In April 1983, for example, Ali Safiadin smashed his bomb-laden Mercedes into an Israeli convoy at Deir Qanoun en-Nahr in southern Lebanon. The difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" depends on who you are blowing up as well as on who you are.Individual motives can sometimes be found. But the suicidal attacks of the Afghans against the Soviet invaders were carried out by Sunni Muslims - brave allies of "ours" in those days, men who "gave their lives in the cause of freedom", as the American right wing would have had us believe at the time. Even Baruch Goldstein,who was almost torn limb from limb after he slaughtered 29 Palestinian worshippers at Hebron in February last year, must have realised his mission was suicidal.

Yet frustration and hatred rather than heaven appears to have crippled his mind.The actions of the first suicide bombers - in Lebanon - might be explained by the Shia Muslim epic of martyrdom personified by the Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet, whose death at Kerbala is illustrated on the walls of southern Lebanon, blood-red tulips springing from the gore of the battlefield around the Imam's slain horses. But the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War thought they were dying for their god-emperor rather than a promise of paradise. He did not.The 10th century Assassins of Persia might have understood this in their mountains at Alamut. He remained silent for almost a minute, then he began to giggle.

His giggling turned to laughter, his shoulders shaking with mirth; sinister, frightening, unreal It was a question of weapons, he said The Israelis were all- powerful, but they feared death. The mujahedin of Lebanon drove the Israelis out of most of their country in just two years, smashing their bomb-laden cars intobarracks, convoys and artillery positions until one night, under fire at Bidias, an Israeli infantry unit cracked; its soldiers ran away, just as they did last autumn when the Hizbollah stormed the Israeli gun batteries at Dibshe in southern Lebanon. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, announced after the Natanya bombings last Sunday that the suicide bombers of Islamic Jihad would be "eradicated". But he promised, and failed, to do the same to the Hizbollah car bombers of southern Lebanon in thelate 1980s.Not long after the Natanya slaughter - in which two Islamic Jihad members killed themselves and 21 Israelis, 19 of whom were soldiers - I asked a leading Palestinian advocate of suicide bombings how he would react if he was Yitzhak Rabin. Can there be a more terrifying conception - love and self-destruction combined to tear the living limb from limb, the smile of the bridegroom turned into the rictus of death?The only US marine to see the Lebanese suicide bomber who atomised his barracks and killed 241 of his comrades in 1983 said later: "All I can remember was that the guy was smiling." In the posters of Hizbollah's suicide bombers, many of the "martyrs" are, indeed, faintly smiling.