Are Suicide Bombers Suicidal?
Robert J. Brym
Department of Sociology
University of Toronto
Bader Araj
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Birzeit University
© Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj (2010)
To be submitted for publication in Terrorism and Political Violence (December 2010)
3,984 words
The project on which this paper is based was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (File No. 410-2005-0026). The authors are grateful to Jack
Veugelers for his critical comments on a draft. Please address correspondence to Robert J. Brym,
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave., Toronto M5S 2J4, Canada
( rbrym@chass.utoronto.ca
).
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Abstract
This paper critically assesses the recent finding of Ariel Merari and colleagues that Palestinian suicide bombers display an unusually high prevalence of depression and suicidal tendencies. It finds inconsistencies between Merari’s conclusions and the results of research on the prevalence and causes of depression among large, representative samples of Palestinians. It raises the possibility that interviewer and contextual effects contaminated Merari et al.’s findings. Finally, it presents evidence (drawn from a 25 percent random sample of Palestinian suicide bombers who conducted attacks between 2000 and 2005) that challenge Merari’s conclusions. The results of their analysis lead the authors to question the utility of a psychological approach in the study of suicide bombers and assert the importance of focusing on the social and political roots of the phenomenon.
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The Difficulty of Imputing Motives
Since the 1980s, researchers have argued that a wide range of factors motivate suicide bombers.
These factors include religious fanaticism, the desire to liberate occupied territory, the craving for revenge against occupiers, desperation originating in material deprivation, the lure of material inducements, and irrational urges grounded in psychopathology. The now-vast body of research literature devoted to suicide bombers has helped to deepen our understanding of how these factors operate, singly and in combination. It has broadened the evidentiary basis for our generalizations. Nonetheless, our ability to resolve many of the debates in the field, especially those concerning the relative causal weight of different variables in different contexts, continues to be hampered by methodological problems that are sometimes acknowledged but rarely overcome.
Foremost among these issues is over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, objective indicators, and small and/or unrepresentative samples. For example, researchers often base their claims about the motivations of suicide bombers on scraps of biographical evidence glued together from newspaper reports and other published sources, and statistics measuring the frequency and lethality of suicide attacks, economic conditions, and other indicators of the context within which suicide bombers operate. Analysts will of course always find it daunting to impute motives to social actors insofar as they lack direct access to the cognitive and limbic processes occurring in actors’ minds. However, the distance between the inner life of the suicide bomber and the kind of anecdotal and objective evidence that analysts often use to infer motives is so vast that one may sensibly wonder just how much the evidence reveals.
For this reason, the results of research recently published by Ariel Merari and colleagues are of more than passing interest.
1
Merari acknowledges that, “in the absence of evidence to the
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contrary, the conclusion that suicide bombers are just ordinary, normal people seems tentatively reasonable.” However, he also emphasizes that no one has ever reported relevant evidence based on direct psychological interviews with, and tests of, suicide bombers.
2
Merari does. He and his colleagues interviewed a convenience sample of 15 failed Palestinian suicide bombers – and, for comparative purposes, 12 Palestinian insurgents who engaged in non-suicide attacks and 14
Palestinian organizers of suicide attacks. His findings led him to conclude that conventional wisdom about the psychological ordinariness of suicide bombers is dubious. Here, we focus on just one of Merari’s findings: suicide bombers were more likely than others were to display depressive and suicidal symptoms. Specifically, “marked clinical signs” of depression were evident in 53 percent of the failed suicide bombers, compared to 21 percent of the organizers and
8 percent of the insurgents who engaged in non-suicide attacks. Fully 40 percent of the suicide bombers displayed suicidal tendencies apart from their political/religious desire for martyrdom compared to none in the other two groups.
3
We, in turn, raise questions about Merari’s methods and findings. First, we find inconsistencies between Merari’s conclusions and the results of research on the prevalence and causes of depression among large, representative samples of Palestinians. Second, we raise the possibility that interviewer and contextual effects contaminated Merari’s findings. Third, we present evidence challenging Merari’s conclusions. In 2006, we drew a 25 percent random sample of suicide bombers (n=42) from a database of collective violence events that occurred in
Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza between 2000 and 2005.
