Journalist James Bennet

DATE July 23, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: James Bennet discusses the Middle East conflict
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Shortly after midnight, the Israeli military fired a missile at the home of
the one of the militants on its list of the most wanted, Sheik Salah Shehadeh.
He was a founder of the military wing of Hamas. The missile flattened three
buildings in a densely populated neighborhood in Gaza City, killing Shehadeh
and at least 14 others, including several children. Hamas has vowed
retaliation. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the attack.

My guest, James Bennet, is the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times.
This morning, he went to a studio in Jerusalem to record an interview about
the latest developments in the Middle East conflict, including this attack
against Hamas.

What does this attack represent in terms of Israel's military tactics?

Mr. JAMES BENNET (The New York Times): Well, it's a familiar tactic that
Israel's been using throughout most of the 22-month conflict. They've gone
about tracking down and killing people they regard as particularly threatening
militant leaders on the Palestinian side. Dozens of men have been killed this
way. In many of the incidents, there's been what the Americans are calling
collateral damage, civilians killed alongside the intended target. This one
was a particularly devastating attack. It's been very rare--I think only on
one other occasion that Israel used F-16s in an attack like this,
American-made warplanes. They did it in an attack on another Hamas leader in
Nablus a year ago. They actually missed the target in that case and killed 11
policemen. The danger is, obviously, a warplane is not likely to be as
accurate as a helicopter gunship or something that can pinpoint its target
more carefully. So this was a very unusual attack in that sense, and the
destruction was far greater than we've seen in most of these sorts of
killings.

GROSS: What was the Israeli justification for assassinating this military
leader of Hamas, and what is the Hamas reaction in response?

Mr. BENNET: The Israelis say that this man, Salah Shehadeh, was a founder of
the military wing of Hamas, and they say he's responsible for hundreds of
attacks in the Gaza Strip, that he's also involved in operations in the West
Bank and even has connections overseas. They considered him perhaps the most
dangerous, certainly one of the most dangerous, Palestinians. But it's part
of the tragedy of this place that one side's cause is always the other side's
effect. For Israelis, broadly speaking, the killing of this man is a just
punishment and the end of something. They've removed an important threat to
Israel.

For Hamas, and really for Palestinians more broadly, this attack is a real
provocation and the beginning of something. They accuse Israel of using what
they say are terrorist tactics, firing a missile into a very densely populated
civilian area, killing not just this man but several children. At least seven
or eight children are said to have died in this attack. So from the
Palestinian perspective, they regard Israel as the aggressor here and
themselves as the attacked responding to Israeli violence with any means at
their disposal.

GROSS: What kind of news is this for the Palestinian Authority? What's the
relationship now between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority?

Mr. BENNET: Well, the relationship is fraught between Hamas and the
Palestinian Authority. Hamas has been gaining popularity over the course of
the conflict, although there are some indications that it's topped out around
23, 24 percent, only marginally, by the way, behind the popularity of Yasser
Arafat himself. Hamas is quite a strong organization. The Israelis say
Arafat has simply been unwilling to crack down on Hamas; that there's kind of
a tacit partnership there. The Palestinian Authority allies of Arafat say
he's unable to crack down on them, lacking sufficient political support at the
moment.

So it's been a very difficult relationship. There has been some cease-fire
negotiations, some discussion behind the scenes between Fatah, which is
Arafat's organization, and Hamas. It's unclear exactly how ripe those
discussions had become. But this killing obviously sets them way, way back.
Hamas is in no interest now, no patience whatsoever for any talk of a
cease-fire.

GROSS: Hamas has been vowing a new kind of attack against Israel. They've
been promising like a new, stronger type of punishment. What do you know
about that?

Mr. BENNET: Well, there's been talk for some time about efforts to
incorporate various types of poisons and things like that in the explosives
that Hamas uses. And there's been evidence actually of rat poison, other
sorts of chemicals added, anti-coagulants, things like that, to make the
attack more damaging. There's also--the Israelis have been warning over and
over again lately of a so-called mega-attack, some sort of a bombing of a
major target, a very large building. There was an attempt to blow up a gas
depot recently here that potentially would have created an enormous explosion.
No responsibility has been claimed in that particular attack. It's not clear
that it was Hamas.

