Blood Tax at Harvest Time

The love of the Jews for the Holy Land ... is incredible. Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though the yoke is heavy.

--Father Michael Naud of the, Society of Jesus, writing in, 1674, Voyage Nouveau de la, Terre-Sainte

Truly, how marvelous to live in the good country

Truly, how wonderful to love our country

Even in her ruin there is none to compare with her,

Even in her desolation she is unequaled,

In her silence there is none like her.

Good are her ashes and her stones.

--Disciples of the Vilna, Goan, 1810

We call on our young men to pay the blood tax.

--Anwar Sadat, October 1973

What Mortal Claim does Israel have on the hearts of Jews? What kind of a Jew am I, anyway, to find my center in Jerusalem? I was not bar mitzvah'd, I speak no Hebrew, my wife is not Jewish, I observe the Sabbath and the holidays with puzzled awareness that they are happening. I am merely an American writer, husband, father.

And yet Israel gives a sweet center of meaning for me, as for many other Jews; it validates love, family, work; and thus I am a Jew for reasons other than that someone here and there says I am. To use that strange word redolent of fund raising: I'm a Zionist, which means, so history informs us, a willingness to live and die for Israel. I discovered Jerusalem as I discovered myself. I belong to this people as this people belongs to the land of Israel, and in a tradition and history in which I continually rediscover myself, I also discover the possibilities of love, trust, confidence, dread and sacrifice.

I've traveled to Israel three times in the past year. The first time was to inquire about the ingathering of Soviet Jews, a people cut off by 50 years of Soviet life from active participation in the Jewish tradition, and yet they dwell in the hope of Zion. They risk their lives and sacrifice their past to join their people in the Place. I lived with a group of them, and stood before the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a young mathematician who folded his hands and said the only prayer he knew: "Now I understand."

The second time, in August of 1973, I attended an international meeting of artists and writers in Jerusalem, in the dry warm days of summer, in a country boiling with hope, energy and fun. What looked dangerous from abroad looked merely challenging here. There was health in the risks, it seemed. We drank, toured and talked too much and, like children, swore we would be friends forever.

And then, soon after, in October I went to the war. In a few weeks' time the flesh had melted from the face of my friend Moshe Dor, poet and teacher. The writers and artists were away killing in the Golan or in Sinai. The grim blackout in which (continued on page 164) Blood Tax (continued from page 105) people stumbled seemed quite literally an extinguishing of the light of life. The young women, tanned and chic in August, were now haggard and abstracted. And a few days after the war began, with only the first casualties announced, everyone was already in mourning and in suspense for new griefs. I met nobody who hadn't already suffered a personal loss. It is a very small country--the population of the Bay Area of San Francisco in a battle for its life against the millions of Arabs from countries whose leaders declare a "blood tax" and say they can afford to kill their youth so long as they also kill Israelis.

I kept two journals of this Indian--summer trip to Israel in the autumn of 1973, one a report of what I saw, the other a notebook of grief. Here are both of them together. No doubt history and obsession fade into each other and make them twins.

• • •

October 6-12

"Jews, and especially Israelis, cannot afford the luxury of despair"--Golda Meir.

"It's strange, Dad. ... Everybody's gone." My daughter Ann, telephoning to San Francisco from Kibbutz Gan Shmuel ("The Garden of Samuel") in the middle of the night on the second day.

The connection with Israel is not an allegiance that can be broken off without the loss of self. The American Irish can understand this; American blacks know the price they have paid by being severed. Many American Jews, weary of turmoil, weary of history, weary in fact of themselves, choose to say Israel doesn't matter to them, or they feel the Arabs have a marvelous case, or why should they get involved. It's far away, it's trouble. They seek some of the relief of joining the powerful oppressor, of giving up. Baptized and name-altered Jews through history have striven for this murky pleasure that is the lack of pain. At what cost the secret shame of abandoning something so close? "Mere ethnic allegiance" is the argument of Cain, who says, He's only my brother, why should I care? It is also the argument of Euthyphro in Plato's dialog, the son who betrayed his father and demanded to know why his father should be any different to him than anyone else. It's only his father. Jewish history is only what generated me.

A man can betray his feeling for his brother or his father only at a terrible price. And when I look at my Jewish friends who say, "What business is it of mine?" I'd rather pay my price in nightmares and dread than their price in evasion of their dreams.

