ISRAEL At 40

By LANCE MORROW

One saw first the boy's eyes. They held a strange and fractured gray-blue light. He pounded indignantly on the car in Gaza. He banged on it with a sort of symbolic fierceness. There was no murder in the eyes -- they were too innocent for that -- but there was something more difficult to know, a dreamy glaze, an enamel of unseeing. He and the other Palestinians, none older than 15 or so, came round and pounded on the car with fists. Their indignation was furious, but also a sort of abstraction, and mixed in it a fierce atmosphere of carnival, an electricity of freedom and breaking loose -- up out of nonentity into entity, a violent flowering of the heart, a burst of flame. A moment before, they had been hurling stones at a Volkswagen van that went veering and skittering off down the main street of Khan Yunis. So we were next in line for the politics of stones. The back window was half-open, and the boy with eyes like cracked ice thrust in his fluttering and clutching hand, like a child reaching into a cave, aggressively curious but half-afraid the hand might be bitten by something in the dark. Roll it up: the hand withdrew before being caught by the glass. All the faces pressed up against the windows now (a nightmare through a fish-eye lens), and the fists beat harder on hood and roof and windshield, in a taunting, accelerating cadence: boom -- -- boom -- boom-boom-boomboomboom boom. The driver, a Palestinian whose taxi had the blue license plates of the occupied territories and not the hated yellow Israeli plates, gave the Palestinian V-sign of solidarity with his fingers (the gesture, seen everywhere in the territories, means not peace, as in Viet Nam days in America, but rather, ''We are here; we endure; we exist; we will not give up''). But the pounding went on, for the foreigner was suspect, an intruder, and the crowd was in a stoning mood. The driver threw his Mercedes into reverse and sped backward out of the crowd. Then came a hail of stones, crashing on the car's receding steel and glass. Backtracking on the puddled road, past piles of tires burning in a cold rain, the taxi met Israeli army jeeps highballing in the other direction, toward the shabab, the Palestinian youths with stones. The soldiers were driving fast, as they do in the territories, their radio antennas whipping like a fly-fisherman's rod with a trout on the line. The soldiers' weapons bristled from the sides of the jeeps, and they wore heavy, stone-proof hard plastic helmets with wraparound clear visors that hid their faces -- a space- alien effect. ''We should go back to see what happens,'' the passenger said, unthinkingly. The driver lit a fresh cigarette from the one now burning down to his fingertips and drove impassively on, away from the violence. No, the shabab would think we had brought the army back with us. Anyway the driver knew, roughly, what would happen. The territories had been living for months in a rain of stones (there was the Mercedes to think of) and in the answering adrenal bursts of the Israeli soldiers scarcely older than the stone throwers. Maybe this time the shabab would disperse before the soldiers' charge. Perhaps some would be caught and beaten, or hit by rubber bullets (rubber, that is, with a core of steel). Tear gas might be fired. Someone might get shot, and killed. Tradition draws upon tradition. The uprising in the territories, deep into its fourth month, has its violent patterns by now, action and reaction, provocation and response. The violence settles into inevitabilities that seem tribal, and reach into history. In any case, this winter and beyond, as the miserable rains passed and a sweet spring came, with the almond and apricot trees in blossom, the Arabs in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, weary of their humiliations and broken hopes, have risen up to disturb Israel's birthday party, its sometime peace and its dream. For 2,000 years the thought of Zion warmed the minds of the world's scattered Jews. ''Next year in Jerusalem'' -- the prayer ended in an ardent sigh. The trajectory of that yearning was launched endlessly from shtetl and ghetto in the wilderness of the Diaspora. At last, 40 years ago the arc of the desire was completed, the dream implanted in history. Israel, thought David Ben-Gurion, would be a ''light unto the nations.'' In his memoirs in 1949, the first Israeli President, Chaim Weizmann, wrote about the Zionist ambition to build a ''high civilization, based on the austere standards of Jewish ethics.'' But the Zionist dream cracked when it fell to earth. ''A land without people for a people without land,'' said the hopeful Zionist formula. But Palestine was not a ''land without people,'' and the Jewish state from its birth has lived in a state of war in order to protect the dream from the discrepancy. History, religion, politics, ethics -- everything made sense except geography. The moral and material backing for Israel has always come primarily from the West. But the state itself was built in the overwhelmingly Arab, Islamic Levant. The creation of Israel dispersed another people, the Palestinian Arabs. At the moment of its birth, Israel was fighting for its life. The neighboring Arab states tried to annihilate the alien creation in its midst. At the end of the War of Independence in 1948, the Israelis held a C-shaped majority of the land that ran from Galilee in the north to the Sinai Peninsula in the south, leaving the Arabs only a central ear from Jerusalem east to the Jordan River and the tiny sliver of Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled their villages for Jordan, for Gaza, for the West Bank, for other Arab countries. Many landed in squalid refugee camps, where they live on now. The physical proximities of the land, and the hatreds that filled them, were terrifying. Arabs and Jews stared into one another's gun muzzles. The corridor from the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem was constantly vulnerable -- and still is littered (the wreckage left as a monument and cautionary tale) with the charred shells of trucks and armored cars destroyed as they struggled to relieve the besieged Jews of Jerusalem in 