Arin Ahmed, age 20, looked like a typical American teenager in tight pants and a short shirt exposing a bare midriff. She was on her way to the Israeli city of Rishon le-Zion, and the bare midriff was only a disguise. She had a bomb in her backpack.

Arin, fortunately, suddenly got cold feet and an unexpected warm heart. The would-be suicide bomber looked into the faces of the crowd and saw not hateful Jews, but an aging grandmother, a gurgling baby, a loving father, a teenager who looked like a Jewish friend she once had. She saw herself: "I suddenly understood what I was about to do, and I said to myself, How can I do such a thing?" She ran back to her two handlers cowering in a car and told them she was scratching her mission. They were furious, of course. At almost the same moment, a 16-year-old boy, her intended partner in suicide, was blowing himself up like a genuine martyr. Her disappointed handlers glumly drove her back to Bethlehem.

We know Arin's story because several days later Israeli security forces arrested her and her accomplices, members of the military (and terrorist) arm of Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah organization. She's in an Israeli jail, where Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer visited her to try to learn what we all want to know: How typical is she? How many like her want to change their minds, but can't? Is there a point of no return? If so, where is it?

"Mr. Minister," she asked of Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, "what will become of me? I have no future. I don't want my whole life to be ruined because of this. I'm at the beginning of life. I changed my mind."