"I'm in a safe place, don't worry, Dad. But I miss my friends. There's nobody left here." Ann, the sixth day.

I'm going. What else can I do?

• • •

October 13

I imagine a nation keeping busy while mourning, fending off its terrors by mobilizing. My wife and young daughter take me to the airport in San Francisco. Stomach twisting; yawns; a persistent incredulousness that this can happen. My friend Bruno happens to be at the airport to meet his girlfriend--sexy Spanish chatter and a little rain of hello kisses.

My resistance is low. I am also irritated by all the plastic stretch-fabric girls and double-knit men, and irritated with myself for caring what my fellow passengers to New York wear. Foolishness. The comic parade of our times has given me the blessing of an unbored life, and so I've no right to judge it with this new sourness, this dread arising only from my preoccupation.

What is happening is forbidden to happen. And it is happening. The world offers this clank and explosion of horror. Nonsense: It is mankind that offers the world its history. And triviality continues to nag me, too: the buttocks overflowing in the aisles and seats of this TWA 707 nonstop San Francisco--New York. Disgust with humankind. Myself doesn't please me, either. I didn't expect so much retraction into vanity.

I love my wife and children, I wish Israel to be saved, that's all.

Why I am going: I can't bear the event without taking part someway. I am swamped by abstractions, death and destruction and political analysis ("oil," "détente," blahblahdeath), and need to make the unreal pain real.

So I feel better as I get closer. If I erase myself in hysteria, then what good am I? No more choking and tears.

The rear end perched on the armrest of my seat is trying to make it with the off-duty stew across the aisle. Stretch-fabric buttocks, brushing my elbow, rotate with anxiety as he works his spell, such as: "I'll buy you a drink in the lounge."

She needlepoints a cable car. "No, I'm doing this."

He has been talking steadily, describing how important he is; he usually travels first-class; he knows many dynamite stewardesses: he always awaits his flight in the VIP lounge.

"No."

He is a singles-bar veteran. "Man," he says to her, "if you don't drink, I'll buy you a Coke. Come on, now."

"No." Her tight little smile. "You don't have to buy the Cokes around here."

"So come on."

"No."

He is still talking--"if you change your mind"--as he slopes off to his own seat. She doesn't look up. Chews her gum. Needle in and out. A very small smile for a very small victory.

• • •

El Al Flight #212, New York-Paris-Lod Airport, Israel, October 13-14

For those lucky enough to get a place on the passenger list, the mood is mostly elated. The Israelis, young people, some with babes in arms, are triumphant. "We're going home!" one shouts at the gate at Kennedy Airport. He has been waiting for five days, and now his turn has come.

In line, a father spins his daughter in the air. They are laughing, in an excursion mood. Chaim, an El Al mechanic, is giving the keys to his car to a pretty SAS ground stewardess and saying, "Use it, otherwise the battery goes dead."

An SAS colleague, also saying goodbye to him, uses a line I hear many times in the departure lounge: "Finish it up and come back Monday."

There are exceptions to the mood. A woman is weeping steadily, quietly, uninterruptedly, as she has been for several hours, and she is helped onto the plane by a stewardess. The first casualty figures were announced this morning.

I ask an old man in a long coat, black hat, beard, if he is an Israeli. "No, New York," he says.

"Why are you going now?"

"I'm an old-age person. Soon I will be too sick. I planned to go. So there's a war. So I'm going."

Most of the passengers, young Israeli students, workers or tourists, are going home to join their units. Many carry guitars, flutes, books, souvenirs. There are also some American doctors and journalists.

Gary Bannerman--the name is Scottish--a big reddish Vancouver broadcaster: "I haven't seen Israel yet, but my wife has been there twice, so I thought this war would be a chance to get some good tapes. But I got to be back in two weeks for a Smothers Brothers taping."

The woman who was weeping is still weeping and I try to talk with her, but she says, "I am very sorry, I can't translate so good English, Hebrew, when I am like this." Her 18-year-old son was on the line at the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur. She is going home to bury him.

I ask a New York grandmother, "You're a tourist?"

"Yes," she says, "can't you tell?" Later she adds: "My daughter in Jerusalem has three children, four years down to two and a half months. I just saw them in August--beautiful. Her husband is a banker, but now he's in Syria. I asked her: 'You want me to come?' And she said, 'Ma, I'm OK.' But then I said I was coming anyway and she said OK."