1948. Three-quarters of the Jewish population and all of Israel's major cities, its airports and the bulk of its industry lay within range of Arab artillery. Wars followed one another in savage procession. In 1956 Israel tried to rid itself of the Arab threat from Gaza by joining Britain and France in attacking Egypt. The U.N. forced Israel to pull back. But Israel learned a lesson: never again a withdrawal without something in return. In the early days of June 1967 came the moment of Israel's brightest triumph -- and the beginning of its present travail. Israeli armies swept over Gaza and the Sinai to the south, the entire West Bank of the Jordan, and the Golan Heights in the north. In triumphal rebuke of the 2,000-year-old stereotype of the passive ghetto Jew, history's endless victim, the Israelis ended with nearly three times their original territory. They annexed East Jerusalem to Israel and pronounced it the nation's capital. Israeli leaders thought a rapid negotiation would give their state some security in return for most of the captured land going back to the Arabs. But there came only more wars -- the War of Attrition in 1969-70, the October War of 1973. Only in 1977 did Egyptian President Anwar Sadat break the stalemate by traveling to Jerusalem to set a partial peace in motion. In 1979 Israel agreed to return all of the Sinai to Egypt in return for the formal peace treaty negotiated with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Jimmy Carter at Camp David. That event was one of Israel's finer moments, but its full promise was never realized. Sadat paid for the deal with his life when he was assassinated in 1981, and Egypt was exiled from the Arab community for eight years. Begin, whose conservative Likud bloc ascended to power in 1977, was praised for his ! statesmanship, but he apparently saw the return of the Sinai as a final act, not as a prelude to negotiating the return of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Then in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in an attempt to wipe out the Palestine Liberation Organization once and for all. For the first time, Israel launched a war for essentially political reasons, not because its immediate survival was at stake but as part of a larger design to alter the distributions of power in the region. The business of peacemaking fell into disrepair. Ultimately, last December, the Israelis' repressive hand in the occupied territories stirred the Palestinians to their current fury of rebellion. Last week what the Palestinians call the intifadeh (uprising) proceeded, and the peace process did not. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir returned home from a nine-day visit to the U.S., in which he had resisted the American proposal for an international peace conference. Shamir's supporters, including several thousand Jewish settlers from the territories who waved machine guns and danced the hora, gave him a hero's welcome in Jerusalem. They chanted, ''Blessed be he who comes back without a conference.'' At least 100 Palestinians had died in the uprising by last week, but for the first time, an Israeli soldier was killed, shot in cold blood as he stood guard duty in Bethlehem. The army issued new shoot-to-kill orders against any Palestinian throwing Molotov cocktails. It also said in effect that Jewish settlers in the territories would be permitted to shoot rioters attacking them with gasoline bombs. There was prescience in Chaim Weizmann's declaration in 1949: ''I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs.'' The world's judgment this year is sometimes harsh, at least on the question of what the Israelis have done in regard to the Arabs in the territories. And the conflict there, considered in light of Israel's history in the past decade -- the invasion of Lebanon, the de facto annexation of the territories through settlement by Israelis, many of whom are religious fundamentalists, the Pollard affair in which the Israeli government assigned an American Jew to spy on the U.S., the Israeli involvement in the Iran-contra enterprise -- has raised the question of whether Israel has lost its way. Israel's accomplishments have the prestige of the miraculous. To many Jews, Israel is a fact of primal identity -- primal precisely because it lived so long and passionately as an idea before descending to hard history. When Elie Wiesel's mind drifts to the Holy Land, his expressive face grows radiant. ''We live in biblical times,'' says Wiesel. ''Think of all that has been accomplished in 40 years.'' A national home for every Jew in the world, an ingathering from more than 100 countries -- although, of course, 9.3 million of the world's Jews remain in the Diaspora. The resurrection of a dormant language, Hebrew, for everyday use, a constantly renewed and invented tongue that has helped compose a functioning society, and democracy, out of the disparate characters and cultures that have come to the Promised Land from Poland, Morocco, Ethiopia, Mexico, everywhere. The earlier Zionist settlers had paved the way over several generations, but Israel from the moment of its beginning in 1948 was an act of collective will and courage, a valor that arose in part out of desperation. A flourishing culture. Universities, clinics, industries, social welfare, housing, an agricultural system watered by a complex national irrigation grid, the world's largest diamond-polishing industry, defense industries. A going concern. One of the best armies in the world. Miraculous. But also the result of an infusion of about $43 billion in American Government aid over the years, and millions more contributed privately by Jews in America and elsewhere. ''The Israelis have produced a modern country -- doorknobs and hinges, plumbing fixtures, electrical supplies, chamber music, airplanes, teacups,'' Saul Bellow has written. ''It is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provision for everything . . . These people are actively, individually engaged in universal history. I don't see how they can bear it.'' Still, as Israel turns 40, it seems unhappy, agitated and exhausting. The idealistic founding energies have matured into certain disillusions of middle age. The