A mission to kill, the toll it takes

“Suicide Bombers,” which begins the third season of the PBS documentary omnibus series “Wide Angle” tonight, is a sad glimpse into the world of asymmetrical warfare and deadly true belief.

Originally shown last year on the BBC, it is not an examination or a history of the practice, or a political analysis but simply interviews with five Palestinians in Israeli custody -- three bombers whose missions failed or were aborted and two men who helped engineer a bus bombing in Haifa last year that killed 17 people and wounded another 50 -- intercut with images of daily life and of violent carnage.

While suicide bombing is neither new nor confined to the Middle East -- 9/11 was, of course, a suicide bombing on a particularly grand scale -- Israel is still the main target, with more than 100 attacks in the last four years and almost 100 failed bombers in custody, ones who did not manage to blow themselves up or decided against it.

Directed by Tom Roberts, an American working in Britain who has made several other films on Israel and Palestine, it is overall a fairly restrained piece of journalism, though it arranges its elements for maximum effect, and in doing so does, perhaps in spite of itself, editorialize.

Instead of subtitles, actors are used for simultaneous voice-over translation, and they put a dramatic spin on the words that sometimes differs crucially from the tone of the original speakers. (And some Arabic-speaking viewers in Britain questioned the accuracy of the translations.)

An electronic score of long dissonant tones is laid in quietly below some of the interviews, coloring the testimony.

The prisoners describe the mechanics of their missions, the steps that brought them there, their past disappointments and hopes for the future.

They are all young -- the failed bombers are teenagers, the men who recruited and trained and outfitted them in their mid-20s -- and seem young, some in the smugness of their certainty, some in the extremity of their confusion.

The narration acknowledges that they have legitimate issues with Israel and the occupying army, and that they are victims as well of the culture of violence, of the endless cycle of eye for eye for eye for eye that rules the land.

But much of what they have to say is nonsense born of zealotry and superstition, no different in kind from what comes from the fundamentalist extremity on the other side of the real wall Israel is now erecting there.

It’s the familiar cant of all whose religious or political certainty blinds them to other possible truths, who cannot see the forest for wanting to blow up the trees, be they Muslim, Jew, Christian, Marxist, anti-Communist or what have you.

The vision of holy reward advanced here -- the 72 virgins awaiting the martyr in paradise, and “rivers of different kinds, milk, nonalcoholic wine and holy water” -- after all is not that different from that expressed by Paul Hill, a “pro-life” former minister who murdered an abortion doctor and his escort.

“I expect a great reward in heaven,” he has said. “I am looking forward to glory. I don’t feel remorse.”

Though “Suicide Bombers” makes for a deeply depressing hour, it is not entirely a hopeless one.

“It crossed my mind that some people did not deserve to die,” says one young man who stepped away from his “martyr operation.”

“Jews who wanted peace ... I was going to kill, and didn’t know whether any of those people might be around.”

He put down his bag of explosives and screws and nails and went for a walk, and though he describes this as a moment of confusion rather than of clarity, it nevertheless speaks for the human good sense that in some lifetime might reclaim the world from chaos.

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‘Wide Angle: Suicide Bombers’

Where: KCET

When: 9-10 tonight

Writer, director, Tom Roberts. Producer, Israel Goldvicht.