An Intifadeh Of the Soul

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His village was partly demolished by the Haganah, the Jewish militia, in 1947. His family moved to a cave at Wadi Fokin, southwest of Bethlehem. There his mother gave birth to Mohammed. Eventually, the family settled into Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, in what was then Jordanian territory. When he was 17, there came the second nakba, the decisive disaster of the 1967 war. The air shrieked with Israeli jet fighters, and with rumors that they would destroy the camp and massacre everyone in it. The Palestinians took to the roads again, struggling to get across the Jordan River.

Once in Jordan, Mohammed joined Al Fatah, the largest faction within the P.L.O. He forsook Islam. He groped toward an identity, inventing himself. He put himself on a heady diet of Hegel, Nietzsche, Arab nationalism. He became a communist.

But Mohammed has an independent, defiant mind that tends to swerve in unorthodox directions. After a year in prison, "I decided that the slogan of destroying Israel was a waste of time," he says. "This conflict has to be settled through two states, Israeli and Palestinian." When he was in jail in the mid-'70s, he tried to persuade fellow prisoners of that. The prisoners' court judged him a traitor and tried to kill him for being an Israeli stooge. The Israelis tortured him, he says, for being a Palestinian agitator. The countervailing dangers seem to have given him a strange serenity.

Mohammed, unorthodox still, accepts a cold beer. "Each people," he says, "must have its story of ordeal."

THE TRIBE OF BLESSINGS

The hills of Moorpark, Calif., look like a memory of Palestine, except they are greener. They do not have the harsh abstraction of the landscape that lies ten time zones to the east -- or the army vehicles that crawl up the roads like porcupines, bristling weapons.

When the intifadeh was younger, more hopeful for them, the Barakat family gathered for a reunion in Moorpark. Barakat means "blessings." This was an ingathering of the tribe of blessings. The five brothers were there, all together for the first time in 30 years. Adnan arrived from Jordan, Samih from Kuwait, Walid from Germany, Khaled from Morocco. Adel, who lives in Moorpark, was host. Each brother speaks English with a different accent, and each has a ^ passport from a different country. "This is what it means," they said, "being a Palestinian."

The brothers told the story of a Palestinian, carrying only Egyptian travel documents, who spent six weeks in 1983 flying from one airport to another in the Arab world, refused entry in one country after another. His papers said he was stateless. Finally, Jordan let the wanderer in.

Other Arabs mistrust Palestinians almost as much as Israelis do, and often treat them worse. Palestinians are considered too cosmopolitan, too educated, too apt to stir up trouble, too dangerous politically. "The Jews of the Arab world," the Palestinians call themselves with a complex, rueful pride. The Arab states think it best to keep them in refugee camps, watched by the secret police, in order to dramatize their misery and to justify revenge: to force them to play their part in the pageant of Arab honor.