moral discrepancy in the original ideal has come home to roost. Israel's political leadership is divided and essentially stagnant, taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising, paralyzed by the dilemma of the territories. Public opinion is splintered between hard-liners who want to keep all the land and those willing to take the chance of giving some of it up for peace. On neither side, in Israel, is the matter as theoretical as it might be elsewhere. Apocalypse is a possibility always. People live with it. They listen to the news almost obsessively. Israelis have traveled a distance from the Leon Uris version of themselves, from the romanticized pioneer days when kibbutzniks drained malarial swamps by day and danced the hora by firelight. After Ben-Gurion came to Palestine in 1906, he wrote a letter of anticipatory nostalgia to his father in Plonsk, Russian Poland. The son was laboring hard. ''But who is to complain, to sigh, to despair? In 25 years our country will be one of the most blooming, most beautiful and happiest: an old-new nation will flourish in an ancient-new land. Then we shall relate how we fevered and worked, hungered and dreamed.'' Israel seems now a nation in a state of strange suspension. In the Dead Sea, one cannot sink, so dense is the water with minerals. Nor can one swim without difficulty. The water is heavy and bitterly stings the eyes. The body floats in uneasy weightlessness in the blue-green metallic sheen, and one looks off across the lifeless water toward the crumpled hills of Moab in Jordan. At 1,300 ft. below sea level, it is the lowest place on earth. Far down to the south is the site of ancient Sodom, now under a few feet of water, and to the north is the monastery of the Essenes at Qumran, where most of their Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Farther, toward Jericho, the mount in the wilderness where Satan tempted Christ. And in the distance to the south, the terrible brow of Masada, where 960 Jewish Zealots committed suicide rather than surrender to the besieging Romans in A.D. 73. Some Israeli army units now celebrate their graduation after basic training under a night sky ablaze with Hebrew characters that say MASADA SHALL NOT FALL AGAIN. Israelis live under constant strain. Graceful manners are not yet a national accomplishment. Israelis' driving is not civilized, although it is not as bad as that in either Boston or Brussels. These days it seems difficult to find Israelis laughing. The soldiers do not smile when they are on duty, on patrol in Hebron or Nablus or Bethlehem. Why should they? Smile at them in greeting, and they stare back with hostile incredulity, as if looking at a lunatic. A rueful joke is told by Yaakov Agmon, the Israeli theatrical director who is in charge of the 40th-anniversary celebrations that will be held all over the country this spring. The joke, based on a pun in Hebrew, suggests that God really meant to give Moses the land of Canada, not Canaan. Moses is asked by God to which country he would like to take the children of Israel. Moses was a stutterer and he wanted to say Canada, but it came out as Ca-ca-ca-na-na-na. So God thought he meant Canaan and sent the children of Israel there. The Jews turn on Moses and say, ''You idiot! We could have had Canada, instead of this miserable godforsaken Middle Eastern blight, surrounded by sand and Arabs!'' The Zionist vision came to earth in a place of maximum inconvenience and danger. Multiple realities are always at work in Israel. Palestinians throw stones in the territories. Ultra-Orthodox Jews throw stones in Jerusalem -- against other Jews who violate the Sabbath. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra plays on, Zubin Mehta conducting, while Israeli soldiers sit on hilltops in southern Lebanon, training expensive, sophisticated observation devices on every Arab who moves -- which sadly is the chief sort of attention that Israelis accord Arabs. Israelis read books at an amazing rate (80 book- publishing houses issue more than 4,000 titles a year) and support four opera companies and twelve dance repertory companies and dozens of legitimate theaters. They love art and poetry and music. But guns are everywhere. That Israel has accomplished so much in the midst of war is impressive. But the uprising of the Palestinians and the Israeli response have disturbed Israelis and Jews abroad, and the world in general, in a new way. Some of the televised spectacles from the territories (the beating of demonstrators, some acts of sadism, the burying alive, with bulldozers, of Palestinians) undermine the moral edifice of the Chosen. And efforts to keep such deeds from the sight of the world, to confiscate film, to bar journalists from the territories, as if the trouble were merely a hallucination and intercepting the message would annul the problem -- all these seem to smack of manipulation. In the first weeks of the Palestinian uprising, many of America's Jews raised their voices against Israel's way of dealing with the trouble. Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, sent a cable to Israeli President Chaim Herzog: ''The indiscriminate beating of Arabs, enunciated and implemented as Israel's new policy to quell the riots of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, is an offense to the Jewish spirit. It violates every principle of human decency. And it betrays the Zionist dream.'' The American Jewish Congress called the beatings ''appalling and repugnant.'' + And yet there came a counterlogic too and eventually a certain bewildered resignation. Outrage was deflected first by the argument that the state has the duty to put down civil disorder, and is not beating the rioters preferable to shooting and killing them? The larger implication is that no good solution exists for Israel at the moment. A more urgent impulse presently asserted itself, a traditional reflex to circle the wagons whenever Israel is in danger. ''Israel today is a nation under siege . . . by Palestinian Arabs, by a hostile press, by hypocrite governments,'' declared B'nai B'rith International in a newspaper ad. The logic of the reaction (criticism at first, then a muting of it) penetrates to