Hamas has also been experimenting with various types of short-range rockets
that have been launched from Gaza and also now from the West Bank. They're
wildly inaccurate, rather crude, but getting more sophisticated and more
powerful. These sorts of things, I think, are what they're referring to.

GROSS: So is Israel preparing for a new kind of attack?

Mr. BENNET: Yeah, they have been preparing for a new kind of attack. They're
constantly on the lookout for this sort of thing. Some of it, of course, is
just propaganda. I mean, Hamas has great interest in--its mission is to sow
fear among Israelis. So they want to suggest that there's a diversification,
amplification of their arsenal, some new, sinister, as yet unheard-of weapon.
But Israeli intelligence has mined the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with
informants and is constantly on the lookout for any sort of new developments
like this. The man that Israel killed this morning, Sheik Salah Shehadeh,
Israel says was basically one of the Hamas, if not the Hamas technological
mastermind who was in charge of this effort to develop new rockets and other
sorts of weaponry.

GROSS: James Bennet is my guest. He's The New York Times' Jerusalem bureau
chief.

Can you give us an accounting of where Israel is now in its policy in the
territories? How many cities have been reoccupied?

Mr. BENNET: Israel has taken seven of the eight major Palestinian population
centers in the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south.
That means that several hundred thousand Palestinians, about 700,000
Palestinians now, are essentially living under 24-hour curfew in the West
Bank, curfews that are sporadically lifted by Israel to allow people to go
shop for groceries, to restock, to get medicine, things like that. But aid
workers and diplomats here are talking about a looming human crisis in the
West Bank. There have been reports of malnutrition among Palestinians. The
Israelis are trying to grapple with--this operation is now about a month old.
Israel started in response to back-to-back suicide bombings in June here in
Jerusalem.

GROSS: Is this controversial within Israel?

Mr. BENNET: It's actually got fairly broad support within Israel, although
the operation is quite open-ended. There's been--in contrast to past
operations, this one--Israel basically undertook it with a stated objective of
seizing and holding what by treaty is Palestinian-controlled territory until
all terror attacks, as Israel defines them, cease. So it could go for many,
many months. And in the meantime, Israel is facing the question of whether it
wants to shoulder the burden of collecting the garbage, educating Palestinian
children, making sure people are fed. It's seeking to avoid that
responsibility, which could cost the government, it estimates, more than $2
billion a year.

But the problem that they've got is the Palestinian Authority, the governing
entity in the West Bank and Gaza, has been labeled by Israel a terrorist
organization. It is under tremendous pressure from Israel, and it's not in
much of a position to provide these services, either.

GROSS: How is Israel dealing with leaders of countries and critics in various
parts of the world who are saying that Israel is responsible for grave human
rights violations in the territories?

Mr. BENNET: Well, I think they're very concerned now that there's going to be
a rising outcry about that very problem. And as a result, they're making it a
little easier now for aid organizations to move through the West Bank to
deliver food to these different areas. That seems to be their short-term
approach to the problem. They're also talking about freeing up some of the
$600 million in Palestinian tax revenue that Israel has sequestered over the
course of the conflict, saying that the money would be used to finance
terrorism. They're talking about now finding some way to hand some of that
money over to help the Palestinians help themselves a little bit, to feed
their people.

GROSS: My guest is James Bennet, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York
Times. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: James Bennet is my guest. He's the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New
York Times, and he's joining us from Jerusalem.

What is Israel saying it would take for it to withdraw from the West Bank?

Mr. BENNET: Well, it depends which Israeli official you speak to. Shimon
Peres, the foreign minister, said yesterday that Israel was willing to start
withdrawing from some areas provided Palestinian security would step in and
ensure Israeli security. Other Israeli officials are saying, no way. There's
going to be no withdrawal, they say, until there's a wholesale reform of
Palestinian security, democracy, financial institutions, reform as Israel
defines it.

The Americans--the Bush administration has now essentially signed on to that
argument. President Bush in his speech a month ago, June 24th, endorsed the
central demand of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, which is that Yasser Arafat be
replaced as leader of the Palestinians before there's any substantive return
to negotiations here. And until then, it seems Israel has received American,
if not blessing, at least implicit support for maintaining this massive really
military presence in the West Bank.

GROSS: Does Israel see a 24-hour curfew as being an incentive for the
Palestinian Authority to reform or does it see it as inhibiting reform because
no one can even go out of the house?

