The Road to Martyrs' Square
A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber
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- $149.00
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- $149.00
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With the beginning of the first intifada in 1987, American scholars Oliver and Steinberg spent six years living in Gaza, collecting interviews and Palestinian political ephemera, much of it related to the multifaceted organization known as Hamas, which first carried out suicide bombings during that time. The pair characterize Hamas's ideology as schizophrenic; the book they have produced feels intentionally disorienting. Part one episodically traces Hamas's development through a political biography of its leader, Sheikh Yasin (who was killed by an Israeli missile last March). Oliver and Steinberg offer a tremendous amount of anecdotal texture, giving a chilling sense of what it was like to live in Gaza as it was engulfed by an Islamism that professes "not only not to be afraid of death, but to love it passionately." Part two offers an unprecedentedly extensive set of photos, translations and interpretations of Hamas graffiti; this section is horrifying and fascinating. Part three offers the most sustained and detailed views, in English, inside the preparation and deployment of suicide bombers, featuring extended exchanges with cell members and the families of the bombers themselves. Knowledgeable, colloquial, relatively nonpartisan and deeply skeptical and smart, this book offers an intensive look at one of the major forces in Palestinian society, one that is as unsettling as it is penetrating. Corrections: In the Nov. 22 review of America's Military Today by Tod Ensign, the author's current employment was misstated. Ensign is the director of Citizen Soldier, not of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.Almost Paradise will, contrary to what's stated in our review , include a chapter and epilogue dealing with the outcome of the trial of Daniel Pelosi for the murder of Ted Ammon.
