Palestinian militants killed by Israeli rocket attacks

first saw the above picture on the New York Times on the Web, sometime around July, 2001. I was fascinated by it, but I thought it probably was perhaps hubristic to post here. I kept thinking about the picture, and then I forgot about it. Then came the "attack on America" (11Sep01), including the destruction of the New York World Trade Center towers by terrorists who turned commercial jet airplanes into incendiary kamikaze bombs. A month after that, I remembered the picture. Now, I think it makes a powerfully thought-provoking juxtaposition to the pictures of the explosion fireballs -- looking like colossal cancer tumors --, when the airplanes crashed and exploded into the WTC towers.

The above picture shows the window where an Israeli rocket entered the building (27Aug01), perhaps without even chipping the paint of the window's sill, and then exploded inside, totally destroying everything in the room it had entered, including killing the Palestinian militant leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, whose office the room was and who was the intended target (I also saw a picture of the rubble in the room after the explosion, but did not save it; but I have found a picture on the BBC website: click here...). I no longer have the details, but they are not relevant to the contrast between those images of wanton destruction raised when the terrorists rammed the airplanes into the World Trade Center towers, and this image of a "pinpoint" "surgical" assassination operation: "Mustafa was decapitated by an Israeli missile... while he was reading papers at his desk..." (The New Yorker, "Letter From Jerusalem: Rage and Reason", 06May02, p.101, by David Remnick)

I am not sure what conclusions to draw from the juxtaposition, except that it seems powerfully to resonate with an Op Ed essay in The Washington Post, the day after the WTC attack: "When Innocents Are the Enemy" (12Sep01).

uring the following months, the situation got worse. The Palestineans came up with a cheap, effective military tactic that was immune to Israel's most advanced technology and military intelligence: suicide bombers who would strap explosive packs inconspicuously under their clothes and blend into an Israeli crowd (e.g., in a restaurant or on a bus), and then detonate the explosive charge when they thought the moment had arrived when they would kill and hurt as many Israelis as possible.

To try to stop the suicide attacks, the Israeli government resorted to ever more drastic repressive measures against the Palestineans, but this only resulted in increased Palestinean hatred, which led to more Palestineans volunteering to become suicide bombers.... As of late June 2002, the Isreali government decided to try building a wall between the Palestinean areas of the occupied territories, and the places where Israelis live, in an attempt to keep potential suicide bombers from ever getting near their potential victims. Picture, below right shows an Israeli soldier patrolling near a section of the wall under construction. The barren desolation of the scene strikes me as evocative of the hopelessness of the situation (somewhat like Luc Besson's end-of-the-world film "Le Dernier Combat", or the United States' abandoned Anti-Ballistic Missile base, from 1978, Grand Forks, North Dakota).

"JERUSALEM, Tuesday, July 23 [NYT on the Web] - An Israeli warplane fired a missile early this morning into the Gaza City home of... Sheik Salah Shehada, a founder of the military wing of Hamas, ...killing at least 15 people, including several children, Hamas and hospital officials in Gaza said. Officials said more than 140 people were wounded in the attack...." CNN (July 23, 2002 Posted: 11:08 AM EDT) quoted Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying: "We have no interest to hurt innocent civilians and are always sorry about civilians that are hurt but this action, according to me, is one of our biggest successes...." See result of this Israeli rocket attack, below.