Mr. BENNET: Well, again, they argue that it is an incentive; that it's
forcing them to address these problems and weakening the support for the
Palestinian Authority; that is increasing frustration of average Palestinians
with the kind of government they're getting from Ramallah. That frustration
was already very, very high. There is a lot of complaints from
Palestinians--average Palestinians about mismanagement, corruption, lack of
proper accountability, democratic representation. The problem is, to some
extent, there's a backlash now. And Palestinians are feeling that though they
may be frustrated with their own government, they don't want outsiders, and
particularly, they don't want Israelis and Americans telling them that they
ought to replace their government. So to some extent you may be actually
seeing an increase in sympathy now and support for Yasser Arafat because he's
under so much--under siege again by Israeli forces.

GROSS: Now one of the questions is: If Arafat did step aside, or was forced
out, who would his successor be? You've written that that's not--there's no
obvious answer to that question in part because he has tried to prevent people
from usurping his power. He's tried to prevent other people from becoming
very powerful within the Palestinian Authority. How has he done that?

Mr. BENNET: Well, Yasser Arafat hasn't been the pre-eminent leader of the
Palestinian people for several decades now because he's a silly or stupid man.
He's a very, very clever leader. And he's been very careful to divide up
power underneath himself and play different factions, different potential
leaders off against each other. He's distributed security portfolios, for
example, in the West Bank and Gaza into a variety of different hands. There's
more than a dozen overlapping Palestinian security agencies. You've got your
West Bank agencies and your Gaza-based agencies, and the people who are in
charge of one have no authority over the other.

So there's a great deal of jostling underneath Arafat, but all the
strings--all the power ultimately goes to him. So it's very unclear who his
successor would be. President Bush in his speech demanded Palestinian
elections, but he also demanded a specific outcome to those elections, which
is that a new leadership be elected that is not compromised by terror, as he
put it. And it's not clear who that would be. All of the potential
replacements to Arafat here--all that have any popular support--are regarded
by this Israeli government, at least, as having some links to terrorism.

GROSS: One of the possible successors of Arafat is Marwan Barghouti, who's
the leader of the Tanzim Militia, the militia that's affiliated with Fatah,
Arafat's organization. Is he still in jail? He was arrested not too long
ago.

Mr. BENNET: Yeah. He was arrested in the last major offensive in Ramallah,
and he is still in jail. And Israel says it is going to put him on trial,
accusing him of being a terrorist; accusing him of basically working on
Arafat's behalf carrying out direct orders from Arafat to kill Israelis.
Marwan Barghouti is one of the more interesting Palestinian figures. He was a
young leader in the first intifida in the late '80s. He was arrested,
deported, came back and he came back ultimately as part of the Oslo peace
process. He had many Israeli friends, like many of his generation, that
actually grew up in the West Bank not in exile. He's a fluent speaker of
Hebrew, which he learned in prison. He also speaks English. And he formed
these friendships with Israeli parliamentarians and others during the Oslo
peace process, which he repeatedly said he was a deep believer in and still
says that he's a believer in a two-state solution.

Israel says that over the course of this conflict, he became one of the most
dangerous terrorist leaders, Israel says, on the Palestinian side; a charge he
denies. He insisted he's a political leader of Fatah, and that while he
supports attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza,
which he regards as legitimate struggle against occupation, he has always said
he opposes attacks within Israel--that is pre-1967 Israel.

The various conspiracy theories, by the way, Terry, about Barghouti's
imprisonment by the Israelis, at least on the Palestinian side--some
Palestinians think that Israel is essentially trying to turn Marwan Barghouti
into the Palestinian Nelson Mandela, exaggerating his credentials as a
potential terrorist, removing him from the scene now as the Palestinian
Authority is faced with so many difficult decisions so that he can return and
possibly run for election, ultimately, and become the next Palestinian leader.

GROSS: Do you think there's any ring of truth to that, or do you think it's
merely a conspiracy theory?

Mr. BENNET: I think it's probably just conspiracy theory, one of many. This
place is prone to them.

GROSS: What's your impression of life in Israel now and the level of fear
that people are living with on a day-to-day basis?