A group of El Al security guards--young, tough, burly, happy finally to be released to go home--hang out together near the tail of the Boeing 707. One gum-chewing, baby-faced kid says, "You want to use bathroom? You must give me ten cents." All laugh at his joke. A doctor, carrying a medical text written in Spanish, waiting to use the John, doesn't like the joking. He scowls rather primly.

"For you," says the kid, opening the door, bowing, "only five cents, a special bargain."

The guards seem to favor the low--rise jeans that were popular a few years ago. I get the impression of a bank of curly hair, bulging muscles, innocently hoodish looks.

"And for you"--as I use the bathroom--"a free Wash'n Dri. Everything is surprise."

Roger Abraham, his wile, Roza, and their 14-month-old daughter, Diane, are in the seats across from me. They are going home, but by one of those happy accidents familiar to travelers, they have been living in San Francisco, like me. "1 was there for '67, I don't want to miss this one," says Roger, a flight engineer. "So if they don't need me on transports? So I'll drive a truck. Later I'll come back to San Francisco. What a beautiful city. How lucky we are to live there."

He asks me a riddle: "My father was born in Russia. Where was I born?"

I guess New York, Paris--he is shaking his head--Shanghai?

"It's too easy for me to win. I won't bother you to guess. Egypt." Broad happy smiles. His wife is playing with Diane in her carry bed. "Wonderful!" he says. "A Russian Jewish Israeli from Egypt who lives in San Francisco! And my wife is Greek! But Diane is a typical California girl--so cute."

He hands the child over to me and I play with this native daughter of the Golden West.

A stewardess has found Oroweat cookies for the babies. She has been doing extra duty. Fair, slim, pretty, exhausted, she tells me, "One brother is in the Golan, one is in Sinai. I have best friend who lost her first husband in 1967 war. Now her second husband is my brother in Sinai. ... You, American, you are happy to visit Israel?"

"Relieved to be on my way."

From the galley where we are standing, she looks toward the woman who is still weeping with tears that seem endless, too bountiful. "In today's announcement, you know, three El Al pilots are dead, too."

It's the middle of the night over the ocean. Time to drink tea. My stewardess gets busy passing sandwiches and cookies I notice that, besides the Star of David, she has a locket hanging from a gold chain. There is a miniature photograph of a young man in it. The locket is open, as if to give him room to breathe.

In order to save time, we do not deplane during refueling at Orly. The 707 is ringed with French police and Israeli security people--walkie-talkies, automatic weapons. A bus pulls up. Two pretty Israeli teenagers are bumped. "They will stay perhaps a little while and see Paree," says their father.

Two Israelis board in their place--sleepy Frenchmen, they would have seemed, but they've been waiting to go home.

I ask the exhausted stewardess, deathly pale now, who is the young man in her locket picture.

She brightens with flirtatious pride. "A secret."

Geraldo Rivera, an ABC television personality, is in a seat near me. Thirty years old, well-tended long hair, lean performer's body, hip Latin good looks. He is reading a science-fiction paperback, Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves, to prepare for the curious reality ahead. He is married to Kurt Vonnegut's daughter. "My mother was Jewish," he says. "I was bar mitzvah'd. Everybody knows my history. Of course, personally, I'm not Jewish, but my cameraman is an Israeli--a wild man. He's already there. He'll make sure we see some good combat.

A stewardess is talking with the lady who lost her son. Her face is swollen. I don't look at it; I look at her feet as she stands near the galley, whispering to the stewardess, who doesn't touch her but talks, listens, talks. Finally the woman returns to her seat.

The stew says to me, "Some lose one son in one war, the next in the next, and so on." But then, to change the mood, she tells with pride about the flier who shot down a Katyusha rocket headed for Tel Aviv. "He was one of ours, an El Al pilot, in normal times."

An announcement over the speaker: "And now we will serve a hot meal, a breakfast. Please enjoy."

Gary Bannerman, the broadcaster from Vancouver, asks, "You don't know Art Finley in San Francisco? I'm coming down to see him soon. We'll all have dinner. His, uh, civilian name is Finger, you know. Wonderful chap."

We eat again. There is the usual constant meal service of international air travel, as if each time zone deserves its food tribute; the usual intimacies, gossip, boredom, fatigue, yawns. Only a slight distortion of temperament, manifested by less litter in the aisles, more courtesy and smiles and care, makes this flight different from other flights.

Those who talk about their feelings say mostly that it feels much better to be on their way. It gives hope to be doing something, or to be getting ready to do something.