4
The database contained information on the residence of each suicide bomber, so it was possible to track down each one’s immediate family members and close friends. With a trained and closely supervised female assistant, this paper’s second author then conducted 68 in-depth, semi-structured interviews of the selected
4

bombers’ immediate family members and close friends in the West Bank. Another trained and closely supervised female assistant conducted 20 such interviews in Gaza. All interviews were conducted in Arabic. Not one family member or close friend who was contacted refused to be interviewed.
5
This primary data source was supplemented by relevant documentary material, including newspaper accounts, party statements, letters written by the bombers, their wills, and their martyrdom videos. Based on these sources, it was possible to construct profiles of the bombers’ social conditions and states of mind in the year leading up to their attacks. We present some of this evidence below.
6
In brief, we conclude that Merari’s claim about the depressive tendencies of suicide bombers may well be spurious and that his assertion concerning suicidal tendencies is likely an exaggeration. Conventional wisdom about the ordinariness of Palestinian suicide bombers seems to fit the facts better than Merari’s revisionism does.
Depression and Suicidality
Psychiatry textbooks typically view depression as a leading proximate cause of, or risk factor associated with, suicide.
7
Therefore, on its face, the finding that Palestinian suicide bombers are unusually prone to depression is important. As Merari notes, while Islam strictly prohibits suicide, most Palestinians view suicide bombers as martyrs. Suicidal Palestinians can therefore transform a potentially shameful act into a heroic deed by engaging in a suicide attack. In
Merari’s view, political and religious considerations may motivate some suicide attacks, but a psychopathological urge may motivate most of them.
Merari acknowledges that, because his sample is small and unrepresentative, his conclusions are provisional. However, his tentativeness might have turned to scepticism if he had attended more closely to the research literature on the prevalence and causes of depression
5

among large, representative samples of Palestinians. This body of work, although small, leads to hypotheses at variance with Merari’s conclusions.
The most recent and sophisticated such study randomly sampled 872 Jewish and
Palestinian Israelis.
8
Not surprisingly, the researchers found the prevalence of depression to be higher among Palestinians. However, once they controlled for a wide range of contextual factors, including level of education and prevalence of chronic disease, no statistically significant difference between the two groups remained. These findings are consistent with previous research. Palestinians unfailingly exhibit more depressive tendencies than Jewish Israelis do, but when analysts introduce appropriate controls, they substantially reduce or eliminate differences in prevalence rates between the groups. Israeli Jews and Palestinians with the same level of education, rate of chronic disease, and so on are typically nearly indistinguishable in terms of depression prevalence.
If we similarly matched Palestinian suicide bombers with insurgents who engaged in nonsuicide attacks and organizers of suicide attacks, would we also find a spurious association between group membership and depressive tendencies? Given the small, unrepresentative sample on which Merari bases his conclusions, we cannot know. However, one tantalizing finding suggests that an analogue of the spurious association between ethnic group membership and depression found in the literature might exist. Universally, formal education is strongly and negatively associated with depression prevalence. Of Merari’s three groups, the failed suicide bombers had the least formal education (93 percent never attended university) while the organizers had the most (57 percent never attended university).
9
This suggests that Merari’s finding of greater depression prevalence among failed suicide bombers may be spurious.
10
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Research on a large, representative sample of Palestinian families in the West Bank and
Gaza (n=7,000) adds to our scepticism.
11 The study shows that radical political engagement has no effect on depression for Palestinian males (who constituted 94 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers during the second intifada ). Male youths who participated in the first intifada (1987-93) were no more inclined to depression than were male youths who remained unengaged.
12
Overall, the former were psychologically resilient. Insofar as they defined their political engagement as an important part of a national struggle, and because family and community tended to strongly support them, engagement acted as a prophylactic against depression. This finding suggests the hypothesis that politically engaged Palestinians – perhaps even suicide bombers – are no more likely to be depressed and suicidal than others are.
Diagnostic Issues
Merari and his colleagues tested their assessments of respondents for inter-coder reliability. They also had a senior clinical specialist who was ignorant of the respondents’ group memberships code all interview and test materials independently. These procedures prevented idiosyncratic interpretations of the data. They enabled the achievement of an acceptable level of what some researchers call “objectivity,” which in practice means intersubjective consensus by members of a research community.
Of course, any intersubjective consensus may be invalid. In psychology and psychiatry, the likelihood of misdiagnosis increases if assessments are based on clinical observation rather than organic pathology. Misdiagnosis is especially likely when the immediate social context of the study and the relationship between interviewers and respondents bias responses in ways
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consonant with the expectations, backgrounds, and interests of the researchers.
