Driven to Destruction

In the dead of night, two men, one of them masked, meet secretly in an empty building on a deserted alley in the Palestinian refugee camp near the West Bank town of Jenin. In the light of a guttering oil lamp, they sit and begin to talk. The masked man is a would-be suicide bomber, but the purpose of this surreptitious meeting is not to plan an attack on the Israeli forces patrolling the camp; he's there to tell the story of his life.

On five consecutive nights last March, a German-born Palestinian journalist and documentary filmmaker named Raid Sabbah interviewed the masked man, a 29-year-old he calls Said. In his new book, Der Tod ist ein Geschenk (Death is a Gift, Droemer; 253 pages), Sabbah offers a rare glimpse inside the mind of a suicide bomber. "I wanted to describe the situation of the Palestinians," Sabbah says, "and create understanding for — but not approval of — the motives of a person like Said."

Don't pick up this book expecting a balanced look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sabbah, who was granted access to the would-be bomber by the terror group Islamic Jihad, doesn't try to hide his sympathy for its cause, though he disagrees with its tactics. Der Tod ist ein Geschenk is presented as Said's first-person account, and portrays him much like the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, unavoidably pushed toward catastrophe by circumstances beyond his control. Sabbah made no attempt to corroborate the details of Said's story; the idea, he told Time, "never entered my head." So the reader can't know if Said is telling the truth or spinning a politically charged fable. By telling his story, Sabbah wants to show "how a human being can be driven to kill innocent people he doesn't even know."

The first seven years of Said's life were uneventful: he grew up on his father's olive farm in the village of Beit Ijza near Ramallah. Then, as he tells it in the book, everything changed. In 1981, he says, the Israelis drove his family out and bulldozed their house to make room for a Jewish settlement. "For the first time in my life I felt an undreamed-of anger," Said says. "Hatred rose in me, an extreme hatred for everything Israeli."

Said goes on to recount two decades filled with ever-more-violent incidents of humiliation and brutality. The military police, he says, arrested and tortured his father and uncle. They eventually arrested Said, who at 16 had joined the ranks of the young intifadeh rebels. His mother, trying to stop her youngest son, Farid, from hurling stones at Israeli tanks, is said to have been shot in the forehead and killed. Released after four years in jail, Said says he made a life for himself, working as a joiner. He dreamed of happy years to come, of marriage and family: "The freedom which had smiled at me on the day of my release was an impetus for my will to live and my ambition." But in 1997, he says, the minibus taking him to work in Haifa was strafed by Israeli soldiers; bullets hit him in the legs, seriously wounding him. Said's disillusionment was complete. "We were and are begrudged [the right] to lead a more or less happy life," he says. "Our dream of a sovereign state ... has proved a fantasy."

Determined "not to go on like this," Said joined the local branch of Islamic Jihad and volunteered as a shahid, or suicide attacker. "We have nothing — neither vehicles nor tanks, let alone planes, with which we could wage war against the Israeli army and for a sovereign Palestinian state," he says. "We only have our bodies. They are our only weapons."

Although aware that his death alone wouldn't change anything, Said says he hoped to make the enemy experience the terror he had endured all his life. "Through the suicide attacks, this conflict has become tangible for the Israelis," he says. "The same fear which our mothers feel for their children and husbands is now among them."

In the end, Said never got the order to don the explosives belt. On April 2, just days after his last interview with Sabbah, he was killed in a shoot-out with Israeli troops who stormed the Jenin refugee camp. Sabbah, who learned of Said's death three months later, doesn't think the young Palestinian would have been sorry to go. He recalls Said's final words to him after the last interview in that empty building: "Like life, death is a gift."

Although it deals with terror and death, Sabbah's book is a plea for peace. He still believes there is hope that the Middle East conflict can be resolved. "The solution to the problem — two independent states — already exists," he says, "and there are many people on both sides who are really sick of fighting." For the majority, life is a greater gift than death.