The pilot announces that he'll try to get the news on Kol Israel, the Voice of Israel. The returning soldier across the aisle listens intently to the steady unemotional BBC-style Hebrew. He doesn't look pleased. I ask him to translate. He shrugs and smiles. "The speaker says they are waiting for you." We talk about the recent statements that the Arabs simply want to return to their homes. He says: "If your neighbor turns his house into a missile site for firing at you, isn't the word home a peculiar word to use for that place?"

Roger Abraham, the flight engineer from San Francisco, has a suggestion. "Let them say they have won the war--a few miles of Suez. Let them open the canal, we always said they could. Let them sit down with us now and talk. We could also win--but more blood, more wars. I think so. Instead, let there be peace."

In the meantime, he and his wife and their 14-month-old daughter go back to fight.

We are making a swift banking approach to landing. No delays, since only El Al flies passengers here now. The pilot comes on: "Shalom. Welcome to Lod Airport in Israel. Thank you for flying El Al and have a good day."

There is no Hatikvah or Fiddler on the Roof music this time. But a conveyor belt is carrying crates of Jaffa oranges into a transport plane for export. That's normal. Less normal are the special car and officer driving to the runway for the woman returning for a funeral.

The rest of us separate quickly, heading for our separate tasks. My cabdriver, an old man who looks like a waiter from Second Avenue, asks, "Where are you staying?"

"I'm not sure."

"If you don't know," he says, "then how should I know? Ask me a different riddle."

• • •

Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, Near Hedera, October 15

There are few young men on this large modern farm at harvest time 1973 except the wounded from recent wars. Yet the harvest is taking place with the help of high school kids, volunteers from the town and a few from abroad, women, children. Of course, many of the young women have gone to war also, and last night I met "the princess of the kibbutz"--reputedly the most beautiful girl of Gan Shmuel, a blonde and blue-eyed Jewish Cybill Shepherd, if you can grasp that concept--home for the first time since Yom Kippur on a six--hour furlough. She is working someplace else now as a radar spotter.

The kibbutz grows apples, pears, oranges, grapefruit, cotton, grains. There is a factory to can juices and a packing plant for olives. Normally about 1500 people live and work here or nearby. A high school teacher--wounded in 1948--showed me a group of high school boys tinkering in the tractor yard. "Some they can fix, I don't know how," he said. "Some, of course, they have difficulties."

Normally, of course, the work of these boys is studying.

Ann Gold (B.A., Stanford University, in art history, 1972) has been a trial member of this kibbutz for a year. Since learning Hebrew, she was sent in September to study in Haifa, with the idea of returning to teach art in the kibbutz high school. She was here for the holiday when the war broke out and was one of the first to know. She heard the ringing of the pilot's telephone next door in the middle of the night. Now she works in the dining hall and helps take care of children. She is in charge of the kitchen one day a week.

She is my eldest daughter and I am writing this at her table beneath a calendar photograph of men praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. She has circled the date Saturday, October 6. Yom Kippur. That day they heard bombing and artillery here in this agricultural community, but now the sounds of war have receded, although frequently we hear jets streaking across the sky, or the rumble of transport Dakotas, and there are occasional air-raid warnings, when everyone tumbles into the underground bunkers. My own wounds consist of bumped shins from moving around under total blackout conditions in an unfamiliar place.

Just now all is quiet except for the twittering of birds and the cooing of the doves in a dovecote nearby.

Yesterday a group of soldiers visited Gan Shmuel for lunch, on their way from the Golan to someplace else. They were covered with dust, unshaven, and one was wounded. Although there is plenty of food, a kind of voluntary rationing has begun because of such extra mouths to feed and because of interruptions of production and transport. Hedera, the town nearby, looks normal--stores open, women on the streets with babies--until you look again and see that there are no young men except Israeli Arabs. Most of the local Arabs are working, normally and more than normally, replacing other hands. At intersections in town and on the road network, children have set up tents and tables to offer fruit, sandwiches and cold drinks to passing soldiers. Like children everywhere, they enjoy the break in homework routines, although they attend school as usual.

A tank on a truck went by, from the direction of the Golan, perhaps being carried back for repair or, healthy, for redeployment. The truckers stopped a moment for lemonade and one gently socked the Lolita serving lemonade. She rolled with the punch and giggled, "Oh, you're so dirty."

