ISRAEL At 40

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