Mr. BENNET: It's abated somewhat as a consequence of this current operation.
There's been fewer attacks in the last month within Israel. There was a
suicide bombing last week in Tel Aviv, and an attack on a settlement in the
West Bank. There continue to be violent incidents in Gaza, but in general
there's been less violence within Israel as Palestinians have essentially been
locked down in the West Bank. They're already surrounded by this fence in
Gaza and there's been less of a problem with attacks from there. This latest
killing of the Hamas leader in Gaza is likely to increase motivation among
Palestinian extremists for attacks. That motivation, diplomats here say, is
already running at record levels because there's so much anger over the way
Palestinians are being treated.

GROSS: Since suicide bombings have been down since the reoccupation of the
West Bank, have Israelis rallied behind the reoccupation? Do they see that
move as a success?

Mr. BENNET: Yes. Yes. Certainly in the short term. The people here just
feel so relieved that they can go out more freely, go to coffee shops, ride
the buses without such fear. There are still security guards everywhere.
There's still a great deal of anxiety, but there's a general sense that people
are a little freer to move around again. You're seeing restaurants fill up
again in Jerusalem and elsewhere. And because of that, people are, at least
in the short term, very supportive of this operation. It does create
long-term problems for Israel, though, in terms of its standing in the world,
possibly, if there is a growing international outcry and also financial
troubles for a government that is already running a tremendous deficit, 3
percent of the GNP.

GROSS: Also in the long term, is there fear that the reoccupation of the West
Bank is going to in the long term breed more suicide bombers? Even if they
can't get out now, they'll get out later.

Mr. BENNET: Well, this is one of the central questions of the whole
operation. There is a fear among Israelis, center and left Israelis voiced
here, that that's exactly what's going to happen, particularly if this
operation is not accompanied by some sort of political discussion, something
to give the Palestinians hope that, despite what's happening now, they're on
the road to statehood if they're willing to assure Israeli security, recognize
a two-state solution and live peacefully beside Israel. In the absence of
that, many Israelis fear that they're just in a cycle, a downward spiral,
that's going to lead to, ultimately, more and more acts of violence by
Palestinians and possibly no withdrawal by Israeli forces from the West Bank.

GROSS: James Bennet is the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. Our
interview was recorded this morning. We'll hear the rest of it in the second
half of the show. I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, a profile of a Palestinian suicide bomber who changed her
mind at the last minute. We continue our discussion with James Bennet,
Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, with more of our interview with
James Bennet, Jerusalem Bureau chief of The New York Times. This morning, he
went to a studio in Jerusalem to record a conversation about the conflict in
the Middle East.

Recently a group of 55 Palestinians took out an ad in the newspaper Al-Quds,
opposing suicide bombing and condemning those who would try to teach young
people to become suicide bombers. More Palestinians have signed on to that ad
since then. What kind of conversation or debate is that ad stirring up among
Palestinians?

Mr. BENNET: Well, it was really an interesting effort. It looked like it
was beginning to create some debate. It was a more cautious statement, by the
way, Terry, than that. They said they were condemning military acts against
Israeli civilians. They didn't actually use the term suiciding bombing,
though everybody knows exactly what they were talking about, and they were
making the argument that it leads to greater hatred on both sides, and it
undermines the Palestinian national interest, that is, makes their aspirations
for statehood that much more unlikely to be fulfilled. This effort, which was
led by Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, who's the president of a Palestinian university
here in Jerusalem, Oxford-educated professor of philosophy, began basically
almost at the same time as this latest Israeli operation in the West Bank,
which has had the effect of stifling that debate. It's very hard for them to
conduct this kind of intra-Palestinian dialogue when they feel that they're
under attack.

Interestingly enough, Sari Nusseibeh himself was recently evicted from his
office at Al-Quds University by Israeli security services, which accused him
of being linked to the Palestinian Authority. They shut down his office, they
carted out a bunch of documents. There was actually a complaint from the
United States about this, and just yesterday, they let him reopen his office
again after he signed a pledge saying he wouldn't do what he says he hasn't
done all along, which is to represent the interests of the PA here in
Jerusalem.

GROSS: It seems like a really confusing move on behalf of Israel, because
Sari Nusseibeh is seen as a moderate and is seen by many observers as just the
kind of person who Israel should be encouraging to take on a bigger leadership
position...

Mr. BENNET: Well...

GROSS: ...because he is a moderate, because he believes in--or he says he
believes in a peaceful co-existence between two states, one Israeli, one
Palestinian.