Last night I watched the day's tank battles on television in a large kibbutz meeting hall. Before the news, there was a cartoon, with the Beatles singing Eleanor Rigby. "All the lonely people, where do they come from?"

And then Arab prisoners, a second or two for each, Mohammed, Abdul, Achmed, so that they can identify themselves to their families, one by one. "Love to my dear wife and five children"--and then turn left off camera to make way for the next. And the next. And the next. This is a totally matter-of-fact service to grieving families. Israelis pray their enemies will do the same. In this rather constricted part of the world, the enemies can watch the same TV shows.

And then the trackless desert, now marred by tank tracks, and the wreckage in the Golan, and the oily spume of explosions, and some astonishing footage from an Israeli patrol boat suddenly sighting an Egyptian commando boat, and rapid firing from both sides--the camera rather shaky--and the Egyptian boat sinking and the Israeli sailors applauding their gunners and singing.

The viewers don't applaud or sing, but they do laugh heartily later, during footage from the United Nations in New York, when Ambassador Malik of the U. S. S. R. insists the Israelis were the aggressors in this war. The laughter grows still when clownish Ambassador Baroody of Saudi Arabia praises the good name of Adolf Hitler.

My daughter introduces me to Dudi, who works in a hospital for old people. He is handsome, tall, mustachioed, a former paratrooper, and looks powerful but has a bad chest wound from 1967. One of his jobs now is to carry the infirm into the shelter during air-raid warnings.

Dudi introduces me to Jacob, well over 80, with the little beard of a Russian intellectual, who toasted the New Year a few weeks ago with these words: "By my right as the oldest member of Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, and by my right also as a member of the last century, let me wish that if the new year brings not peace, it at least brings not war."

His wish was not granted. He has trouble keeping awake during the news. It is long past his bedtime, but here he is, watching the war a few miles away in a room that is somewhat hot and stuffy, blackout curtains interfering with the normal ventilation.

Ann leads me back to her cottage. A marvelous full harvest moon has come up. "Look at my garden," she says, and I can make out the patch of freshly turned earth. "Look, I did a normal garden during the war. It's good to keep busy."

Ann, like everyone here, has near ones who are away, and they haven't heard recently from all of them.

• • •

Kibbutz Nir David, Palley of Jezreel, October 16

The early-morning bus from Gan Shmuel to Afula was filled with women, soldiers, police, Arabs going to work, and with the sounds of the Beatles on the radio. Israel seems to be listening to the golden age of rock music during this war. I met a young American woman who happened to be returning to the country from a vacation in Italy to rejoin her husband at Kibbutz Nir David, where I was headed, and we shared a taxi from Afula to the kibbutz, which is at the Jordan border.

She is Kate Hunter Wittenberg, originally from McLean, Virginia, "an Air Force brat," she described herself--her father a colonel. She is a graduate of Mary Washington College, majoring in math and art history, but now she is a farmer, married to a Jew, who wishes she knew Hebrew better. "It's good to be home," she said. "It was scary to hear the news in Italy."

I am staying with my old friends Shimon and Sara Tal, whom I first met when he headed a United Nations mission in Haiti, teaching Haitians to plant and raise fish. Internationally known as a fish expert, here he has developed an extensive network of scientific fishponds. Like all kibbutzniks, he also takes his turn in the kitchen.

He was off at work when I arrived, and so I jumped into the stream that curves past his cottage--hearing sonic booms overhead, thinking about the trenches and towers that had appeared since my last visit, happy to have met Shaul, a young man I remembered from other visits, here for a few hours after duty in the Golan. Normally he drives a tractor; there he drives a tank.

One of the pilots from Nir David is in Egyptian hands. The boyfriend of a girl I know here is dead. Shaul saw three Sky-hawks hit in the first days, by Soviet radar-guided missiles, and from two of them the pilots parachuted out but fell in Syria. Six times he saw rockets pass narrowly and the Israeli planes continued. But his eyes reddened as he said, "They saved us in Golan. More tanks attacked than Hitler used to attack Russia. We knocked out 800--I don't know how many they used. Maybe we had 200 in the first days."

Here at Nir David they continue to raise fish and fruit and, as elsewhere, old people, women, children replace the men. Many Arabs from the West Bank also come to work. Days after King Hussein declared war, Jordanians are still passing freely into Israel to work or to visit relatives. This seemed even odder than my taking a pleasant swim on a warm day with the sounds of war resonating in the sky.

