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...