ISRAEL At 40: the Dream Confronts Palestinian Fury

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dealing with the trouble. Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, sent a cable to Israeli President Chaim Herzog: ''The indiscriminate beating of Arabs, enunciated and implemented as Israel's new policy to quell the riots of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, is an offense to the Jewish spirit. It violates every principle of human decency. And it betrays the Zionist dream.'' The American Jewish Congress called the beatings ''appalling and repugnant.'' + And yet there came a counterlogic too and eventually a certain bewildered resignation. Outrage was deflected first by the argument that the state has the duty to put down civil disorder, and is not beating the rioters preferable to shooting and killing them? The larger implication is that no good solution exists for Israel at the moment. A more urgent impulse presently asserted itself, a traditional reflex to circle the wagons whenever Israel is in danger. ''Israel today is a nation under siege . . . by Palestinian Arabs, by a hostile press, by hypocrite governments,'' declared B'nai B'rith International in a newspaper ad. The logic of the reaction (criticism at first, then a muting of it) penetrates to the bone. If American Jews withdraw their support, or seem to do so, then American politicians might feel free to back away from Israel as well. Without an annual $3 billion in American aid, the largest amount the U.S. sends to any foreign country, the very existence of Israel might fall into question. The predicaments and victories of the world's Jews have often seemed beyond conventional explanation, so unusual and terrifying and emblematic that the Jews appeared to be acting out God's deeper and harsher mysteries. One of the founding premises of Zionism was simply to give Jews, at last, a home where they could be normal, where they could say, Enough! and live like other people, escaping into the ordinary. Some think the Jewish normality was better achieved in America, which may be the real Promised Land. If Jews were ferociously persecuted down the centuries, and if they survived, the birth of modern Israel was as primal and melodramatic as any story the Bible tells. That has always been one of the unsettling things about Israel: the absolutist vocabulary and images that attended its creation, the passions that it aroused in enemies, a haunting by all of the extreme possibilities of desire and fanaticism. Maybe it comes with the territory: the Middle East has some blood-curdling habits of rhetoric and statecraft. The state of Israel made the transit from the deepest blackness of history to the dream of the promised land. It emerged in the Jewish mind as a radiant interval between Hitler and the Messiah -- horror redeemed in exultation. The light in Jerusalem is as pure and delicate as a psalm. The blond dolomite limestone walls of the Old City turn from peach to rose toward sunset. It is as if a spiracle arises here, a hole in heaven through which God and man have trafficked with each other. From Jerusalem, Christ rose from the dead, and the Prophet Muhammad on his horse Burak ascended to heaven, and Abraham heard the voice of an angel. But the theme of the miraculous has its limits. The other side of miracles is intoxication and fanaticism, and beyond both an awful blindness. The Holy Land suffers from too much primal fury. The spirit may thrust upward toward the absolute, but aspirations tend to fall down again in a rain of knives. The theme of