ISRAEL At 40

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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