Mr. BENNET: Well, that's exactly the argument that was advanced by a lot of
Israeli opposition politicians and others, that `Look,' they said to the
government, `you say you want an alternative moderate Palestinian leadership,
and here you are interfering with the pre-eminent Palestinian moderate.'

GROSS: And Israel says?

Mr. BENNET: And Israel said--in this case it was Uzi Landau, the minister of
public security--said that, `Well, sorry, you shouldn't be fooled by Sari
Nusseibeh's seeming amiability. He's functioning as a Trojan horse for Arafat
here in Jerusalem and undermining Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.' There's
an argument made you hear among right-wing Israelis that Sari Nusseibeh is, in
fact, not a moderate, that he's some sort of a closet radical, that he's
actually functioned as an Iraqi spy, which he vehemently denies.

GROSS: Do you think that's more conspiracy theory?

Mr. BENNET: Well, as I said before, there are large numbers of conspiracy
theories on both sides. It's often hard to evaluate, to get to the very heart
of them. But there's little evidence that's been put forward to support that
charge.

GROSS: You did an article a few weeks ago in which you interviewed a suicide
bomber, a Palestinian suicide bomber, who was being held at an Israeli prison.
Her name was Arian Achmed(ph), and she's a young woman who at the last minute
decided not to go through with the suicide bombing. You described her as
representative of how suicide bombers are changing in the kind of profile that
they represent. How is she different from the expected portrait of the
suicide bomber?

Mr. BENNET: Well, she was a student at Bethlehem University in Bethlehem,
which has not produced any suicide bombers. She was a student of business
administration who skipped a marketing lecture to go carry out this attack.
She was a young woman, in other words, who seemed to have a bright future.
She's a fluent speaker of English. She's a very self-possessed young woman
from a fairly well-to-do home. Her uncle is an engineer trained in the United
States. They're, as I say, a successful family. They don't seem to suffer
from economic deprivation or to be despairing. Her uncle actually is a critic
of suicide bombing. In her case, her fiance had died. He was a militant
leader. She believed he had been killed by Israeli intelligence agents. He
actually blew himself up accidentally.

But this was part of a kind of a personal motivation for her. And that's what
we're seeing. There's all kinds of motivations now in these attacks. It used
to be when we first started seeing the phenomena of suicide bombing here, that
it took a great deal of time and preparation to get somebody ready to commit
one of these attacks. There's often a lot of spiritual training that went
into it. In some cases, according to Israeli Intelligence Services, people
would wear their burial shroud in advance of the attack. They would be buried
up to their necks in sand, left to ponder what they were facing, trying to
imagine what the world looked like from their god's perspective. Now it seems
to be an almost casual affair. A woman like Arian Achmed, feeling very angry
about what Israel is doing, perhaps because of some personal turmoil, contacts
someone she knows--in this case, it was a friend of her dead fiance--and
within a matter of days, she finds herself with a bomb on her back walking
through an Israeli town and, in her case, wondering what she's doing. In
other cases, people have gone through with their attacks, including a
16-year-old boy who was with Arian that day who blew himself up in the town of
Rishon Letzion in Israel.

GROSS: Did she tell you exactly when and why she had second thoughts and
decided not to go through with the attack?

Mr. BENNET: It was partly on the drive down there, but it was really, she
said, when she was walking through the town, she was carrying the bomb. She
described it as almost a kind of epiphany. She said she looked around at the
people and she looked up at the sky, and she remembered what she'd been taught
as a child, she said, which is it was wrong to take any human life. And she
turned back at that point. And she said that the young man with her also had
second thoughts, but for reasons that are still not clear, he ultimately went
through with the attack.

GROSS: Well, when she decided not to go through with it and she decided to
turn back, where did she go? I mean, where do you go when you have a bomb
strapped to you, and everyone is expecting you to go through with it, but
you're not going to?

Mr. BENNET: She came back. She dropped the bomb off in the car that had
conveyed her there. She called the courier that had led them down there. She
didn't even know the name of the town where she was. She wondered if she was
in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. She didn't know. She had no idea where she was in
Israel. So she called him. He called the guys in Bethlehem, who had
dispatched her, and there ensued a fairly furious conversation. Some pressure
was put on her to go through with it. I think it's possible some threats were
made. In a case like this, someone in her position would fear, obviously, for
her family, that there might be some kind of reprisal taken. She said they
were not happy with her. But after having been, to some extent at least,
manipulated into this position, she now showed some strength of will and stood
out against them and insisted on going back, and they finally insisted that
this courier bring her back to Bethlehem, I think partly because they were
afraid she'd run to the Israelis and turn them all in.