13
We believe that
Merari’s study suffers from just this problem.
In particular, the interviewers may well have been seeking out signs of depression, which may have led to overdiagnosis, an increasingly common problem in psychology and psychiatry.
14
The respondents were political prisoners in Israeli jails, which likely led to the observation of a higher rate of depression and suicidal tendencies than one would find outside the prison system.
The interviews and tests were conducted by authority figures whom respondents probably saw as part of the coercive apparatus of an Israeli penal institution, perhaps leading prisoners to respond less than candidly and in a way that was uncorrelated with their behaviour. We note in this connection that the researchers administered an adapted version of the California Personality
Inventory but refrained from analyzing it because 36 percent of the failed suicide bombers completed less than half the questionnaire or gave answers indicating extreme inconsistency or strong efforts to please the interviewers. Consequently, the researchers based their findings on projective tests, such as the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test. Projective tests leave a lot to the imagination of the interpreter, and many if not most researchers now regard them as unreliable and invalid instruments that are often unable to predict behaviour.
15
Finally, at least some of the interviewers were affiliated with the Israeli defence establishment, suggesting that they might have had an unconscious political interest in coming up with findings that depoliticize and delegitimize the Palestinian national movement, such as the observation that 40 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers were motivated by a psychopathological urge.
These are possibilities, not accusations. However, they are possibilities worth raising because like-minded authorities with an interest in particular research results testing subjects in a coercive institution using questionable projective techniques may produce invalid findings, even
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setting aside the fact that their sample is small and unrepresentative, and that research based on large, representative samples leads to hypotheses at variance with those of the researchers.
Findings from a Representative Sample of Palestinian Suicide Bombers
Our survey of immediate family members and close friends of Palestinian suicide bombers included a battery of questions about the motivations of the bombers. To examine the degree to which psychological stressors affected the bombers’ states of mind and influenced their motivations, each set of respondents was asked whether the suicide bomber suffered any social, emotional or other type of personal crisis in the year before the bombing that might have affected his or her decision to participate in the attack. Respondents were also asked to support their answers by quoting or paraphrasing the bombers. Separate interviews were conducted with at last two immediate family members or close friends of each suicide bomber. This procedure allowed answers to be compared for consistency. There were no significant discrepancies in the answers recorded for these questions. The authors independently coded responses to the questions concerning the bombers’ states of mind in the year preceding their attacks. Two discrepancies in interpretation were resolved through discussion.
In the year preceding their suicide attacks, nine bombers (21 percent of the total) expressed the desire for martyrdom. None of the others gave any indication to their immediate family members or close friends that they wanted to end their lives for any other reason.
We coded the bombers as having manifested, in the year before their attack, (1) no sign of depression, (2) signs of major depression or personal crisis that could have led to major depression or (3) signs of minor depression or personal crisis that could have led to minor depression.
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As Table 1 shows, 32 bombers (76 percent of the total) did not manifest any sign of depression that was apparent to members of their immediate family or close friends. Six bombers
(14 percent of the total) may have suffered major depression. However, as will be clear from the following examples, in most cases psychological stressors derived from the immediate social and political context in which the bombers found themselves, not from some underlying, chronic pathology:

The Israeli internal security service recruited a man to collect information on a local
Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader. The leader discovered the mole and then gave him the opportunity to redeem himself by becoming a suicide bomber or face the consequences.
He suffered tremendous stress when his ties to the Israeli intelligence service were discovered; his parents said he was “mentally disturbed.” When he blew himself up, several Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers were seriously injured.
 A man’s brother gave information to the Israelis that enabled them to assassinate his cousin, a Hamas leader. The man underwent considerable turmoil until he decided to clear his family’s name and avenge the assassination of his cousin by means of a suicide attack.

Following the assassination of two close friends and the arrest of others by the Israelis,
Ibrahim Naji fell into a depressed state according to his parents. Eventually, he blew himself up to avenge the killing of his friends and in reaction to the humiliation of his father during an Israeli incursion into the refugee camp in which they resided.
 Abdalfatah Rashid was a police officer. He accidentally killed a Palestinian prisoner during an interrogation regarding a car theft. Rashid was jailed but then escaped. Now
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wanted by the Palestinian Authority and fearful that the family of his victim might pursue him, it was relatively easy for a militant from Palestinian Islamic Jihad whom he had met in prison to convince him to carry out a suicide attack.
