Editorials

...Belgian biochemist Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for providing insight ("poetic," the committee called it) into the innovative, suddenly metamorphic aspect of nature's behavior...

...Lewis Thomas, chancellor of New York's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and eminent "biology watcher," was recently protesting this sorry truth in the pages of The New York Times Magazine...

...The startling part was that monkeys on neighboring islands soon began to replicate the behavior - with no direct contact with Imo and her friends...

...All perfectly logical, at least in that cold-blooded logic - which the Israelis, it should be noted, did not invent - of Mideast survival...

...With their uniformitarian, all but timeless 'laws' geared to inanimate, finished objects, classical physics and chemistry never provided satisfactory or imitable models for fields where deviation from the norm and mutation is the rule...

...How can the Israelis prevent the PLO from reconstructing its military infrastructure, except by occupying Lebanon indefinitely...

...It's as if all the members of the same species are tuned into each other, and when one or a critical mass of the set picks up a different drummer, all the kin receive the improvisation without the necessity of any direct transmission of energy...

...And the world with him...

...there they will in turn overthrow the moderate King Hussein, take over the country and turn it into a Palestinian state, thus removing the international pressure on Israel for a Palestinian state on the West Bank...

...But contemporary physics and chemistry are finding their elementary worlds a little closer to Teilhard de Chardin's mystical world - if not Tolkien's - than you might think...

...It is he who is responsible for much of the pressure for additional Jewish settlements on the West Bank and for the increasingly heavy-handed and inflammatory work of the Israeli civilian administration of that area...

...We sell the AWACS to Saudi Arabia, then sign a strategic memorandum with Israel, then void it after Begin's move in the Golan Heights, hint at renewing it in the face of Iran's recent victories (which Israel has aided), talk of new arms for Jordan, and even while remonstrating in Washington with Mr...

...It should be clear that neither side in this dispute is blameless...

...How do you explain, for instance, the - shall we say it...

...How much effective opposition is there to his policies inside Israel...

...Begin's notion of autonomy on the West Bank, pushing hard In keeping with Commonweal's usual summer schedule, only one issue with be published each month during July and August...

...Begin has taken to referring to Israel and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as "Western Eretz Israel...

...The physical universe, Bohm and Pribram are saying, resembles a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of something that acts a lot more like mind than a computer...

...But according to David K. Shipler of the New York Times, ever since Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Mr...

...The immediate task is to contain the Lebanese fighting, but a new initiative on the Palestinian issue is the very next order of the day...

...Unlike "closed systems" such as a rock or this morning's cold coffee, "open systems" like Imo, seeds, DNA molecules, stars, and towns appear to abhor an indefinite steady state, seem to thrive and jump to new levels of complexity by undergoing "perturbations'' that look like disintegration, like they're shaking themselves to chaotic death...

...And what kind of alternatives does the Labor party offer...

...The West's leaders are on the road...

...Having mastered the art of washing the vegetable, Imo then proceeded to teach it to her mother and her playmates...

...Judea and Samaria are parts of the land of Israel, in which our nation was born...

...The Arab states are in disarray over the Iran-Iraq conflict...

...About a decade ago, London University physicist David Bohm took on the analogous phenomenon in quantum mechanics and postulated, as an explanation, the existence of a vast ocean of patterned energy, beyond time-space, out of which our material order is envisioned to emanate like a small eddy...

...For one, we've noticed that something suspiciously like spirit, or at least an anthropomorphic logic in violation of time-space, seems to be sneaking into the usual billiard-ball analogues of scientific theory...

...the Arabs are not, and the Israelis are understandably loath to test whether Arab "rejectionism" is as strictly verbal as sometimes claimed...

...The editors of the prestigious British journal Nature called Sheldrake's book, when it appeared in England last year, "the best candidate for burning there has been in years...

...The theory was subsequently picked up by neurophysiologist Karl Pribram of Stanford University to account for the non local distribution of memory in the brain...

...How far do Mr...

...Egypt has not yet digested the Sinai...

...Sooner or later, someone would strike, and Israel has always favored sooner...

...Begin and Sharon provide deadly provocation to the PLO almost every day...

...The next two issues will be dated July 16 and August 13...

...But it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel has no intention of giving up the territory it won by force of arms in 1967...

...CURIOUSER & CURIOUSER To the imaginations of many, the adjective dull - as in "dull facts" - has become almost the hallmark of what physical science is about...

...Asked about the possibility that his country would annex the West Bank, which he calls by its Biblical names, Prime Minister Begin is quoted as saying: "You cannot annex your own country...

...The worst thing that has happened to science education," said Thomas, "is that the fun has gone out of it...

...Many Israelis fear for the future of their Jewish state if Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza with their 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs...

...But what the logic of the Lebanese invasion avoids entirely is the impasse that is at the root of the problem...

...The stuff of which we and quarks and marigolds and, yes, the chimpanzees are made gets daily curiouser and curiouser...

...Only sometimes - and it only takes a few, a sort of "creative minority" within a species - out of such quirky disorganization comes an entirely new, more complex constellation...

...Begin's ambitions go...

...It is time that we, too, concentrate on the core problem, unmistakably indicating that we reject Mr...

