![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This study was designed to investigate the background, psychological characteristics and motivations of independent actors who carried out attacks in Israel. It also examined the antecedent factors that influenced their decision to carry out an attack, and their retrospective attitudes to the act. Forty-five Palestinians who had carried out attacks against Israeli targets on their own initiative were interviewed in prison about their background, motivations, circumstances and process of the attack. Thirty-nine of them were also interviewed by a clinical psychologist and took a battery of psychological tests. Twenty-six of these were diagnosed as suffering from one or more of the following: psychotic background, severe personality disorder, and suicidality. A considerable number of the participants described personal, family or social problems that influenced their decision to carry out the attack. Three dominant motives for carrying out an attack were identified: suicidality, a psychotic state, and an ideological national-religious motivation. The characteristics of the attack were influenced by the dominant type of motivation. The discussion compares the findings of this study with those of a study on suicide bombers and with studies on behavioral characteristics of independent actors in other countries.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Uri Ben Yaakov, who managed the organizational requirements of the study, Yitzhak Gabai, Jonathan Fighel, Arie Livneh, Inbal Bar-On, and Rachel-Li Saar, who conducted the general interviews, Dr. Arie Bibi, Dr. Haim Aharoni, Harel Peled, Perle Rine, Dr. Ilan Diamant, Dr. Giora Zakin and Dr. Eran Shadach, who carried out clinical psychological interviews and assessment. We are also grateful to Dr. Gad Frishman, Chief Scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Public Security, and Dr. Idit Hakimi, head of the Social Sciences Section of the Chief Scientist Bureau, for their help and support. We are immensely grateful to Prof. James Butcher for assessing the MMPI-2 protocols.
Thanks are also due to Prof. Max Taylor, Prof. John Horgan, Prof. Bruce Bongar and Prof. Larry Beutler for their advice and lastly to Dr. Eitan Azani, Stevie Weinberg, Lorena Atiyas Lvovsky and Arava Lev. We also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. These figures are taken from a database, constructed by the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC), Herzliya, which covered all attacks in the period under consideration, utilizing a variety of open sources.
2. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr, “The Myth of Lone-Wolf Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, July 26, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/western-europe/2016-07-26/myth-lone-wolf-terrorism (accessed August 22, 2016).
3. Bart Schuurman, Francis O'Connor, Lasse Lindekilde, Noemie Bouhana, Paul Gill and Stefan Malthaner, “End of the Lone Wolf: The Typology That Should Not Have Been,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 42, no. 8 (2019): 771–778.
4. Emily Corner, Paul Gill, Ronald Schouten and Frank Farnham, “Mental Disorders, Personality Traits, and Grievance-Fueled Targeted Violence: The Evidence Base and Implications for Research and Practice,” Journal of Personality Assessment 100, no. 5 (2018): 459–70.
5. John Donne, “No Man is an Island” https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/island.html (accessed July 30, 2019).
6. Jeff Gruenewald, Steven Chermak and Joshua Freilich, “Distinguishing ‘Loner’ Attacks from other Domestic Extremist Violence,” Criminology & Public Policy 12, no. 1 (2013): 65–91; Emily Corner and Paul Gill, “A False Dichotomy? Mental Illness and Lone-Actor Terrorism (2015),” Law and Human Behavior 39, no. 1 (2014): 23–34; John Horgan, N. Shortland, S. Abbasciano, and S. Walsh, “Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012,” Journal of Forensic Sciences (2016) Emily Corner, Paul Gill and O. Mason, “Mental Health Disorders and the Terrorist: A Research Note Probing Selection Effects and Disorder Prevalence,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 39, no. 6 (2016): 560–68.
7. Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey, Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 58 (December 14, 2015), available at: http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2058%20full%20English.pdf; H. Chorev, “Palestinian Social Media and Lone-Wolf Attacks: Subculture, Legitimization, and Epidemic,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 6 (2019): 1284–306.
8. Paul Gill, John Horgan and Paige Deckert, “Bombing Alone: Tracing the Motivations and Antecedent Behaviors of Lone-Actor Terrorists,” Journal of Forensic Science 59, no. 2 (2014); E. Corner and P. Gill, “A False Dichotomy? Mental Illness and Lone-Actor Terrorism,” Law and Human Behavior 39, no. 1 (2015): 23–34.
9. Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijn and Edwin Bakker, “Analyzing Personal Characteristics of Lone-Actor Terrorists: Research Findings and Recommendations,” Perspectives on Terrorism 10, no. 2 (2016): 41–48.
10. World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe, “Data and Statistics,” 2016, http://www. euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/ mental-health/data-and-statistics.
11. Gruenewald, Chermak, and Freilich, “Distinguishing 'Loner' Attacks from Other Domestic Extremist Violence,” (2013): 65-91.
12. Maarten van Leyenhorst and Ada Andreas, “Dutch Suspects of Terrorist Activity: A Study of Their Biographical Backgrounds Based on Primary Sources,” Journal for Deradicalization 12 (2017). http://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/119 (accessed October 30, 2019).
13. Anton Weenink, “Behavioral Problems and Disorders Among Radicals in Police Files,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 2 (2015): 17-33.
14. Paul Gill, James Silver, John Horgan, and Emily Corner, “Shooting Alone: The Pre-Attack Experiences and Behaviors of U.S. Solo Mass Murderers,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 62, no. 3 (2017): 710–14.
15. Lauren Richards, Peter Molinaro, John Wyman, and Sara Craun, “Lone offender: A study of lone offender terrorism in the United States (1972–2015),” U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Behavioral Analysis Unit, November 2019. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/lone-offender-terrorism-report-111319.pdf (accessed November 14, 2019).
16. Gill, Horgan & Deckert, “Bombing Alone,” (2014): 425–435.
17. Bart Schuurman, Edwin Bakker, Paul Gill, and Noemie Bouhana, “Lone Actor Terrorist Attack Planning and Preparation: A Data-Driven Analysis,” Journal of Forensic Science 63, no. 4 (2018): 1191–200.
18. Horgan, Shortland, Abbasciano, and Walsh, “Actions Speak Louder than Words: A Behavioral Analysis of 183 Individuals Convicted for Terrorist Offenses in the United States from 1995 to 2012,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 61, no. 5 (2016): 1228–37.
19. Weenink, “Behavioral Problems and Disorders among Radicals in Police Files,” (2015): 17–33.
20. Marc Hecker, “137 Shades of Terrorism: French Jihadists before the Courts,” Focus Strategique, No. 79, April 2018, https://www.ifri.org/en/publications/etudes-de-lifri/focus-strategique/137-shades-terrorism-french-jihadists-courts (accessed August 12, 2020).
21. Gill, Silver, Horgan & Corner, “Shooting Alone,” (2017): 710–714.
22. L. Richards, P. Molinaro, J. Wyman, and S. Craun, “Lone Offender,” (2019).
23. Three adult males and one juvenile male were only available for interviews at a time when Arabic speaking clinical psychologists were not available. Two other juvenile males refused to take the psychological interview, saying that they were bored and tired. Seven of the males were illiterate and therefore could not take the self-report inventory MMPI-2. Two females stopped this test before completion, saying that they were tired.
24. The proportion of participants who were diagnosed as suicidal (and, by implication, whose attack can presumably be regarded as a suicide attempt), is very high. We could not find official data of the Palestinian Authority on suicide rates in the West Bank. However, there are reliable data of the Israeli Ministry of Health concerning suicide rates among Israeli Arabs. According to these data, during the period of 1981–2013, suicide rate among Israeli Arabs was three times lower than that of Israeli Jews (2.6 suicides vs. 7.9 suicides per 100,000 population, respectively). Suicide rates among Israeli Arabs in the age range of fifteen to twenty-four was 2.7. By world standards this is a very low rate. However, in the period of 2013–2015, the suicide rate among Arabs in the age range of fifteen to twenty-four was 3.6, as compared to 5.9 per 100,000 among Jews in the same age group. As could be expected, the rate of suicide attempts was much higher than that of completed suicides. In the period of 2014–2016 the rate of suicide attempts among Arab males in the age range of fifteen to twenty-four was 114, and among females—245 per 100,000 population. Source: Israeli Ministry of Health, Suicidality in Israel: Suicides 1981–2015, attempted suicides 2004–2016. Jerusalem, July 2018, pp. 28, 78. Available at: https://www.health.gov.il/publicationsFiles/loss_2018.pdf. In interpreting the relevance of this information, it should be noted that for perpetrators of attacks in the recent wave of independent actors’ attacks under consideration, the likelihood of getting killed was very high—55 percent of them died in the course of the attack.
