Think suicide bombings are bad? Then we need to address our mass shootings in the U.S.

Okay, this is grim, but I went down a bit of a data rabbit hole, and what I found is striking.

I was recently at a conference and heard some horrific, racist rhetoric directed at Palestinians. It was literally stomach-turning, but it was also a powerful learning experience.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to say, “I was born in Michigan” and have someone immediately fly into a rage about that part of my identity, but that’s what I witnessed. 

Then, today, I began reading a novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It’s brilliant so far, and this is no criticism and not much of a spoiler, but at one point a character is planning to plant a bomb as an act of political violence.  And I thought, “That’s odd. Bombing isn’t really America’s style. The authorities keep an eye out for people researching bombs, and we track the materials. Meanwhile, we make it as easy as possible to get guns. Many mass shooters are at least partly politically motivated. And many want to be killed, which is why a number of our ideas about deterrents will never work.”

I do not pretend to be any authority on the motivations of Palestinian suicide bombers, but I’ll bet they are complicated and involve a number of factors beyond the two-dimensional portraits we’re often provided. This is by no means a justification for a suicide bombing, but it’s interesting that we’re provided all kinds of theories to explain the motivations of American mass shooters (mental health, politics, bullying, video games, weed, and on and on), but  the closest we get to that when there’s a suicide bombing is a polarized view that the bomber is either a horrible person who hates Israel or a brave freedom fighter trying to liberate an illegally occupied land. I’m not saying it’s somewhere in between. I’m saying it certainly involves other things like mental health, isolation, radicalization, and more. (The video games excuse has always struck me as ridiculous and grasping. Weed is even more absurd.)  

And then I remembered some of the insults hurled at the Palestinians at this conference. And I thought I’d do a little research. If mass shootings are our suicide bombings, I wondered if they are more prevalent than suicide bombings in Israel or in Palestine. 

Guess what I learned?

According to JewishVirtualLibrary.org, a cite that is heavily biased against Palestinians, there hasn’t been a suicide bombing in Israel since 2008. Zero. In 14 years.

Now, I know an absence of a thing isn’t cause for a headline, but this was news to me. It certainly flies in the face of the vitriol I heard hurled at the Palestinian Americans at this conference. 

I’d pulled up the populations of Palestine (4.8 mil), Israel (9.2 mil) and the US (329.5 mil) so I could do some math to try to figure out the danger of mass shootings in the US relative to mass shootings in Israel and Palestine. I thought it would be really tricky to pick out the periods of time. I didn’t want to skew the data by cherry-picking the years, and finding reliable data on mass shootings in the US is incredibly difficult since the Hyde Amendment makes it illegal for the government to research gun deaths as a public health issue. 

Based on what I could find in an archive maintained by Mother Jones, we have lost at least 682 Americans to our version of suicide bombings since 2008. 

Number of Isrealis killed by Palestinians in suicide bombings since 2008? Zero.

It turns out there is no adjusting for population which is necessary or even possible. No matter how you slice it, mass shootings in the United States are more lethal than suicide bombings in Israel. 

This wasn’t always true. During the height of the Intifada, in 2002, 220 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings (according to JewishVirtualLibrary.org) and that coincides with the year, nine years into the Federal Assault Weapons ban, when the number of mass shootings in the US fell all the way to zero. So I completely understand why people in the US, watching the news, have this sense that Israel is a country plagued by frequent suicide bombings. That was the case. Twenty years ago. 

And I’m not trying to explain the causes of the end of suicide bombings in Israel. My guess is that it’s complicated, and the fact that the Israeli military has killed five times as many Palestinians in 2022 than it killed in the same period in 2021 does not bode well for peace for Israel or Palestine. But, again, I am not an expert on Israel or Palestine. 

I’m just a person who lives in a country where I am now far more likely to be killed in a mass shooting than an Isreali is to be killed in a suicide bombing. And I think that’s worth reflecting on.

Because Americans have a remarkable ability to convince ourselves that everywhere else is worse, no matter what the data shows. 

Did you know that, when North Koreans escape to South Korea, they are shocked by the standard of living they find? No matter how bad things get in North Korea, the people are taught that things are worse everywhere else. I’m not trying to draw a one-to-one comparison. We are certainly not North Korea, and the rest of the world relative to the US isn’t South Korea in relation to North Korea. But if we’re going to address any problem in the US, we ought to have a realistic view of it. Yes, repealing the Hyde Amendment and allowing rigorous study of the problem of gun violence would sure help, but we should also consider how our emotions color our perception of the data.

We have been taught to shake our heads sadly and believe the political situation between Israel and Palestine is intractable because of Palestinian suicide bombings or Isreali aggression or both.  And this taps into American anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and racism, since Palestinians are Mulims and Jews and Christians and Druze and atheists but anti-Palestinian sentiment is rooted in Islamophobia or just anti-Palestinian racism, and Isreal is often conflated with Judaism even though it’s a country and does not represent the religion. But even for Americans who don’t hate or fear people from Israel or Palestine, I think there’s a common misperception that suicide bombings are this frequent occurance, and that they are symbolic of a massive political and humanitarian failure on the part of two governments. 

I am not qualified to adjudicate the situation there, but if we have the sense that frequent suicide bombings are emblamatic of a crisis, we need to look in the mirror. 

The United States is not a failed state. We don’t have the murder rate of South Africa or El Salvador, the authoritarianism of Russia or China or the DPRK, the poverty of Burundi or Afghanistan. But we also don’t have the health of Japan or Iceland, the freedom of Singapore or Switzerland, the happiness of Finland or Bhutan.

And we now have frequent and increasing mass shootings while Israel and Palestine have no more suicide bombings. 

I think that’s worth reflecting on.