GROSS: Well, you interviewed her from an Israeli prison.

Mr. BENNET: That's right. A few days later, the Israelis swooped in and
arrested her, and since then, they've arrested all the members of this
particular cell.

GROSS: How did they find out about her?

Mr. BENNET: I'm not sure exactly what the precise sequence was, but within a
couple of days of the attack, they arrested this driver, a man named Ibraham
Sirockney(ph), who was at a mall actually outside Tel Aviv with his wife and
child after having brought the bombers to this attack. And once they had him,
interrogation quickly led to the rest of the cell, I think.

GROSS: How did you get access to interviewing her?

Mr. BENNET: I and a couple of other journalists were--I had made several
requests to interview these people that were being held in Israeli custody,
and the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, allowed us to interview
her and also Ibraham Sirockney separately. There was a Shin Bet agent present
for the interview.

GROSS: And did she feel comfortable talking with you about her motivations?

Mr. BENNET: She said she felt comfortable, that she did not feel coerced.
She said it was in her own interests to talk because she was hoping for some
sympathy for her position. The security agents who were present did not
interrupt, except to steer conversation away from the nature of her
interrogation. Arian Achmed is hoping to be released by the Israelis and to
make a new life for herself in Jordan.

GROSS: My guest is James Bennet, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York
Times. We'll talk more after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Let's get back to the interview we recorded this morning with James
Bennet, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. When we left off, we
were talking about his profile of a young woman who was set to carry out a
suicide bombing, but at the last minute, shortly before it was time to
detonate the bomb on her back, she changed her mind. Bennet interviewed her
in an Israeli prison.

So is there anything that particularly surprised you talking with her?

Mr. BENNET: I guess it was--the real word I think is just casualness of the
whole process. The Israelis talk about--Ariel Sharon, the prime minister,
talks about an infrastructure of terror. The use of the word `infrastructure'
suggests a complex, sophisticated apparatus with lots of moving parts and a
clear, detailed blueprint, in a sense. In fact, there's a very loosely
organized series of cells now increasingly isolated throughout the West Bank,
fairly autonomous, I think, and a little slapdash in some cases.

I interviewed another young suicide bomber from Jenin, a kid who blew himself
up at a junction, the Megiddo Junction, in Israel near Jenin. He wounded
himself. He didn't hurt anybody else. And I interviewed him while he was
recuperating in an Israeli hospital. Israel had gone to great pains to put
this young man back together again. And his case was somewhat similar. Over
the course of the intifada, he found himself unemployed. He used to work in
Israel. He'd hung around at a pool hall. Then he'd started listening to
Islamic clerics who explained that he was wasting his life. He started going
to mosque more often.

He became angry, he said, about what Israel was doing in the West Bank, and he
contacted the brother of a known militant leader in Jenin, and a day or two
later, this guy took him to a house, showed him a bomb, showed him how to
trigger it and told him to find his way into Israel and basically explode
himself wherever he wanted. He advised him to try to find a group of soldiers
and blow himself up there. So this boy takes the bomb, gets in a cab, walks
across the boundary with Israel, something that is still possible to do,
although it's getting harder. On his way, he gets concerned because the bomb
smells so terrible. I think it must have been made from fertilizer. He gets
worried about this, so he stops in a store and buys some cheap perfume. And
you have this young Palestinian man walking through the streets of an Israeli
Arab village, dousing his bomb with perfume in hopes of getting past whatever
kind of Israeli security he might encounter. As I say, this is the
infrastructure of terror that the Israelis are up against, and in some ways,
it's much more difficult to defeat because it's so atomized and chaotic.

GROSS: You know, you're talking about the casualness with which young people
now are setting out to become suicide bombers, and I wonder if you think that
they are that casual, in part, because of the whole media campaign that's done
by the suicide bombers and the people who support and advocate them, you know,
the whole glamorization of the martyr.

Mr. BENNET: Well, I think this...

GROSS: It becomes a part of culture. It becomes a part of everyday life.
People are used to it. It's not unthinkable anymore.

