ISRAEL At 40: the Dream Confronts Palestinian Fury

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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