If the idea of self-sacrifice is thus comprehensible, it is clearly not a natural phenomenon. In a normal society, in a community whose people feel they are treated equally and with justice, we regard suicide as a tragic aberration, a death produced – in the coroner's eloquent lexicon – when "the balance of the mind is disturbed". But what happens when the balance of a whole society's mind has been disturbed? Walking through the wreckage of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut a few weeks ago – the same camps in which up to 2,000 civilians were massacred in 1982 and for which, on page 103 of its report, the Israeli Kahan Commission held Ariel Sharon "personally responsible" – I could only wonder at the stability of the survivors who still lived there amid the concrete huts and the garbage and the football-sized rats. If I lived here, I remember thinking, I would commit suicide.
(...)

But I go back to my own first reaction when I reached the Sbarro pizza house. Unforgivable. What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on earth, recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin? Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own people's tragedy. His was not an act of "mindless terror", the words Israeli spokesmen use. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, tortured and killed in terrible numbers. The pressure cooker of the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.

thanks to also not found in nature