The legend of Samson lives on

Much, if not most, of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible1 borrow from the prevalent lore of the region of ancient Palestine.

Whether Samson was an actual character or the hero of a local legend is not at issue; the point of the narrative is the glorification of suicide, along with taking other people's lives, when the protagonist is humiliated and tormented by his enemies, and when all hope for freedom and dignity is lost, thus releasing the nihilistic impulse of the caged animal.

Killing of thousands of your enemies while taking your own life is seen as a pious act of desperation in pursuit of salvation on the altar of one's pantheon.

When Delilah of Gaza enticed Samson and ascertained that the secret of his strength lay in his hair, the Philistines sent a man to shave off the seven locks of his head. Weakened, he was imprisoned. "Howbeit, the hair of his head began to grow again, after he was shaven." In a public show of humiliation, the Philistines called for Samson so he "may make us sport."

In his dying moments, Samson beseeched the Lord God to remember him, strengthen him, one last time, and let him die with his enemies. As recounted in the Old Testament (Judges 13-16), "the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." When the two middle pillars upon which the temple stood, and upon which it was borne up, buckled, the building collapsed, killing himself and three thousand "men and women."(1)

In the narrative Samson was an Israelite, and his "occupiers" were the Philistines. At the time of the narrative, the Philistines were the rulers, because it came to pass that the people of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.

This Hercules, the hero of the Old Testament, did not come from nowhere. And for that matter, neither did the latter-day suicide bombers of modern Palestine. Ancient legends and modern acts betray the long thread of cultural continuity and collective memory that characterize the ethos of the region.

Curiously enough, the story of Samson is not mentioned in the Qur'an, the Holy Book of Islam, despite the fact that the Qur'an recognizes the Hebrew mythology as the starting point of the historical continuum leading to Prophet Muhammad. More curiously, the myth of Samson still lives in the Islamic world as a folkloric legend.

When I was a child, I was introduced to Samson in the streets of Rode El Faraj, a poor neighborhood of Cairo, when I was nine years old. A peddler would come to our street about once a week, and we kids would rush to give him trinkets and old newspapers, and in exchange he would let us have a peek at his magic lantern (sandouk al ajjab).

The most popular peep show was Shamshoun el Jabbar— Samson the Mighty. (Shamshoun is the Canaanite term for Samson.) The legend of Samson in the Islamic Middle East is alive through oral history rather than sacred text. A common Arabic expression in the region, when defeat is imminent and all rays of hope are gone, is "Upon me and my enemies, O Lord." (ìalai wa ala aídai ya rabî.)

The most ominous manifestation of this logic, if such a term is justified, is modern-day Israel's Samson Option. In a series of high-level meetings in 1964-65 held in Midrasha, a Mossaad (2) retreat outside Tel Aviv to discuss nuclear weapons, the view was not whether to go nuclear or not, but when. With the Dimona reactor under way, the Israeli leadership took the view that the nuclear bomb is their only recourse against an attack from neighboring states; there would be no other Massada, where the besieged resistance would hide behind a fortress against advancing armies.(3) Norman Podhoretz in a 1976 essay in Commentary, accurately summarized the pro-nuclear argument in describing what Israel would do if abandoned by the United States and overrun by the Arabs: "The Israelis would fight "with conventional weapons for as long as they could, and if the tide were turning decisively against them, and if help in the form of supplies will not come from the United States or any other guarantors were not forthcoming, it is safe to predict that they would fight with nuclear weapons in the end.". It used to be said that the Israelis had a Massada complex.. But if the Israelis are to be understood in term of a "complex" involving suicide rather than surrender and rooted in a relevant precedent of Jewish history, the example of Samson, whose suicide brought about the destruction of his enemies, would be more appropriate than Massada where in committing suicide the Zealots killed only themselves and took no Romans with them. Seymour Hersh's "The Samson Option" is worth reading for further elaboration on this policy alternative. The Samson Option became Israel's cry of one last time, "Never again." It is ironic that a country like Israel that contemplates mass suicide as an act of ultimate defense against defeat fails to take into account the motives of young Palestinians who did no evil in the sight of the Lord but whose whole life is a series of humiliations and unceasing depredation under a brutal and punishing military occupation. They know no other life. The suicide bombers, in their own desperation, and robbed of their dignity, exercise the "Samson Option" because they see no way out, and have no other option. They do not possess the weapons that allow them to wage a symmetrical war against their enemy. Neither do they have the strength of Samson to punch the tanks and armored vehicles that surround them in their daily life. All they have is their bodies— their ultimate weapon — nihilism.

Abu Sultan/Émile Durzi March, 2004

(1) The Christian Old Testament (2) The Israeli version of the C.I.A. (3)In 73 A.D., Jews revolting against the Roman Empire committed mass suicide in the fortress at Massada rather than surrender.