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The Phenomenon of Palestinian Suicide Terrorism
and freedom fighters, some are either and some are neither. But what is important
is whether their missions break the law of the territory they operate in and
concentrate their activities against, or international law. In such a case, regardless
their possible virtuous and righteous scope, they can be more than legitimately
considered the object of a criminological research. Terrorism can be a tactical tool
in a military conflict for undermining the morale and the resistance of the opponent
(Eckstein, 1964) and a strategy of insurgency. It is claimed to be an evaluative
concept (Wilkinson, 1974, p. 101; Hutchinson, 1972, pp. 373-396), defined in
terms either of motivation/aims of the actors, or by the nature of their activities
(Bassiouni, 1974; Hacker, 1979). It is exactly this nature of the activities, the
means deployed and not the end sought to be achieved (Merari, 1978, pp. 331-346;
Dobson and Payne, 1982), that can make very small the definitional distance
between even true “freedom fighters” and “common criminals” (Kaufman, 1986) .
Suicide bombings, apart from the relevant national homicide laws they violate
(depending on where the attacks take place), can also fall into the category of
“Crimes against Humanity.” Although the definition might differ slightly from
treaty to treaty, all condemn the deliberate, widespread, or systematic killing of
civilians by an organization or government. 7 Unlike war crimes, “Crimes against
Humanity” may be committed in times of peace or in periods of unrest that do not
rise to the level of an armed conflict. 8 The most recent definition is contained in the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force on July
1, 2002. The statute characterizes as “Crimes against Humanity” the “participation
in and knowledge of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian
population,” and “the multiple commission of [such] acts…against any civilian
population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to
commit such attack.” The Statute’s introduction speaks of “policy to commit such
attack” to mean that the state or organization actively promoted or encouraged such
attacks against a civilian population. The elements of the “Crime against Humanity
of Murder” require that: (1) “the perpetrator killed one or more persons,” (2) “[t]he
conduct was committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed
against a civilian population,” and (3) “[t]he perpetrator knew that the conduct was
part of, or intended the conduct to be part of, a widespread or systematic attack
against a civilian population. 9
Moreover, the suicide mission- from a criminal law perspective- is a murderous act
with a particular mens rea: the willingness to kill combined with the willingness to
die, 10 with the later expressed as the specific operational method to accomplish the
first scope. We are actually dealing with a combined violent act, one of special
characteristics. This is why the component element ‘suicide’ indeed may be a
misleading one, because the main objective of the mission is not suicide but mass
homicide, albeit carried out by means of self-destruction designed to inflict lethal
harm on others. 11 The suicide terrorist actually becomes a ‘human time-bomb’ in
order to hurt others and clearly needs to be distinguished from an ordinary person
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