Continuing the thread in my post on Palestine and aj's and DanielS's followups, we've had a short talk on the subject on IRC. It's worth stating it here though, to more or less continue the thread.
I'm not trying to justify or support the Palestinian suicide bombings, but we need to understand what Palestinians are going through to see why they go ahead and blow themselves up, killing dozens near them. For decades, the Palestinians have been opressed and their land occupied by the Israeli army.
Someone must be quite desperate and have no horizons at all in their future to decide that they want to stick an explosive belt around their body. I don't know the exact figures, but there was a study done on the young population of Cisjordania and Gaza, and in both territories, but specially Gaza, the children were found to be depressed, with difficulties to sleep during nights, and easily frightened whenever they hear a loud noise (airplanes, hellicopters) outside their houses. Palestinian kids, instead of having an infance, grow up in dry, dusty refugee camps. Their favourite games are running around the tanks, and throwing stones at them, to annoy soldiers, who everyone and then shoot back. These kids have been born and raised outside their real homes, in overpopulated guettos, have seen how soldiers randomly raid their camp, beat or kill their older brothers, fathers, or uncles, have seen how their best friend was killed by a "lost" bullet, they have seen a bulldozer destroy their home without prior notice, because their neighbour went out with a bomb the night before. These kids see and live these things with even less than 10 years. They have no future other than one day becoming martyrs themselves, making their families and neighbours proud.
If this isn't enough, Israel is now building a horrific wall to aisle Israel from Palestine completely, even if that means that Palestinians can't cross to Israel to go to their working places. Unemployment is over 60% in some cities of Cisjordania and most of the population depends on international aid. If this isn't enough, Israel sends fighters which fire missiles at their "enemies", and if 10 innocent citizens are killed as well, too bad. When a bomb goes off in a Israeli city, it's a unacceptable terrorist attack, when it's an American missile fired by a Israeli soldier, US leaders say "Israel has a right to defend itself".
As long as Israel and the US keep denying Palestine their most basic rights, they will be fuelling the hate of these people, which will have less and less reasons to not stick a bomb to their chests. Just go away from Palestine, stop stealing the small bits of worthy land they have while building your fucked wall, stop the random killings, and help finance the rebuilding of Gaza and Cisjordania. Give Palestinian kids a chance to go to school, learn to be normal children and in a few years your problem will be gone. Keep your current policy and you'll get weekly bloodbaths in both sides of the wall.