...In a sensitive area where the two superpowers could easily come eyeball to eyeball, both Israelis and Palestinians need a firm and impartial arbitrator if the risk of all-out war is to be avoided...

...Not many so far...

...That logic has its limits, however...

...Perhaps, after all, the secrets of physics are more like the nature Shakespeare fathomed through the character of Lear than what Newton figured with the falling apple: Well, one thing is clear: there's plenty of fun in this newborn cosmology...

...soon all the island's monkeys were doing so...

...In the weeks before the Lebanese incursion, more Arab mayors on the West Bank were dismissed from their posts by their Israeli overlords, more and more previously "moderate'' Palestinians were drawn into the resultant protests, and more and more Arab youths were being shot by Israeli soldiers and quick-on-the trigger, ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers...

...Very odd - and odder still that quantum particles, crystals, rats, and if Jung is right about a collective unconscious, humans seem to communicate in similar disregard of conven-tional causality...

...Nor can logic resolve an old problem for militarily successful nations - getting in is easier than getting out...

...Why wait...

...Not necessarily by direct contact sports, answers British biochemist Rupert Sheldrake (The New Science of Life, Tarcher, 1982...

...has vacillated irresponsibly...

...The Camp David accord specified that the 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs living on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should be granted "autonomy," a limited form of self-administration, during the five years in which the final status of the Israeli-occupied territory is to be negotiated...

...Sheldrake, currently in this country to set up tests for his theory, proposes that organic systems may be regulated not only by the physical laws we already know about, but also by invisible organizing forces he calls "morphogenetic fields...

...If anyone could pake Begin look like a moderate, it is Sharon...

...It may be "morphic resonance," operating across time and somehow nonspatially, says Sheldrake, that accounts for the dissemination of Imo's new trick, or that rats in a maze, separated from the leader, get smart all untaught, or that once an organic compound is first synthesized, subsequent crystallizations around the globe become dramatically easier...

...The well-known fact that sudden human "conversions" at a certain stage have all the marks of schizophrenic breakdowns, we are tempted to surmise, reflects an analogous pattern...

...And it is reported to be Sharon who pushed hardest for an all-out assault on the PLO in Lebanon, already called by many in Israel "Sharon's war" - with what is rumored to be an almost unbelievable scenario in mind: decimate the Palestinians in Lebanon, with a few swipes at the Syrians by the way, pushing the remainder of the PLO completely out of the country and into Jordan...

...Yes, we've noticed some very queer things...

...telepathic monkeys biologist Lyall Watson has observed on some Japanese islands...

...But Sharon is said to have an answer for that: make life so uncomfortable for the Palestinians on the West Bank that many will pack up and leave, including most Palestinian leaders...

...All very strange indeed - as if, incipiently and between the linear sequences of orthodox science, at the bottom of things the ancient conception of the Logos were stealing in...

...Nothing remarkable there, you say - but wait...

...Messrs...

...But The New Scientist encouraged the heresy, for one thing because a number of eminent physicists, long familiar with wavicles that seem to 'know' instantly (faster than the speed of light) what their separated kin are doing in another locale (the EPR effect), do not find Sheldrake's speculation all that far out...

...At the same time he vowed that no Jewish settlement in the area would be dismantled as the result of any future peace negotiations...

...the PLO in turn regularly arouses Israeli wrath by terroristic actions and inflamatory statements...

...At least as disturbing as Mr...

...Begin has always considered the West Bank to be an integral part of Eretz Israel - the Land of Israel...

...Theology, after all, is too important to be left to the theologians...

...Far-fetched, yes, but in the Middle East today nothing is impossible...

...And if it smells a bit like theology, then so be it...

...The difference is that the Israelis are in a position to put their one-sided view into practice...

...It's no surprise, and only appropriate, that such criticism should come from a close student of the life sciences...

...The fault, lamented Thomas, lies first with working scientists who don't stress in public that it's the unknown that engrosses them, and secondly with science teachers who too often present a world of "facts" as fixed and as boring as Latin grammar...

...Instead of playing this role, the U.S...

...for an open PLO affirmation of Israel's right to exist, but also ending our fruitless policy of refusing to talk to the PLO...

...Speaking a few days later at the opening of the Israeli parliament's summer session, he affirmed that Israel would demand national sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at the end of the five-year transition period prescribed by Camp David...

...But how does the word, if that's the word, of the new constellation get around...

...Sharon send him home with massive military and economic grants...

...It cannot insure that the fighting in Lebanon will not mushroom into a larger war: at this writing, the response of the Syrians is still in doubt...

...It seems one entrepreneurial young simian (please note: a female) named Imo fancied that a washed potato made better eating than a dirty potato...

...In one sense there is nothing new in this...

...Ominously, this phrasing revives the notion of the Revisionist Zionist movement, to which he belongs, that the historical land of Israel also included the East Bank of the Jordan river, which is Jordanian territory...

...Begin's rhetoric and the general political situation in Israel are the rumors about the plans of one of his potential successors, Defense Minister General Ariel Sharon...

...Begin is buying time in Lebanon, but losing time on the West Bank...

...The PLO and most of the surrounding Arab states remain officially as unreconciled to Israel's existence as the Begin government is to genuine Palestinian self-determination...