ISRAEL At 40: the Dream Confronts Palestinian Fury

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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