Since the attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, certain Western media and organizations have continued to describe the nearly 19,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, according to Hamas figures, as “martyrs”. A terminology that the terrorist group uses to describe the deaths on the Palestinian side. Thus the Qatari television channel Al-Jazeera which, in its Arabic edition, systematically mentions the “martyrs” killed by the “Israeli occupation”. Ditto in the United States, where the slogan “glory to our martyrs” regularly appears on campuses or in the communications of certain organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). In Barcelona too, demonstrators unfurled a banner in October reading “honor to the martyrs”. Without forgetting France, where the Palestine Vaincra collective is increasing, among others, tributes to Palestinian “martyrs”.
In Palestine, the term “shahid” (the “witness” in Islam, often translated as “martyr”) has been very anchored in the vocabulary since the 20th century to designate someone who fought for the Palestinian cause at the cost of his life. But the martyr does not only designate the fighter. Any individual, man, woman or child, killed by the Israeli camp can be described as a “martyr”. The term is thus used as much by the Red Crescent (the Palestinian division of the Red Cross) as by certain representatives of the Palestinian Authority, Fatah or Hamas.
Indoctrination
The figure of the martyr has largely permeated Palestinian society, particularly during the second Intifada (2000-2005), under the impetus of indoctrination and suicide attacks carried out under the aegis of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. In his study entitled “The impossible Palestinian strategy of martyrdom” published in 2003, the professor of political sociology at Inalco, Laetitia Bucaille, writes that “conferring the status of “martyr” on inactive civilians makes it possible to promote an interpretation of the fight which would pit harmless Palestinians against Israelis wielding force. . This reading supports the thesis of the profound inequality of the balance of power between oppressors and oppressed.
She adds that “the aura aroused by the figure of the ‘martyr’ is evident in the discourse developed by the age group of 15-24 year olds, those we call ‘the little brothers’. This generation has observed the first Intifada with the eyes of children. Marked by the violence of the interventions of the Israeli army, she also remembers the “heroes” who fell for the cause. When adolescents are asked to express their personal desires and their plans for the future, several affirm without specificity that they wish to become “martyrs”.”
Advancing “the cause”
“Hamas, like Islamic Jihad, is riding on the tragic history of the Palestinians and the aura of the figure of the “martyr” within society to advance “the cause”, but as they understand it, it “that is to say through the prism of jihad, and to promote their deadly ideology among the Palestinians”, describes the Syrian writer and expert on the Arab world Omar Youssef Souleimane.
For Hamas, the figure of the martyr, and its specifically religious dimension, is so central that its armed wing (the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades) was named in reference to the Syrian Izz al-Din al-Qassam (1882 -1935), one of the precursors of the Islamist movement of Palestinian nationalism, perceived by many as one of the region’s first martyrs. In his statements, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh regularly refers to the martyrs as “the tribute of freedom, liberation and independence.”
“Westerners who use this term seem to forget the Islamic religious charge that it covers, especially in the eyes of Hamas and, therefore, the nature of this war: a crusade against the Jews, a holy war and not just a territorial war,” notes historian Georges Bensoussan. But make no mistake: some of those who use this term in the West share this binary representation of good versus evil (of which Israel is the embodiment).”
However, it must be remembered that not all Palestinians are committed to the ideology of Hamas. According to an article from Foreign Affairs, citing the Arab Barometer, an independent research network that benchmarks for the Middle East and North Africa, only 29% of Gazans had confidence in Hamas just before the bloody attack on October 7. More Gazans attribute responsibility for their food difficulties to poor management by Hamas (31%) than to an external blockade decided by Israel and Egypt (16%). Better: only a minority of Gazans share Hamas’s wish to destroy Israel, and 73% favor a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to 20% who favor a military solution that could lead to the destruction of Israel. Note that half of them believe that democracy is the best form of government.
Economic challenge
How can we explain, in this case, that many Palestinians continue to describe their dead as “martyrs”? Beyond the spiritual issues (for Muslim Palestinians, the martyr gains eternal life), patriotic (he helps restore dignity to the Palestinian nation) and social (he becomes a hero for society and his portrait will be publicly displayed ), noted by many specialists, the economic issue plays an important role.
In 2022, the New York Times reported in its columns the story of Palestinian Muhammad Abu Naise, 27, killed during an Israeli operation in a refugee camp in the West Bank. According to the newspaper, the young man did not belong to any political movement – which did not prevent Islamic Jihad from wrapping his body in a black flag. After the funeral, members of the political group left a sign to hang outside the family home reading: “Islamic Jihad and its military wing honor the heroic martyr Muhammad Abu Naise.” His father didn’t want to display it. “Because of these words, Israel could use the excuse and say: ‘We did not kill a civilian,'” he said, according to the New York Times. Before being convinced by his wife and family. The argument? The financial support that Islamic Jihad could provide.
To claim responsibility for the dead, armed groups “often offer financial support to families,” the headline noted. In her article published in the magazine “Tsantsa” in 1999, the Swiss ethnologist Christine von Kaenel-Mounoud explained in more detail that “during the prosperous period of the MRP (Palestinian Resistance Movement), the fighter was insured, in case he had to lose his life, the economic and educational support of his family by the political organization for which he fought. An issue which was not the least given the living conditions in the camps and the difficult access to jobs. .” However, it is difficult to estimate precisely what the situation is today, at a time when Palestinian deaths have numbered in the thousands since October 7.
Hierarchy of the dead
In his chronicle of Point entitled ““Chahid” or the dead VIP“, the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud believed that “transforming the dead Palestinian into a “chahid” is not only to reduce the universal experience of death to a “confessional assignment”, but it is also to impose by semantics a “hierarchy between corpses”. This suggests, the author emphasized, “that “our” deaths are noble deaths, and “theirs” are remains or carcasses. We can smile about it if we are unbelievers, or barely be interested in the title of shahid whether we care about balance sheets or facts. But this abstract decoration, in vogue in the so-called “Muslim” world, above all signals a sneaky and sad classification: as if, faced with a West that is accused of hierarchizing the living, we responded by hierarchizing the dead.
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