JERUSALEM, June 20 (Reuters) - Israel's own military actions
are partly to blame for creating a Palestinian "incubator of
terror", the country's defence minister was quoted as saying
on Thursday after meeting jailed would-be suicide bombers.
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Ha'aretz newspaper in an interview
that he took the unusual step of questioning two Palestinians
face-to-face this week about their aborted bomb plots because he
wanted to find out what motivated them.
Among those he interviewed was a 20-year-old Palestinian
woman, who told him she changed her mind at the last minute
about carrying out a suicide attack because she could not bear
to kill mothers, children and teenagers.
Ben-Eliezer said people who carried out suicide bombings
were pressured into it by militant groups with the "satanic
aim...to create human bombs".
But the defence minister -- head of the centre-left Labour
Party, junior partner in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition
-- was quoted as saying Israel was also partly responsible
because of its military campaign in Palestinian-ruled areas.
"While the army is carrying out these necessary
actions...the military actions kindle the frustration, hatred
and despair and are the incubator for terror to come,"
Ben-Eliezer told the newspaper.
"The (Palestinian) religious and political environment
immediately exploits this effect and dispatches the new suicide
bombers and the pattern is repeated," he was quoted as saying.
Ben-Eliezer is the Labour's leading hawk but has generally
taken a more conciliatory approach to the Palestinians than
Sharon, who heads the right-wing Likud Party.
The Iraqi-born defence minister, who speaks fluent Arabic,
justified his jailhouse meetings as a fact-finding mission. "I
wanted to understand the fuel that drives suicide bombers," he
told Israel Radio.
Seeking insights, Ben-Eliezer met a Bethlehem University
student who said she had had volunteered for a suicide mission
to avenge the killing of her boyfriend, a militant, by Israeli
troops.
On May 22, she stood with a bomb strapped to her body in a
pedestrian mall in the town of Rishon Letzion near Tel Aviv.
She was driven there with another Palestinian for what was
meant to be a double suicide bombing. She stood nearby as her
partner, a teenager, blew himself up, killing two people.
"I saw a lot of people, mothers with children, teenaged boys
and girls," she told Ben-Eliezer, according to a transcript of
the meeting published in Ha'aretz.
"I remembered an Israeli girl my age whom I used to be in
touch with," she was quoted as saying. "I suddenly understood
what I was about to do and I said to myself: How can I do such a
thing? I changed my mind".
Ben-Eliezer expressed a measure of sympathy for the young
woman, who returned home to Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem and was
later arrested.
He described as "spineless" the other wound-be bomber he
met, a man from the Palestinian town of Jenin in the West Bank.
Ben-Eliezer said the man had tried and failed four times to
carry out bombings before he was arrested. He told the defence
minister suicide bombings are a "religious imperative from
Allah", according to transcripts of the meeting.
"What links the two (would-be bombers) together is the same
desperation they have reached," Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio.
20 JUN 2002 22:46:41 Israel partly to blame for bombings-minister
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