the bone. If American Jews withdraw their support, or seem to do so, then American politicians might feel free to back away from Israel as well. Without an annual $3 billion in American aid, the largest amount the U.S. sends to any foreign country, the very existence of Israel might fall into question. The predicaments and victories of the world's Jews have often seemed beyond conventional explanation, so unusual and terrifying and emblematic that the Jews appeared to be acting out God's deeper and harsher mysteries. One of the founding premises of Zionism was simply to give Jews, at last, a home where they could be normal, where they could say, Enough! and live like other people, escaping into the ordinary. Some think the Jewish normality was better achieved in America, which may be the real Promised Land. If Jews were ferociously persecuted down the centuries, and if they survived, the birth of modern Israel was as primal and melodramatic as any story the Bible tells. That has always been one of the unsettling things about Israel: the absolutist vocabulary and images that attended its creation, the passions that it aroused in enemies, a haunting by all of the extreme possibilities of desire and fanaticism. Maybe it comes with the territory: the Middle East has some blood-curdling habits of rhetoric and statecraft. The state of Israel made the transit from the deepest blackness of history to the dream of the promised land. It emerged in the Jewish mind as a radiant interval between Hitler and the Messiah -- horror redeemed in exultation. The light in Jerusalem is as pure and delicate as a psalm. The blond dolomite limestone walls of the Old City turn from peach to rose toward sunset. It is as if a spiracle arises here, a hole in heaven through which God and man have trafficked with each other. From Jerusalem, Christ rose from the dead, and the Prophet Muhammad on his horse Burak ascended to heaven, and Abraham heard the voice of an angel. But the theme of the miraculous has its limits. The other side of miracles is intoxication and fanaticism, and beyond both an awful blindness. The Holy Land suffers from too much primal fury. The spirit may thrust upward toward the absolute, but aspirations tend to fall down again in a rain of knives. The theme of miracles in Israel has always been accompanied by an equally powerful motif of denial. At the turn of the century, Zionism proceeded by a logic of ''as if'' -- the Promised Land would be settled by Jews as if no Arabs already lived there. Golda Meir once said ''there was no such thing as a Palestinian people,'' and Israeli Jews constantly produce scholarship and pseudoscholarship intended to establish that Palestinians do not exist and never have, at least not as a national entity. But they do exist. Alongside the theme of the miraculous in Israel there arises an eerie pattern of twinning, of self and antiself. In complex ways, Arab and Jew come to seem each other's evil twin brother, antiselves. In a tragedy of geography, two peoples with claims to the same land sometimes seem perverse mirror images of each other. Islamic fundamentalists are arising at the very moment when Jewish fundamentalists are also increasing. Once Israel was David against the Arab Goliath. Now the Palestinians, slinging stones, call themselves David -- and Israel is the vulnerable giant. The Palestinians are sometimes called the Jews of the Arab world, a double- edged description that implies that 1) Jews and Palestinians share certain virtues and values, such as reverence for education, hard work and the family, and 2) the Palestinians are exiles longing for their ancestral home, just like the Jews. Grotesque secondary twinnings are suggested sometimes. In the Gaza, on a white tin fence an Arab has painted an enormous black swastika, implying that the Jews who lost 6 million of their number in the Holocaust have themselves become Nazis in the occupation of the Palestinian lands. In another way, to put it in high-tech terms, the Israelis and the Palestinians seem like different computer systems -- say, IBM and Apple. Each system makes elaborate and perfect sense within its own universe, but at least in prototype, without elaborate mediations, each is utterly incapable of communicating with the other. The software of one is unintelligible to the other. The two sides seem immiscible systems of culture and thought and history, colliding validities, all perfectly coherent within themselves. They are technically cousins, as their ancestors Isaac and Ishmael were half brothers. Israel's tragedy is that the Arabs and Jews, intimately commingled on the same turf, behave as if they belonged to different species. Neither can enter the house of the other's logic. A late winter snow-storm fell upon Hebron, a heavy, slushy mess three inches deep that covered all the stones of the countryside. There was nothing available to throw that day except snowballs. Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, lies just outside Hebron. Its schoolchildren had a snow holiday. They slogged around outside their apartment buildings. Aside from the fences and guard towers around its perimeter, Kiryat Arba looked like a development outside Albuquerque. In his apartment, Yossi Dayan dandled children, shushed them, answered their questions, all the while talking about his program as a Jew, as an Israeli and as deputy to Meir Kahane, the head of the right-wing Kach movement, which wants to expel the Arabs from Israel -- an Israel, of course, that in Kahane's view includes the West Bank. Dayan is a useful though extreme illustration of the IBM-Apple incompatibility, a statement of the problem in clear form. ''One basis of my philosophy is mystic,'' says Dayan, who came to Israel from Mexico. ''I want to be Jewish. I don't have to apologize. It is my very essence.'' He is an affectionate and demonstrative father, and small children tend to sprawl on his knees and interrupt him with coy, lolling, attention-seeking questions. He pauses during his interview every time to answer the child first. Palestinians? ''There is no Palestine.'' Jews called it Palestine before 1948. The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians are transients. West