Palästinensische „Märtyrer“: eine vergleichende Analyse über Selbstmordattentäter

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain how suicide attacks, which began as a very specific and limited strategy of Islamist organizations, could become more generalized. The figure of the martyr has become the main figure of the intifada al Aqsa, and the suicide bomber is one, if not the main, incarnation. Through an analysis of the Palestinian discourse of martyrdom, this article demonstrates how the martyr constitutes the figure of the „national hero,” a sacralized and exemplary figure. This derives from the double association with a cause, the Palestinian national cause, and with a system of beliefs (faith). The sacralization of this figure of the hero and its integration into religious terms of reference makes it possible to cite the next world, which at the same time authorizes the reference to death and to overcoming death. The reference to death corresponds to the evolution of the Palestinian analysis of the balance of power, to their feeling of being the losers anyway. In this context, commitment to the national struggle can only mean death, so the hero of such a struggle is the hero who dies.

But the sacralization of his death and its integration into a religious context of meaning makes it possible to go beyond the level of death, and to create an instrument for victory and a better future: for the personal fate of the shahid, on the one hand, who is promised the rewards of paradise, but also for the national struggle, which each shahid connects a little more with the jihad, the sacred fight in which victory is certain in the long term. The insistence on a sacralized national hero, the martyr, thus allows, through the integration of the national struggle in a religious frame of meaning, a double overcoming: the overcoming of the death of the fighters and the overcoming of the certain failure of the national cause. Now that it is registered in another longer-term temporality, religious atemporality and the eschatological temporality of the jihad, this national fight can again be envisaged as victorious.