ISRAEL At 40: the Dream Confronts Palestinian Fury

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miracles in Israel has always been accompanied by an equally powerful motif of denial. At the turn of the century, Zionism proceeded by a logic of ''as if'' -- the Promised Land would be settled by Jews as if no Arabs already lived there. Golda Meir once said ''there was no such thing as a Palestinian people,'' and Israeli Jews constantly produce scholarship and pseudoscholarship intended to establish that Palestinians do not exist and never have, at least not as a national entity. But they do exist. Alongside the theme of the miraculous in Israel there arises an eerie pattern of twinning, of self and antiself. In complex ways, Arab and Jew come to seem each other's evil twin brother, antiselves. In a tragedy of geography, two peoples with claims to the same land sometimes seem perverse mirror images of each other. Islamic fundamentalists are arising at the very moment when Jewish fundamentalists are also increasing. Once Israel was David against the Arab Goliath. Now the Palestinians, slinging stones, call themselves David -- and Israel is the vulnerable giant. The Palestinians are sometimes called the Jews of the Arab world, a double- edged description that implies that 1) Jews and Palestinians share certain virtues and values, such as reverence for education, hard work and the family, and 2) the Palestinians are exiles longing for their ancestral home, just like the Jews. Grotesque secondary twinnings are suggested sometimes. In the Gaza, on a white tin fence an Arab has painted an enormous black swastika, implying that the Jews who lost 6 million of their number in the Holocaust have themselves become Nazis in the occupation of the Palestinian lands. In another way, to put it in high-tech terms, the Israelis and the Palestinians seem like different computer systems -- say, IBM and Apple. Each system makes elaborate and perfect sense within its own universe, but at least in prototype, without elaborate mediations, each is utterly incapable of communicating with the other. The software of one is unintelligible to the other. The two sides seem immiscible systems of culture and thought and history, colliding validities, all perfectly coherent within themselves. They are technically cousins, as their ancestors Isaac and Ishmael were half brothers. Israel's tragedy is that the Arabs and Jews, intimately commingled on the same turf, behave as if they belonged to different species. Neither can enter the house of the other's logic. A late winter snow-storm fell upon Hebron, a heavy, slushy mess three inches deep that covered all the stones of the countryside. There was nothing available to throw that day except snowballs. Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, lies just outside Hebron. Its schoolchildren had a snow holiday. They slogged around outside their apartment buildings. Aside from the fences and guard towers around its perimeter, Kiryat Arba looked like a development outside Albuquerque. In his apartment, Yossi Dayan dandled children, shushed them, answered their questions, all the while talking about his program as a Jew, as an Israeli and as deputy to Meir Kahane, the head of the right-wing Kach movement, which wants to expel the Arabs from Israel -- an Israel, of course, that in Kahane's view includes the West Bank. Dayan is a useful though extreme illustration of the IBM-Apple incompatibility, a statement of the problem in clear form. ''One basis of my philosophy is mystic,'' says Dayan, who came to Israel from