NEW DOCUMENTARY ON PALI SUICIDE BOMBERS

Terrorists in the Spotlight by Alyssa A. Lappen
Six months ago, filmmaker Pierre Rehov sat in an Israeli jail, interviewing a 16-year-old Palestinian. The boy wanted to be a martyr, he told Rehov, because "the Jews killed the prophet Mohammed." Told that this is not in the Koran, the illiterate boy insisted that it was. He wanted nothing but to die in the act of murdering others.

Rehov's forthcoming film, Suicide Killers, will be the seventh in a series of documentaries on Israel produced since 2000. In that year, on September 30, Rehov flipped on the television at his home in France and saw photographs of young Mohammed Al Durrah. As an experienced filmmaker, Rehov recalls, he realized instantly that "news" of the child’s death at the hands of Israeli soldiers in Gaza had been faked....

Rehov's newest film explores the motivations of suicide killers. "I interviewed a few cases of survivors of terror -- young, beautiful girls. But the deeper I got into the film, the more I realized that I did not want to make a film like everyone else," he says now. "This will not be a film about how you build a new life. What every one wanted to talk about," -- and the thing that ultimately captivated Rehov as well -- "was the smile and the behavior of the terrorist before he blew himself up. I wanted to be in him; I wanted to know what he feels the second before detonating."

So Rehov has interviewed psychologists, political analysts, religious scholars and others to discuss the psychopathology of the bombers. Unexpectedly, he found that sexuality has a great deal to do with it. "In their society, young men are forbidden to have a real relationship with a woman. So when you ask them what they are going to become, they are not trying to become engineers, doctors or professionals. Their entire society believes that a man becomes a hero by blowing himself up. They believe that the next second, they are in heaven, surrounded by women. It is pure sexual fantasy."