Mr. BENNET: I should say, by the way, in using the word `casual,' I don't
mean to minimize what they're doing or suggest it's unimportant. I think
it's more the phenomenon that you're describing. I think the reason that
you're seeing Sari Nusseibeh and other Palestinian intellectuals beginning
to raise the alarm about this kind of behavior is that they're fearful that
there is this kind of cultural phenomenon at work, that there's a culture of
heroism growing up around these sorts of acts. And as a result, you're
getting a sort of self-sustaining, self-reinforcing cycle at work, where it
becomes popular, heroic to carry out these sorts of suicide attacks. That
poses, they think, a long-term threat not just to Israel but to Palestinian
society itself.

GROSS: James Bennet is my guest. He's the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New
York Times.

In one of your articles this morning, you referred to a big debate, a big
division, between the ultra-Orthodox in Israel and the rest of the country,
particularly secular Jews. Can you talk a little bit about what the latest
shift in the debate is, what the latest eruption in the debate is?

Mr. BENNET: Well, there's a source of constant turmoil here within Israeli
society, and, in fact, before this intifada broke out, there was a lot of talk
about Israel society fragmenting along these lines because of this secular
religious split. To some extent, that debate, like other internal disputes on
both sides, have been mooted by this present conflict. People on both sides
say that if they didn't have the other side to rally against, they might tear
themselves apart because there are so many internal splits among Palestinians
and among Israelis.

In this case, what's bringing it to a head now is a bill pending in the
Israeli Parliament that would formalize what has long been the case here,
which is that yeshiva students, the ultra-religious students of Judaism here,
are exempt from mandatory service in the Israeli army, which all Israeli men
perform for three years. And their studies furthermore are subsidized by the
state. Secular Israelis are saying this is grossly unfair, that their sons
are at risk, their daughters as well, but in this case, yeshiva students are
only male. Since their sons are at risk, the students of the religious should
be as well.

GROSS: So would you say that there's a lot of resentment now, the
ultra-Orthodox who aren't fighting, but they're very representative of some of
the policies that are requiring the fighting?

Mr. BENNET: Well, that's the argument that's made; that in some cases, the
secular Israelis are defending yeshivas located in settlements in the West
Bank, so they're putting their lives at stake to defend people who are
exercising their religious principles, holding on to the territory they
believe that, by divine right, has been granted by God to the Jews, and that,
in fact, these yeshiva students should possibly be contributing a little more
to their own defense. The measure, however, is likely to pass. The exemption
is likely to be preserved. Yesterday, a much more modest measure was voted
down in a committee. That measure would have compelled yeshiva students to
perform just two weeks of compulsory service in the civil guards, but that
didn't get anywhere in the end.

GROSS: Do you get the feeling that there's a lot of people in Israel now with
a kind of tortured conscience, doing what they feel they need to do to protect
themselves but feeling, at the same time, bad about what they're doing?

Mr. BENNET: There's some of that, Terry. There's some feeling. But you
often hear on the Israeli side now, `Well, we have no choice.' They feel
they've been backed into a corner and left no option. And interestingly
enough, recent reports from the States about the American operation in
Afghanistan has made the Israelis feel a little more confident, I think, about
what they're doing.

GROSS: You're referring to reports that hundreds of...

Mr. BENNET: Hundreds of...

GROSS: ...innocent Afghans have been killed in our bombing attacks, even
though they were supposed to be very precise.

Mr. BENNET: Exactly. They're saying, `Well, you know, we could be carpet
bombing the West Bank and Gaza. We could be doing exactly the same thing, but
we're not.' And so they're using the Americans, in a sense, as a foil. There
was a piece yesterday in the mass circulation Israeli daily here by perhaps
the most noted Israeli columnist, Nahum Barnea, that basically said, `Well, we
can't ever let ourselves be like the Americans, because we're much more moral
people, and we don't take this kind of approach to fighting our fights, and we
have to use much more pinpoint operations and much more humane tactics.'

GROSS: My guest is James Bennet, Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York
Times. We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: James Bennet is my guest. He's The New York Times Jerusalem bureau
chief.

What kind of comments are you hearing about the Bush administration and its
stand on Israel, on its insistence that Arafat is not a partner for peace,
that basically nothing's going to happen until he leaves? What are you
hearing from Israelis and Palestinians in positions of authority?

