ISRAEL At 40: the Dream Confronts Palestinian Fury

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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