 Reem Riashee was Hamas’s first female suicide bomber and the first Palestinian mother to blow herself up. Her bombing may have been due to pressure from her husband, a
Hamas supporter who is said to have forced his wife to conduct the attack as atonement for adultery – but who dismissed such reports when he was interviewed in Gaza, saying that “Reem died and her secret [motivation] died with her.” Despite the ambiguity concerning this case, we placed it in the “major depression” category.
– Table 1 about here –
Finally, four bombers in our sample (10 percent of the total) experienced personal crises that could have led to minor depression. For instance, Abdalbasit Awdeh was the perpetrator of the second intifada
’s deadliest suicide bombing in Netanya in March 2002. According to his brother, a secondary motivation for Awdeh’s attack was that he suffered because Israeli military regulations prevented him from marrying the woman he loved. She lived in Iraq. He was not permitted to visit her and she was denied the right to move to the West Bank.
We are not clinical psychologists. The suicide bombers in our sample were not formally tested for symptoms of depression and suicidality. We can nonetheless state with confidence that the people who were most intimately involved with the bombers did not spot any suicidal impulses other than the political/religious desire for martyrdom in 21 percent of cases. Moreover, respondents associated with 76 percent of the bombers failed to notice any symptoms of
11

depression among them in the year preceding their attacks. At most, 14 percent of the bombers in our sample were involved in situations that most people would find intolerable and that could have easily led to depression, but compared to the 10.6 percent of Jewish Israelis and 24.9 percent of Palestinian Israelis who likely or very likely suffer from depression,
16
that percentage is not extraordinary. Some people might consider it surprisingly low given the difficult circumstances – well illustrated by our examples – in which Palestinians residing in the West
Bank and Gaza often find themselves embroiled.
Ordinary People After All
The suicide bombers in our sample did differ from the Palestinian population in terms of their gender, age structure, and marital and employment status. Most significantly, only two bombers
(5 percent of the total) were women and the average age of the bombers was just 22.
Consequently, 88 percent were unmarried and 40 percent were students. Only 5 percent were unemployed, compared to a Palestinian unemployment rate of 29 percent during the period 2000-
05.
17
For other socio-demographic variables, such as economic status, occupational distribution
(for non-students), and geographical distribution, the bombers were not much different from the
Palestinian population. With the exception of the variables just noted, they were quite ordinary.
Ever since Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram conducted their now-classic experiments in the 1970s, we have known that ordinary people can do extraordinary things in certain social circumstances.
18
Under the right conditions, they may even discard deeply held norms of decency and civility, and behave in ways that most people would consider cruel and immoral. This insight into human nature (or, more accurately, into the absence of a fixed human nature) has greatly enriched history and social science. Some scholars still engage in moral
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essentialism and psychological reductionism. However, the consensus in history and the social sciences lies in a more nuanced and contextual appreciation of the sources of human action.
19
Researchers have made much progress in the study of suicide bombers over the past decade,
20
but in our judgment Merari and his colleagues have not advanced the field by seeking to revive a psychopathological approach to understanding motives that most scholars have rejected.
21
Their renewed assertion that a deep urge for self-immolation drives many if not most suicide bombers has already fuelled extravagant claims 22 that, one hopes, will at most only temporarily and partially obscure the largely social and political roots of suicide bombing.
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Notes
1
Ariel Merari, Ilan Diamant, Arie Bibi, Yoav Broshi, and Gora Zakin, “Personality
Characteristics of ‘Self Martyrs’/‘Suicide Bombers’ and Organizers of Suicide Attacks,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (2010), 87-101; Ariel Merari, Jonathan Fiugel, Boaz Ganor,
Ephraim Lavie, Yohanan Tzoreff, and Arie Livne, “Making Palestinian ‘Martyrdom
Operations’/‘Suicide Attacks’: Interviews with Would-Be Perpetrators and Organizers,”
Terrorism and Political Violence 22 (2010), 102-19; Ariel Merari, Driven to Death (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
2
Ibid., 5.
3
Merari et al., “Personality Characteristics...,” 95-6.
4
For information on the database, see Robert J. Brym and Bader Araj, “Suicide Bombing as
Strategy and Interaction: The Case of the Second Intifada
,”
Social Forces 84, 4 (2006) 1965-82.
5
Arabic and English versions of the questionnaire are available from the authors on request.
