THE West Bank and the Gaza Strip are like a potent drug. One visit and you're hooked, and Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg have the craving. Their book, "The Road to Martyrs' Square," is a strange, seductive hybrid of sociology and memoir that recounts the eight years they spent photographing and studying Palestinian graffiti.
If you've never been to the Palestinian territories, this might sound like an esoteric or trivial subject. Studying wall scribblings while there's a war going on? In fact, graffiti is the bulletin board of the Palestinian intifada, the website where protests are planned, slogans are tested and rage is vented. By studying the changes in this very public expression of Palestinian rhetoric, Oliver and Steinberg have created a unique history.
When the authors arrived in the Gaza Strip in 1988, Palestinian suicide bombers were unheard of; it would be six years before the militant group Hamas adopted this murderous tactic. Oliver and Sternberg stumbled onto a resistance movement undergoing mutation. After 31 years of Israeli occupation, the old nationalist-Marxist model of resistance -- epitomized by Yasser Arafat -- was clearly failing. The dominant ideas of Palestinian life had failed to deliver liberation. Yet an Islamic model of resistance -- epitomized by Hamas and the late Sheik Ahmed Yassin -- had not yet been popularized.
So what draws tens of thousands of young men (and growing numbers of women) to an elaborate death cult? The statistics are shocking enough. The U.S. Agency for International Development -- hardly a pro-Palestinian pressure group -- reported in 2002 that one in five young children in the Palestinian territories suffers from malnutrition. For more than 13% of children under 5 in the Gaza Strip, the problem is so acute that it will affect their growth and mental development.
Even this misery is not enough to explain (let alone justify) blowing oneself up to kill Israelis. Yet political ideas are viral. They spread in debased conditions and -- whatever the other causes -- there can be no question that decades of Israeli military occupation created a soil in which jihadism would thrive.
When the authors first arrived, most Palestinians subscribed to a nationalist ideology. Nationalists revere the peasant and the shepherd and talk in a romantic way about the land. Islamists revere the hajj, the religious pilgrim who relinquishes his earthly possessions to fulfill the commands of God. Nationalism is, of course, far easier to deal with, because nationalists are merely bidding -- however aggressively -- for real estate.
