FROM HIGHBRIDGE TO HAIFA

...One was left wondering not only about the possible menace of a confiscated puppet but also about the consequences for a society which sought to seal its borders in the interest of national security...

...How long could they hold the loyalty of the nation's youth through guilt and military might...

...That means recognizing the national rights of Palestinians as well as of Israelis...

...bullies hung out on the fringes, waiting to bash their hecklers...

...They were sure the United States, controlled by Jews, was busy behind the scenes in the new state...

...I found voices in Israel that cherished their homeland but feared that if Israel didn't identify with the people of the Middle East, it would find itself increasingly a garrison state When I first visited the West Bank and then Israel in the early 1970s, I found myself torn...

...One of them asked us insistently, Why didn't you come sooner...

...The invasion of Lebanon evokes these memories and speculations...

...America must also change its course if it is to be on the side of justice...

...in its place will come a growing experience with the injustices of the Jewish state—and a heightened Palestinian determination to resist, to fight on and on...

...I welcomed the birth of Israel and wanted it to flourish, although it held no particular personal attraction...

...I began to read and listen more widely...

...The spotless crematoria and the barrels of ashes stunned the most hardened GI...

...Racists baited shoppers coming in and out of nearby Jewish stores...

...The time to bring such feeling and understanding into effective political action in the United States is long overdue...

...When American rabbis and politicians throw in with the invaders, while deploring the loss of lives, one senses that more than Lebanon and peace have been sacrificed...

...He would pay his taxes and fight if called...

...During the invasion I went to hear an Israeli army officer visiting in New York, a veteran of five of his country's wars and a spokesman for Peace Now, a small but increasingly significant group challenging their country's failure to make peace with the Arab world...

...industrial, financial, and political sectors...

...Preventive war and the killing of thousands in the name of security can only bring new hatred and violence, no matter how compassionate and how tormented individual Israeli soldiers may be...

...There had to be a haven for Jews who could not find a home elsewhere...

...Will we now foot the $2.5 billion bill for eliminating terrorists in Lebanon...

...I also met rugged Jewish farmers, who reminded me of farmers I admired in New England and had worked with in Montana and Oklahoma...

...cal footbridge crossing the Harlem River from Highbridge to Manhattan—these were fully absorbing...

...Much of the American opposition to the new state came from rich and successful Jews who feared that Gentile misunderstanding of the nature of this alternative homeland might compromise their position—their acceptance in the United States...

...Father Charles Coughlin's openly anti-Semitic paper, Social Justice, sold out every Sunday on the steps of the big Catholic church in Highbridge...

...The gaunt figures in striped pajamas, whose turn might have been next, reinforced one's sense of horror and anger...

...In Israel my concerns grew, perhaps because as a frontier people the Israelis appeared too busy building and defending to have time for doubts...

...Here am I paying taxes to my own government, whose vast military expenditures include substantial aid for Israel's war efforts as well as for many other undertakings about whose mis-guidedness I have even fewer doubts...

...One read about brown-shirted American Nazis drilling in Yorkville...

...I found there were voices, often lonely, within Israel, that cherished the ideal of a homeland but feared that an Israel which did not identify with the people of the Middle East and did not respect Palestinian national rights would find itself increasingly a garrison state without an enduring ethical base to sustain it...

...Anything for the Jewish National Fun...

...What could an American listener say to this soldier who has risked so much for his country...

...Even the amused questioner who asked what was the Jewish National Fun was kind, caring little that I couldn't tell him much about the Fund for buying land in Palestine...

...The responses were friendly and the pennies and nickels sincerely given, for spare change was hard to come by then...

...Those who questioned the second-class citizenship assigned to the Arab minority, who asked whether the peaceful dream could survive the moral peril the Israelis risked in becoming an occupying power, were pushed outside the pale of "the Jewish community," if not accused of outright anti-Semitism...

...Could I tell him that perhaps now was the time to say no...

...My Arab friends bore the deep scars of displacement...

...As a soldier I would see Dachau immediately after its liberation...

...But America was the best...

...Occasional beatings and more frequent Jew-boy taunts seemed merely the hazards of growing up...

...There is no simple way to characterize the audience packed into the town's main movie house...

...In careful teaching manner I guided him through the structure of power at home to show how limited was Jewish presence and power in the key U.S...

...I made no connection with my own future...

...My father would tell us that Emperor Franz Joseph had been good to the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which he had left as a boy...

...There were bearded elders, mini-skirted soldiers, shopkeepers, children...

...The arms and money we commit to the Middle East are meant to advance our own power interests which, tragically for Americans, have little to do with the long-run aspirations of two peoples caught in a conflict for homelands...

...When the Menachem Begin says military "defense" is the finest expression of a people, he abandons an age-old tradition of brotherhood...

