War & Peace Quote by A. B. Yehoshua

Suicide bombing, in A. B. Yehoshua's telling, is not framed as fanaticism with a purpose but as violence stripped of its usual consolations. He lands on a paradox: even revenge is denied. The attacker dies with the victims, collapsing the familiar moral math of crime and punishment into one grisly instant. In most political violence, the perpetrator survives to be hunted, tried, mythologized, traded, or recruited again. Here, the act forecloses every sequel. That closure is the point, and Yehoshua writes it with the cold precision of a novelist who understands how endings function.

The line about blood mixing does more than shock. It dissolves the boundary the terrorist depends on: us versus them, pure versus impure, martyr versus target. Mixed blood is literal contamination, but also narrative contamination. It refuses the fantasy that the bomber can exit the scene morally intact, lifted above the dead. Yehoshua turns the attack into an image of unwanted intimacy, a forced merging that undercuts the romance of sacrifice.

As an Israeli writer shaped by the second half of the 20th century and the waves of attacks that marked the conflict's most intimate terrain (buses, cafes, street corners), Yehoshua is also arguing against simplifications that treat suicide bombing as strategically rational or spiritually coherent. His subtext is accusatory and mournful: a tactic so absolute it destroys not only bodies but the very idea of accountability, leaving communities trapped in grief without the even imperfect catharsis of justice.