Bank? ''There is no West Bank in real geography. It is really the west bank of the Dead Sea.'' Dayan does not ''want to offer Arabs second-class citizenship.'' The Arabs must leave, or be persuaded to leave through a requirement of national service or high taxes. ''They should have 48 hours in which to sign a loyalty oath to the Zionist state. Otherwise they will be expelled in trucks.'' Dayan hates the American television networks, which he regards as virtually ! Palestinian terrorist weapons, a judgment heard often. ''Their message to the Israelis is 'Don't be brutal. Be moral.' Fine. We can be moral and surrender the territories, and after that we will have to surrender the Galilee!'' Where does it end, with Israel solving its public relations problem by leaping into the Mediterranean Sea? With a cheerful fierceness, Dayan describes the reality that he sees around him: ''Everyone around here hates everyone, and everyone hates the Jews. I want to avoid killing Arabs, and so I want to expel them. You know, at a Super Bowl in America, I saw a black man singing the national anthem. In Israel, you would not find one Arab, not one, to sing the national anthem of Israel!'' But the Jews have granted the Arabs no voice. It is grotesque to invite the mute to sing. In Kafr Qaddum, an Arab village in the hills of the West Bank not far from Nablus, the people have strewn boulders across the road to stop intrusions. They are frightened. The sun is bright, vivid. A red-green-white-and-black Palestinian flag on a makeshift pole flies from the mosque in the distance. Now one sees the young Palestinian, wrapped in a dense, irrational thunder, walking up the road. His legs move like scissors, stiffly; his body is jolted with anger. His eyes, looking inward and outward simultaneously, are sightless with rage. They are red and shattered, as if a bomb had gone off inside them and fractured the window glass, behind which is a red fire. He does not want to talk, but does, finally, when he has settled down. He says a Jewish settler came in a car and used an Uzi and killed his friend. The new grave is down at a crossroads by the mosque. An Israeli helicopter passes overhead. The friend of the dead man promises, ''We will never forget.'' Has Israel lost its way? Israelis may find the question offensive. It implies that the answer is yes. And further, that the asker knows the true ''way'' and Israel does not. The question suggests that Israel, in making its way through history, may have obliviously or foolishly blundered into swamps or deserts off the true path. Would anyone ask if France had lost its way? If Japan had lost its way? And yet: Israel, although an ancient people, is a new country, unlike France or Japan. Moreover, Israel, like the U.S., is essentially an idea, a vision, a mission, a created entity. Like the U.S., Israel has claimed a certain exceptionalism, a special nature that derives in part from its essentially moral purposes. ''We don't want to be just a state,'' says Amos Oz, an Israeli author, ''but an exemplary state.'' Israel was born with monumental ambitions and evoked heroic expectations. Israelis are extraordinarily sensitive about their image, in part because of the 2,000 years in which Jews had to worry, for their survival, about the opinions of the Gentiles around them. ''Israelis feel they are a people walking a high ledge,'' says Oz. It is not only fair but necessary to ask if Israel has lost its way. Surrounded by nations that have tried to destroy it in five wars in 40 years, and now engaged in fighting a Palestinian uprising, Israel cannot afford to lose its way. The question of its survival is involved. Arthur Hertzberg, a vice president of the World Jewish Congress, believes something began to go wrong for Israel at the moment of its greatest triumph, the Six-Day War. He argues that while the 1967 victory was splendid for the Jewish ego, in Israel and in the Diaspora, the demonstration of such brilliant power, whatever advantages it brought, eventually led down a path of aggressiveness and grandiosity. After the Six-Day War, Ben-Gurion, then in retirement, warned Israel that it should give back all the captured territories very quickly, ''for holding on to them would distort, and might ultimately destroy, the Jewish state.'' Prime Minister Levi Eshkol offered to return almost all the territories to the Arabs in exchange for recognition and a promise to negotiate peace. But opposition from Israeli hard-liners, including Menachem Begin, then a Cabinet minister, crippled Eshkol's proposals. Meanwhile, the Arab states responded thunderously with their famous ''three noes'' -- no recognition of Israel, no negotiation, no peace. Twenty-one years later, Israel still holds the territories, but no longer so reluctantly. Twenty-one years is long enough to allow a generation of Palestinians to grow to adulthood knowing only, and hating, the occupation. But in a land so old, 21 years is merely an instant. Civilizations are piled on top of one another (Hebrew, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Hellenistic, Maccabean, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, on and on), all the laminations that conquerors have left in the earth there -- a rich debris of meanings and promises and desires. The accumulation of passion and memory, so much of it implicated with God, can make the land seem at times both wondrous and psychotic. There are certain parallels between Israel and America -- both nations born with a mission, both ingatherings of people from around the world. In a curious way, part of the genius of America has been a collective forgetfulness, a talent for somehow outdistancing problems in a headlong race toward something new. It is a form of heedlessness, perhaps, blithe and profligate, but also an exuberant forward spin that may spare people the exhausting obligations of revenge. A curse of the Middle East is that almost nothing there is ever forgotten. Part of the difference is physical space: Americans had an enormous continent to flow into, an expanse in which to lose themselves and some of their obsessions. Like the Zionist pioneers, Americans coming to the new land encountered people already