Palestine: frustrations and aspirations
The Making of a Palestinian Suicide Bomber by Mitri I Musleh
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Impassioned account by a Palestinian Canadian of the frustrations facing Palestinian youth, but with little original insight or analysis. The author fills his few pages with documentation on the Israeli occupation and “how Israel mistreats the Palestinian people” (p. 70), derived mostly from the Internet. But how and why do such frustrations lead to suicide bombing? Rather than to any of the many other forms of (non-suicidal) resistance or escape? Earlier generations of Palestinian “freedom fighters” included extreme factions eager to kill real or imagined “Zionists,” but not themselves. I suspect that the incidence of suicidal attacks is related to the breakdown of those organized resistance groups and belief in their myth of a future “free Palestine” worth living for. But Musleh has nothing to say about that.
I don’t know who was the artist of the image above — almost a Palestinian parody of Delacroix’s famous painting of the 1830 revolution in Paris.
