews with family and friends tell another story. Idris lived at home after a failed marriage. Her husband, also her cousin, divorced her eight years into the marriage because of her infertility. At age 28, she looked forward to a bleak future in a society where women’s primary value is the ability to bear offspring.
Studies by the American Psychology Association and the Jamestown Foundation in 2012 and 2005, respectively, indicate that female terrorists have a greater “emphasis on individual emotions” and “personal experiences” as opposed to ideological commitment. Such evidence suggests that women, more so than their male counterparts, engage in terrorism out of personal motivations rather than pursuit of a collective goal. This is just one potential reason women have been known to vacillate mid-attack and renege on operations.
Many shaheedas seem to deeply desire an escape from the pressures of traditional society. Hanadi al-Malek, for example, was a spinster at 27, but as a suicide bomber in a Haifa restaurant in 2003, she became the “Bride of Haifa” and earned symbolically in death what she could not have in life. Faiza Ahmad chose martyrdom over life as a transsexual after years of degradation and deprecation. She had been nicknamed mutarajilla—manly woman. Ayat al-Ahras and Andleeb Takatka Suleiman were both said to have violated familial honor through illicit sexual behavior before they executed bombings in Jerusalem a month apart from each other.
Martyrdom functions as an acceptable and even glorified form of suicide. A woman on the fringes of society who chooses shahada has the chance of becoming a celebrated hero with her portraits displayed in classrooms, universities, and mosques as examples to all. There are numerous instances of “women who are ostracized … turning to suicide attacks for redemption and social acceptance,” note Lauren Squires and Lindsey Seaver of the Institute of the Study of War in an interview with HPR.
Although it might be tempting to depict female terrorism as a liberating, albeit unconventional, path to empowerment in an environment of male dominance, the reality in Palestine is that women are victims rather than beneficiaries. Experts unfortunately concur that in a stagnant social situation, women will continue to be abused for their strategic and tactical advantage. Perhaps the only remedy for the appalling state of women in terror is increased social and economic opportunity. In a Palestine that shows few signs of improving gender equality, however, the trend may be difficult to reverse.
This article has been updated from an earlier version (2/25/15).
Image source: Wikimedia Commons