in residence, and solved the problem harshly enough. Some Israelis on the far right wish they could settle their dispute with the native Arabs as easily and brutally as the Americans did with the Indians, and without the witness of television. The Israelis have alarmingly little space. For both Palestinian and Jew, memory is a profound influence, a medium of hope, but something else as well. Each has felt the passionate ache of nostalgia for the same land. In the circumstances, memory is sometimes a fanatic and a poison. Observant Jews believe God gave Abraham title to the land of Israel sometime in the Bronze Age. The Book of Genesis declares, ''The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.'' The more secular deed, in modern times, was the Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917 by Britain. ''His Majesty's Government,'' it said, ''view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.'' Jews tend to quote this first part of the declaration without proceeding to the next proviso: ''. . . it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.'' There, again, is the discrepancy: How can justice be done both to Jews and the ''existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine''? In any case, the Palestinians have never considered that it was the business of a colonial power to bestow the land on anyone, and certainly not upon Jews from the far reaches of Eastern Europe. Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary in 1917, had served in Ireland as Governor-General during the British occupation. His administration there was known to be stern. Once, an Irishman came to him to complain that the British policies lacked justice. ''Justice?'' Lord Balfour said thoughtfully. ''There is not enough to go around.'' In the Middle East there is a permanent struggle over the meaning of justice, and the answering virtue of mercy is not much at home. The result has been a drama of mutual follies -- of fierce immobilities interlocked, shaken now and then by spasms of violence. In her book The March of Folly, Historian Barbara Tuchman argues that through the ages governments have shown a propensity to pursue policies contrary to their own interests. The first example of freely chosen disaster that she cites was Rehoboam's loss of the northern kingdom of Judea and its conquest by the Assyrians nearly 3,000 years ago. The story of the Middle East for years has been, in many ways, an endless pageant of the self-defeating. ''We were in a different time zone 40 years ago,'' says Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian professor of philosophy at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. As the Zionist immigration came to critical mass, especially after World War II and the Holocaust, when Israel became the haven for 687,000 new immigrants with no homes elsewhere in the world, the Arabs' alarm rose to lethal levels. ''We found ourselves paying the price for something with which we had nothing to do,'' says Nusseibeh. ''We didn't know how to meet the challenge except by saying no.'' Had Egypt, Syria and the other Arab nations accepted Israel's right to exist in 1947, the Palestinians could have been living for the past 40 years in a state of their own. The Palestinians could have bargained for a homeland in 1967. But once again the Arabs failed to grasp the offer, ''to test us and be astonished by our generosity,'' as Abba Eban put it. That is disingenuous. The Palestinians obviously missed an opportunity. But the Israelis made it clear after the Six-Day War that they would never return any part of Jerusalem to the Arabs, not a good starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian homeland. Further, even those Israeli governments willing in principle to compromise on territory between 1967 and 1977 refused to permit the development of an indigenous Palestinian leadership strong enough to contemplate, much less achieve, compromise. The Israelis' instinct was to jail or deport Arab nationalists within the territories. In the years since, both sides have hardened their views. The Palestinians seemed to develop a fatal attraction for making the wrong move. It has become a small diplomatic truism that the Palestinians will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The face that the Palestinians turned to the world for years was ferocious: the black-hooded murderers at the Munich Olympics, the hijackers of Entebbe, the killers of the Achille Lauro. But now the Israelis have shown a ferocity of their own, which has altered the perspectives of world sympathy. It was as if the Palestinians had at last found their authenticity, a true internal voice. Nonetheless, some Palestinians have not lost their deadly touch in turning opinion against them. As repugnance mounted against Israeli soldiers beating demonstrators, Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists, in order to express their solidarity with the uprising, crossed into the Negev desert from Egypt a few weeks ago and attacked a commuter bus. Five people died in the incident. In the course of their travails, the Palestinians have learned to trust no one, least of all Arab states like Syria, which has sought for years to control and exploit Palestinian nationalism. Few of the Arab states, and especially the conservative gulf states that have poured so much money into the Palestinian cause, have any real enthusiasm for the notion of a revolutionary, secular Palestinian state in the region. If the Palestinians have learned to distrust other Arabs, their support for the P.L.O. remains unshaken. Their fealty is as much symbolic as practical. Palestinians continue to think of the P.L.O. as the touchstone of their national identity, the ''sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,'' as an Arab summit declared in 1974. After so many years of defeat and failure, the Palestinians see the uprising as a new beginning. It has reawakened their pride and hope. ''It is now our challenge,'' says Nusseibeh. ''Can we translate this victory into political gain?'' In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson suggests that the root of the problem between Israelis and Arabs lies in their radically