On the Right - Two Terrorists Less?(Middle East conflict)(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, AUGUST 3

On one day, the papers ran an obituary on an American flyer who in 1943 shot down the plane carrying Admiral Yamamoto from a Japanese base in Rabaul, New Britain. There was jubilation in America over that nice coordination of intelligence and warmaking, and I remember the special glee of a 15-year-old who had quivered with indignation when the Japanese admiral a year or two earlier had broadcast that he looked forward to dictating the terms of surrender to the Americans in Washington, D.C. On the same day there was news of the Israeli helicopter attack on Nablus in the West Bank. The targets were two leaders of Hamas, and they were killed, as also four others and two boys walking past the building when the helicopters struck.

The perspectives by which the two episodes are judged have to do with civil protocols. We were at war with Japan, which meant that anything we proceeded to do, including bombing civilian centers, was okay. If we elected not to bomb the Emperor, that was because we thought him more valuable alive than dead. If there was a scruple on this matter, it was of the kind felt by heads of state. When we commissioned the assassination of Fidel Castro, in the Bobby Kennedy days, word got around that reciprocity was conceivable, and for a few hot hours after the shots fired out in Dealey Plaza, some suspected that the killer Oswald was doing the work of Fidel Castro, repaying the compliments of (failed) U.S.-led assassins.

That situation has cooled off, but hardly that of Israel and the Palestinians. But of course they are not "at war" with one another, so that the protocols do not fall quite in place when a helicopter attack singles out two Hamas leaders and incidentally kills a few others while at it. The reactions were absolutely predictable at one end: The Palestinians are enraged and threaten retaliation. Every now and then, after a sortie of this kind, the Israelis clam up. But not this time. The office of Prime Minister Sharon issued a statement: The doomed Hamas figures "were in the process of planning further terrorist acts." The helicopter attack was therefore preemptive. Palestinians have denied ...