14

6 For details on the survey methodology, see Bader Araj, Suicide Bombing and Harsh State
Repression: The Second Intifada , 2000-05 (Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology,
University of Toronto, 2011) 14-17 and 95-97.
7
For example, Howard S. Sudak, “Suicide,” in Benjamin J. Sadock and Virginia A. Sadock, eds., Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (Philadelphia: Lippincott
Williams & Wilkins, 2005) 2443-53.
8
Giora Kaplan, Saralee Glasser, Havi Murad, Ahmed Atamna, Gershon Alpert, Uri Goldbourt, amd Ofra Kalter-Leibovici, “Depression among Arabs and Jews in Israel: A Population-Based
Study,”
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 45 (2010) 931-39.
9 Calculated from Merari et al., “Personality Characteristics...,” 90-91. The educational level of insurgents who engaged in non-suicide attacks was only slightly higher than that of failed suicide bombers.
10
On the importance of introducing statistical controls in the study of depression, see Rick E.
Ingram and Greg J. Siegle, “Methodological Issues in the Study of Depression,” in Ian H. Gotlib and Constance L. Hammen, eds., Handbook of Depression , 2 nd
ed. (New York: Guilford, 2009)
76-78.
15

11 Brian K. Barber, “Political Violence, Family Relations, and Palestinian Youth Functioning,”
Journal of Adolescent Research , 14, 2 (1999) 206-30.
12
Engagement was defined as consisting of participation (distributing leaflets, protecting someone from Israeli soldiers or police, marching or demonstrating in protest against the occupation, or throwing stones at Israeli soldiers or police) or victimization (being harassed, beaten, arrested or shot by Israeli soldiers or police).
13
Richard B. Felson, “Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior,” Annual Review of Sociology 22
(1996) 103–128.
14
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: Wiley, 1997) 290; Gordon Parker, “Is Depression Overdiagnosed?”
BMJ 335 (18
August 2007) 328.
15 Merari et al., “Personality Characteristics...,” 92; Scott O. Lilienfeld, James M. Wood, and
Howard N. Garb, “The Scientific Status of Projective Techniques,” Psychological Science in the
Public Interest , 1, 2 (2000) 27-66.
16
Kaplan et al., “Depression...”
17
The Palestinian Strategic Report 2005 (Beirut: Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and
Consultations), http://www.alzaytouna.net/english/books/PSR05/STR2005_Eng_ch7.pdf
(accessed 17 December 2010) 213.
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18 Philip G. Zimbardo, “Pathology of Imprisonment,” Society 9, 6 (1972) 4–8; Stanley Milgram,
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
19
See especially the debate among historians that greeted the publication of Christopher R.
Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New
York: Harper, 1992) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
20
See especially Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New
York: Random House, 2005); Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism (Cambridge UK: Polity, 2005);
Assef Moghadam, The Globalization of Martyrdom: Al Qaeda, Salafi Jihad, and the Diffusion of
Suicide Attacks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (New York: HarperCollins,
2010). For a recent theoretical reflection on the literature, see Robert J. Brym and Cynthia
Hamlin, “Suicide Bombers: Beyond Cultural Dopes and Rational Fools,” in Mohammed
Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton, eds. Raymond Boudon: A Life in Sociology , 4 vols.
(Oxford:
Bardwell Press, 2009), vol. 2, 83-96.
21
Scott Atran, “Is it Possible that Suicide Bombers are Motivated More by Depression than
Revenge or Religious Fanaticism?”
Science + Religion Today , 7 December 2010, http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2010/12/07/is-it-possible-that-suicide-bombers-are-
17

motivated-more-by-depression-than-revenge-or-religious-fanaticism/ (accessed 17 December
2010).
22
Paul Kix, “The Truth about Suicide Bombers,” Boston Globe , 5 December 2010, http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/12/05/the_truth_about_suicide_bombers
/ (accessed 17 December 2010); Adam Lankford, “Do Suicide Terrorists Exhibit Clinically
Suicidal Risk Factors? A Review of Initial Evidence and Call for Future Research,”
Aggression and Violent Behavior 15 (2010) 334-40.
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Table 1 The State of Mind of the Suicide Bombers
State of Mind
No signs of depression
Frequency Percent
32 76
4 10 Signs of minor depression or personal crisis that could have led to minor depression
Signs of major depression or personal crisis that could have led to major depression
6 14
Total 42 100
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