...And insisting on supporting only peaceful means for resolving the painful differences in the Middle East...

...I thought I was most persuasive, but his parting question was, What about Kissinger...

...I wanted to plant in the minds of Israel's leaders the idea that they just might be wrong...

...When my mother died, friends planted trees in her memory in what was now Israel, and that seemed right...

...It was the von Hindenburg, majestically crossing over Manhattan toward its New Jersey hangar at Lakehurst...

...There were mentions of European relatives who hoped to settle in Palestine...

...Too fresh memories of Arab leaders sympathetic to the Third Reich made it simpler here to ignore the new injustice used to right an ancient one...

...Again the message was plain: The world understands force...

...The next morning the great German blimp was crashing down in flames on the front page of The Times...

...The soldier who for several hours picked through our baggage (including my child's toys) after we crossed over from Jordan on the Allenby Bridge turned apologetic and spoke about his life as a librarian...

...When he claims that the American Jews who back policies represent a united Jewish community, one must wonder about the price of silence and the shame of all who feel—but do not shout— "Not me...

...We would have guests who had fled Germany or Austria to begin new lives here...

...But never again would there be such a meaningless war...

...An emerging generation of Moslems, Christians, and Jews will have a diminished collective memory of the injustices done to the Jews throughout their history...

...each had escaped from an unfeeling and hostile world only by chance...

...And there was pride at home in the famous musicians and achievers of our wandering race...

...Anti-Semitism and Nazism came up at the table frequently...

...Most Arabs saw only a villainous Israel depriving them of land, labor, and identity...

...The arguments heard later—that the Jews who managed to survive the hell of Germany had to live among those who would understand—also seemed unanswerable...

...Israel must change its course, he said...

...On its fins were swastikas, huge and ominous...

...There was scant reference to the cause of the Palestinians, who had been displaced by Israel...

...Shortly afterward I watched the Israeli army mark Independence Day by parading its armored might through Arab East Jerusalem and then show off its aerial skills over the Holy City...

...I can't say that I thought about prophecy and vengeance, but the swastikas seemed very close...

...Certainly there were few among the Arab nations who spoke or acted with genuine compassion for the Palestinian refugees...

...Where were you all these years...

...But Israel would have placed itself on the side of its ethical tradition by taking the first bold step...

...When I returned to Israel several years later I noticed the spreading doubts and fears...

...And with no ultimate security...

...One morning I attended a Holocaust commemoration, one of many held that day throughout the country...

...When I was about ten I dutifully rang the doorbells of Irish and Scandinavian neighbors in Highbridge, holding out the blue and white box from the Hebrew school to which I journeyed a mile each weekday afternoon...

...My parents, if not particularly religious, were interested in Jewish culture...

...Hitlerism seemed to end any debate about Zionism...

...Some American Jewish organizations, self-identified as representing American Jewry, applauded Tel Aviv's military toughness and cheered each triumph in the early wars of survival as signaling the birth of a new and more admirable Jew...

...Many of the colonel's Peace Now colleagues were fighting in Lebanon, though reluctantly...

...Never again must Jews be without it...

...Still vivid for me was riding one day on the open platform of an elevated train (a weekly adventure which made my destination—my piano teacher's apartment—more palatable) when a man standing next to me suddenly shook his fist at the sky...

...But no one was asking me...

...While defenders of Israel cited biblical guarantees and technological virtuosity in making a desert bloom, I walked through olive groves and fields which had taken generations of Arabs to terrace...

...But the theme was clear: No one in Israel must ever forget...

...Will dumping Begin and Ariel Sharon for their excesses end the reliance on a military solution to the Palestinian problem...

...I want to help keep my country democratic and peaceful, just as I want the colonel to save his...

...One could not count on moderation from the latter, at least not right away...

...But their fields were tended by Arab hands, and their sons were more likely to be managers or technicians...

...The mid-1930s and high school sharpened my awareness of Nazism and the proximity of its occasional stray admirers...

...And it came from oilmen and geo-politicians such as the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who warned that if we recognized Israel we might soon be driving four-cylinder cars...

...Until it respected the Palestinian's right of self-determination there would be little reason to expect a moderate response from either the Palestinians or the other Arabs...

...I drank coffee with a rural doctor in the courtyard of a West Bank hospital...

...Grammar school, a delivery boy's job, games played in the street and on the magiRobert Engler, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, is the author of "The Politics of Oil" and "The Brotherhood of Oil...

...Courting the Arab world had everything to d \ with keeping the imperial oil lines open...

...Israel was a democratic society, he explained, and his side had lost a debate that Americans knew too little about...

...And if somehow I was ushered before the Cabinet how could I guarantee that the oft-quoted vow to drive Israel into the sea was just so much dated Arab rhetoric...