Mr. BENNET: Well, Israelis in positions of authority are delighted because
they feel that George Bush has wholly endorsed their position. Palestinians
have been dismayed by it. The Bush administration essentially reversed what
had been long-standing American policy, which was that Yasser Arafat is the
only Palestinian leader strong enough to secure a peace agreement with
Israel. George Bush has decided that, in fact, Yasser Arafat is a central
obstacle to peace with Israel and has predicated progress towards a political
solution here on Arafat's replacement. As I said earlier, this has created
a somewhat dangerous political dynamic from the Bush administration's
perspective, which is that Yasser Arafat's popularity seems to be growing as a
result. And, in fact, some diplomats here say the Americans are now starting
to back away from the idea of holding elections early next year in the
Palestinian Authority because they're afraid that Yasser Arafat will score an
overwhelming victory. So it's paradoxical. We've gone from saying that we
want Arafat to be strong to fearing that, in fact, he might be too strong and
that that will undermine the Bush administration's aims, or at least I guess
make them look silly.

GROSS: If the United States does go ahead with plans to invade Iraq and try
to overthrow Saddam Hussein, what might that mean for the Middle East?

Mr. BENNET: Well, this is the $64,000 question. Many Israelis and
Palestinians believe that what the Bush administration has been doing is
essentially trying to put this conflict on the back burner, push it out of
sight until the Iraq operation can be taken care of. That's regarded as the
Bush administration's top priority. And the feeling on both sides is it's
going to completely scramble the chessboard. Everything will depend on what
the outcome is. The Israelis are hoping that it will rewrite the rules in the
Middle East, that it will put pressure on the Syrians, the Iranians to change
their ways. Palestinians are also very, very concerned, obviously, about any
action against an Arab nation. And everybody's just waiting to see what the
impact might be in the end.

GROSS: Is Israel worried about Scud missiles that Iraq might aim at them?

Mr. BENNET: Well, and this is a question--during the last war in Iraq, there
were Scud missiles aimed at Israel that did hit Israel. And the Bush
administration at that time took great pains to put tremendous pressure on the
Israeli government not to respond, because if Israel came into the war, the
Americans feared, it would shatter the coalition of Arab states that that Bush
administration had built to wage its war; that is, that Arabs couldn't be seen
as fighting alongside Israel against another Arab nation. That same dilemma
is likely to face both the Israelis and the Americans this time around as
well. And it's far from certain how the Israelis would respond.

GROSS: Are you satisfied with the kind of access that you have now as a
journalist, or do you feel like you are not being allowed access that you need
to fairly cover the story?

Mr. BENNET: It's very difficult getting around in the West Bank right now.
The Israelis have been loosening some of the restrictions on journalists. The
areas that were declared closed military zones are, for the most part, open
now and we no longer, in theory at least, have to find back roads, dirt roads
around Israeli positions and other sorts of safeguards to find our way into
these Palestinian areas.

Often, though, it's still very hard to get across checkpoints. It can take a
very, very long time. It recently took me four hours to get back from
Ramallah to Jerusalem, which is a distance of less than 10 miles in this case.
So it can be very, very hard to get around.

GROSS: Now I know last week you became a father for the first time. Your
wife had a baby.

Mr. BENNET: Yeah.

GROSS: I want to congratulate you on the birth of your son.

Mr. BENNET: Thank you.

GROSS: And is it a difficult time to be having a baby while you're covering
all this fighting?

Mr. BENNET: To be honest, I haven't completely processed that like a lot of
the really intense experiences that I've had in the last few months. For us,
it's been a wonderful, wonderful thing. And it is a little hard to go back to
focusing on the destruction, the violence and the venom here. But life does
go on here on both sides, by the way. People are having babies on both sides
and they're getting married and they're trying to move on with their lives and
conduct their lives in very, very difficult circumstances. Our circumstances
are certainly a lot less difficult than most everybody else's. And as I say,
I haven't reconciled all this yet.

GROSS: Well, James Bennet, congratulations on the birth of your son.

Mr. BENNET: Thank you.

GROSS: And my best to your family. Thank you very, very much for talking
with us.

Mr. BENNET: Thank you.

GROSS: James Bennet is the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times. Our
interview was recorded this morning.

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(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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