different approaches to the idea of negotiation and compromise. ''The Jews had been for two millennia an oppressed minority who had never possessed the option of force,'' wrote Johnson. ''They had therefore been habitually obliged to negotiate, often for bare existence, and nearly always from a position of great weakness.'' Over the centuries, Jews developed not merely negotiating skills but also a philosophy of negotiation. They would negotiate against impossible odds, according to Johnson's thesis, and they learned to accept a negotiated status, however lowly and underprivileged. ''The Arabs, by contrast, were a conquering race, whose sacred writings both inspired and reflected a maximalist position toward other peoples . . . The very concept of negotiation toward a final settlement was to them a betrayal of principle . . . A treaty appeared to them a kind of surrender.'' But Israel over the years has hardened into the style of its region. ''Security'' in the Israeli lexicon is an emotionally charged absolute. Soon after Golda Meir took office in 1969, the Israeli psychology began to shift away from the old predisposition to negotiate. A British governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, once referred to the ''mystic, the almost frightening, metallic clang of Zionism.'' With the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, the strain of biblical nationalism, the manifest destiny of Abraham's covenant, came parading through the Israeli mind. It was a triumphal Messianism that now justified the occupation, making it not only permissible but also inevitable. The West Bank became, to Begin and his supporters, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. Arabs or no, God meant the Jews to have that land. Before 1948, some ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently opposed the very idea of a Jewish state. It was to them a blasphemy. There could be no state of Israel until the arrival of the Messiah. But since the advent of Beginism, Jewish religion and nationalism have mixed in a new way. ''We have come back to our homeland, and we are not going to leave forever,'' vows Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces. To such Jews, the West Bank is not ''occupied'' but ''liberated'' territory. ''When you begin to doubt our moral right to Judea and Samaria,'' says Joseph Ben-Shlomo, a leader of the right-wing settlers' movement Gush Emunim, ''you doubt the very justice of Israel's right to be.'' To further intimidate any doubters, Israel has for the past 21 years established what it calls ''facts on the ground,'' settlements that have changed the face of the West Bank and Gaza. Some 67,000 settlers have moved into well over 100 new compounds. The settlements are almost always built on high ground, in order to command the surrounding countryside, and part of the rationale for the settlements was that they increased the country's security by providing an early-warning system of any Arab military movement. For more than two decades, Israel has persuaded itself that the occupation is not so terrible. It has, in fact, brought the nation many benefits: cheap labor, captive markets, surplus taxes from the inhabitants and, of course, land for settlement. But Israel is paying a high price for its policy. The Arab stones are not injuring Israel so much as its own self-delusions are. By occupying the territories, and continuing to occupy them, it may be internalizing the most serious threat to its existence. Other Israelis believe that their country may be inviting its destruction by leaving the territories. The two positions are poles of the national debate. Still, Americans might find it difficult to live with 100 million Russians inhabiting Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. By the year 2010, the Arab population of Israel, plus the territories, will have risen to rough parity with the Jewish population. Herein lies Israel's biggest dilemma. When the virtues of Israel are enumerated, almost the first to be mentioned by Israelis and their supporters is the fact that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. But when it comes to the Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, the Israelis are anything but democratic; Arabs have been denied fundamental civil and political rights. If present trends continue, Israel will have to choose between its democratic principles -- which would eventually require sharing political power with Arabs -- and its other profound ambition, to offer to Jews around the world a land they can always call their own. The Palestinian problem cannot be brushed aside by rhetoric or obliterated by military force. Eventually, Israelis probably must bring themselves to face the same difficult, dangerous course that has always suggested itself: partition. ''We must divide the apartment and conduct a decent divorce,'' says Amos Oz. Israelis and Palestinians must give up their absolutist demands and compromise on coexistence. Israel will have to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel, not instead of Israel. And that means it must be safe. The Palestinians will have to compromise even more. Their state can be only a truncated version of their former domain -- they must give up their sustaining ^ dreams of returning to their homes in Haifa and Jaffa and Lydda. Further, their home must be a rigorously demilitarized state. Either confederation with Jordan or guarantees by the superpowers could assure that, once allowed their independence and self-determination, the Palestinians would not change their minds. Says Philosopher David Hartman: ''They can run their own lives, but they must do it without military power. This is what Israelis need to sleep at night.'' Yet in Israel many persist in a different dream. They have married nationalism to religion, and advocate annexing the territories into Israel forever. It is, they say, Eretz Yisrael (land of Israel), the land God granted to the Jews. Some Israelis want to transfer the Arabs out of Eretz Yisrael. They use a hard logic. Wars always have consequences. Wars create refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven out of Morocco, Tunisia and other North African