25. Although we could not find comprehensive official reports on the prevalence of mental illness in the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Ministry of Health report for 2018, which details the number of new cases of mental illness in that year, may serve as a basis for a rough comparison. According to this report, the rates per 100,000 people were 18.6 for new cases of schizophrenia, 16.1 for affective disorders, 6.8 for emotion disorders, and 5.4 for organic disorders. All together, these are less than one thousandth of the population per year. Even if we assume that the prevalence of these illnesses in the population at a given point in time is an accumulation of the new annual cases over a twenty years period, we shall have a prevalence of about one percent of the population. The prevalence of psychotic disorders in other countries is also much lower than the rate found in our study. A meta-analysis of seventy-three studies which provided primary data of prevalence rates of psychosis found that the median lifetime prevalence was 7.49 per 1000. See: B. Moreno-Küstner, “Prevalence of Psychotic Disorders and Its Association with Methodological Issues. A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses,” PloS One 13, 4 (2018). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5896987/ (accessed August 12, 2020). For the Palestinian Ministry of Health report see: http://healthclusteropt.org/admin/file_manager/uploads/files/1/Health%20Annual%20Report%20Palestine%202018.pdf (accessed August 11, 2020).
26. Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey, Palestinian Public Opinion Poll No. 58 (December 14, 2015), available at: http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2058%20full%20English.pdf.
27. For an analysis of the importance of the search for significance as a motivation for suicide terrorist attacks see: Arie Kruglanski, Xiaoyan Chen, Mark Dechesne, Shira Fishman, and Edward Orehek, “Fully Committed: Suicide Bombers’ Motivation and the Quest for Personal Significance,” Political Psychology 30, no. 3 (2009): 331–57; David Webber, Kristen Klein, Arie Kruglanski, Ambra Brizi and Ariel Merari, “Divergent Paths to Martyrdom and Significance among Suicide Attackers,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29, no. 5 (2017): 852–74.
28. Ariel Merari, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 92–95.
29. Van Leyenhorst and Andreas, “Dutch Suspects of Terrorist Activity” (2017).
30. Gill, Silver, Horgan & Corner, “Shooting Alone,” (2017): 710–714.
31. Corner & Gill, “A False Dichotomy”; Gill, Horgan & Deckert, “Bombing Alone,” 2014; E. Corner, P. Gill and O. Mason, “Mental Health Disorders and the Terrorist: A Research Note Probing Selection Effects and Disorder Prevalence,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 39, no. 6 (2016): 560–68.
32. Out of fifteen participants in the would-be suicides study, ten said that they had hesitated and five said that they had not hesitated. Eight of the fifteen would-be suicides volunteered on their own initiative to carry out a suicide mission (i.e., offered themselves to the organization, requesting to be sent to carry out a suicide attack), while the other seven agreed to carry out the mission after being approached by a recruiter of the organization (draftees). Only four of the eight volunteers (50 percent) hesitated, while among the draftees the number of hesitators was six of the seven (86 percent).
33. Merari, A, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
34. Ariel Merari, Ilan Diamant, Arie Bibi, Yoav Broshi, and Giora Zakin, “Personality Characteristics of ‘Self Martyrs’/‘Suicide Bombers’ and Organizers of Suicide Attacks,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22 2010: 87–101.
35. For claims about cultural bias in psychological tests see, for example: Marwan Dwairy, From Psycho-Analysis to Culture-Analysis: A Within-Culture Psychotherapy (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).
36. Arguably, the perceived likelihood of the chance to get killed in the attack reflects the assailant’s readiness to die and not necessarily his/her willingness to die.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Ariel Merari
Ariel Merari is a retired professor at Tel Aviv University and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya. He is a former Chairman of the Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University. He was a visiting professor at Berkeley and Harvard, and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s International Security Program of the Belfer Center. He has studied political terrorism and other forms of political violence for more than forty years and authored, coauthored or edited several books and many articles, monographs and chapters on these subjects. His book, Driven to Death: Psychological and Social Aspects of Suicide Terrorism was published by Oxford University Press.
Boaz Ganor
Boaz Ganor is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), the Ronald S. Lauder Chair for Counterterrorism and Former Dean of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy & Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel. Currently on sabbatical from IDC Herzliya, Prof. Ganor is the Cecile Goldman Visiting Israeli Professor and Israel Institute Fellow at Georgetown University for 2020. His book, Global Alert: Modern Terrorism Rationality and the Challenge to the Democratic World was published by Columbia University Press.