states. Why should not the Arabs of the camps and territories be resettled in Jordan (where Palestinians already make up at least 60% of the population anyway) or some other place in the vast Arab land holdings? But there is a harder logic still. If it becomes legitimate to tell Arabs they must depart because they lost wars, then it becomes both legitimate and tempting for Arabs to fight more wars in the hope of making the Jews leave the Middle East forever. It is a formula for apocalypse. Taking the necessary steps will require political courage, a virtue scarce on both sides. P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat's genius for survival is not matched by a larger sense of the constructive. Israel was created by visions, by an astonishing force of ideas and by great figures. In the late '70s, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter rose to the occasion at Camp David. Their accords included a formula for negotiations on the territories, but Israel's political leaders now seem dispiritingly small -- visionless and timid, working the world from a defensive crouch. They show no signs that they have the imagination to lead Israel out of the dangerous historical territory it now inhabits. Israel's peculiar political system -- a queer mix of party control over candidates and proportional representation in voting -- has bred this political weakness and cowardice. After every election, more than a dozen parties hold seats in the Knesset. No major group has ever been able to rule without a coalition of partners. The founding Zionists designed the system in * order to give maximum representation to fragmented Jewry, but as President Herzog says, ''It is not suited to a modern state.'' Today the national-unity government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the right-wing Likud bloc, and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, head of the Labor Party, is divided over nearly every major decision. Craven leaders, afraid to offend any large minority, conduct government by near paralysis. The present policy on the occupied territories rests on the hope that the civil order will eventually be restored and that the territories will return to the ''status quo,'' the endlessly uneasy but preferred state of affairs in a nation whose front door opens onto the abyss. For 21 years, Israel's leaders have been telling the people that they were ''practically at peace.'' Why rush to negotiate some traumatizing political compromise? Now Shamir's government says Israel cannot negotiate as long as there is trouble in the territories, an argument that would suggest postponing negotiations until three or four weeks after the Last Day. An election scheduled for November may be among the most critical in Israel's history, but it is unlikely to give any candidate a mandate. ''I am afraid we are going nowhere,'' says Meron Benvenisti, head of the West Bank Data Base Project. ''More of the same. You will be asking the same question ((about the territories)) on our 50th anniversary.'' Paradoxically, Israel's moral territory has contracted as its physical space has expanded. Israelis must consider the dangers of the authoritarian temptation. Israel cannot be a ''light unto the nations'' if it must exhaust itself daily by beating Arabs into submission. The Israeli Arab writer Attalah Mansour describes the Israelis' predicament with an Oriental image: ''Instead of stepping on the snake that threatened them, they swallowed it. Now they have to live with it, or die from it.'' Once when the columnist Stewart Alsop wrote that the Israelis have a ''Masada complex,'' a besieged mentality, preferring collective suicide to surrender, Prime Minister Golda Meir replied, ''It is true. We do have a Masada complex. We have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex.'' Yehoshafat Harkabi, once the chief of Israeli military intelligence and now a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University, has one of the clearer minds in the Middle East. He sits in his study at dusk, on Bar Kokhba, a street in Jerusalem named for the leader of a catastrophic Jewish rebellion against the Romans in A.D. 132, an uprising that left half a million Jews dead and the people of Israel scattered to the corners of the earth. Bar Kokhba is an important and ominous presence in Harkabi's mind. He has written a history of the revolt called The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, and in it stated a warning against national projects that have about them an aspect of grandiose self-destruction. ''Our choice,'' he says, ''is not between good and bad. That is easy. Our choice is between bad and worse. Israel cannot defend itself if half its population is the enemy. The Arabs understand that if there is no settlement, then there will be hell, for them and for us.'' This is the real danger, Harkabi believes: ''If an individual claims that he can live only provided that he sits on the shoulders of another individual, and further that he has the right to drive his fingernails into the other's body (that is, in this instance by establishing settlements), people will begin to question whether it might be better if such an individual did not exist. Never before has Israel prejudiced its claim to legitimacy as by the argument that it cannot exist without the West Bank.'' It is almost dark in Harkabi's study. His face almost vanishes in the dusk, and one sees only his nimbus of white hair. ''Jewish wisdom always dealt with interpersonal problems,'' he goes on, ''and not with how a state should live with other states. We must learn to think internationally, to distinguish between grand design and policy. The Arabs' grand design may be still to destroy Israel, but their policy is different. We must deal not with the Arabs' vicious dreams, but with their policies. ''We must reopen the national debate, must think with our heads and not our hearts. We need a Zionism of quality, not of acreage.'' Harkabi's voice now comes out of near darkness. ''People ask me how large an Israel I want. I tell them, 'From Paris to New Delhi!' They say, 'But that's too big!' I say, 'Ah, well. Then let's talk realistically. How big is enough?' ''