• • •

Tal has a problem. He needs a truck to ship some fish, and since the army has his trucks, we drive to Beit Shean, in a corner of Israel surrounded by Jordan, to request our transport. Soldiers lounge under trees; buses everywhere: soldiers eat at noontime in the shade. They are in the business of dissuading King Hussein from trying to cross this border. At the same time, the local activities--cotton, olives, harvesting and packing--continue. The religious soldiers lunch outdoors in booths decorated with leaves and fruit. It's the last day of Sukkoth. the feast of booths. There is time for religion, too.

The religious chief of the truck pool refuses Tal's request. "To drive on the Sabbath--no!" Tal claims the war gives dispensation. "No," he repeats. Tal gives up for a few minutes and they separate.

Tal explains to me, "I can't push him. We must live together. Normally we have our own trucks----" Tal is a fish farmer with that peculiar kibbutz combination of body accustomed to work, head to disputation. His eyes are red-rimmed today, there is dust in his hair, his humor is patient.

He returns to the fray. The chief of the truck pool takes off his yarmulke and scratches his head. He has been thinking. "It is for the war, not for economical reasons?" he asks.

"What else?"

"You will use your own driver, not ours?"

"If you please."

"Then take. The sin will be on his head."

• • •

We are feeding the swans and geese on the Asi River as evening falls. Nearby, young boys are learning to use the Uzi submachine gun on a field ringed by newly dug trenches. A girl runs off to talk with Shaul, and they stand together on the little bridge. Sara Tal smiles and says, "She's crazy about him."

The fish will be shipped. Girls fall in love. In a kibbutz a few miles from here, a Syrian shell demolished the children's houses, but of course the children were sleeping in their shelters and fairly safe, as they are here. Children learn to use weapons and everybody treats his fear for all the missing men with good cheer. After all, it is nothing special. On whose head is the sin?

• • •

Jerusalem, October 17

A man heard a knock at his door in Jerusalem early one morning, and the words: "Express letter! Special delivery!"

But then, from below his line of sight, a child caught his attention and handed him the envelope. He also saluted, saying, "It's only temporary, sir. When I grow up, I'm going to be a doctor."

If your letter from Israel comes with sticky fingerprints on it, you should be informed that most of the mail is being sorted by teenagers and younger temporary help. There is a record amount of bubble gum in the post office.

Mobilization has taken all the able-bodied young men, many of the women, many of the middle-aged. At Kibbutz Gan Shmuel and Kibbutz Nir David, all the usual work is going forward, but young volunteers--including Scandinavians, Germans, Americans, in addition to children from the cities--are taking unusual adult responsibilities. The chief noticeable effect is a greater volume of Beatle and Bob Dylan music in kitchens and offices.

There have been some special visitors and volunteers from abroad, aside from musicians such as conductor Zubin Mehta and violinist Isaac Stern, who have given concerts and played for the wounded in hospitals; a group of Dutch anti-Nazi underground fighters; Christian missionaries from England who have come to work through the war with crippled and injured children in orphanages and hospitals.

An Israeli reserve lieutenant returned from abroad and was immediately arrested at the airport. He had fled on a criminal charge a year ago but hoped to sneak back into the country to join his unit. He was brought to court. The judge decided to release him without bail until the end of the war, and the reserve lieutenant left to take care of the first problem first.

Israeli blind have been visiting injured soldiers whose sight is lost or impaired, explaining that they are not alone, that life goes on. "This is not my regular work, I am a philologist, specializing in Arab languages," a man blinded in the War of Liberation, 1948, explained to me. "But since I have a vacation from the university, I can spend it this way."

Perhaps the oddest contribution to Israeli life comes from the Jewish immigrants from the U. S. S. R., who continue to flow into Lod Airport despite Soviet hostility, despite the war. After the grueling journey from Russia to Vienna by train, and the stresses of the flight to Lod Airport, doctors and nurses have gone directly from the airport to work in hospitals. The tensions of adjustment to a strange new world seem to be relieved by the sense of immediate usefulness in an emergency. Other Russians go directly to work in industry or on farms. Many give blood. "That's what I came for," said one young man, rolling up his sleeve.

An official French declaration reaffirmed today its policy of selling arms and Mirage jets only to nonbelligerents, such as Libya. French foreign minister Jobert, in response to repeated Israeli assertions that these Mirage jets are fighting with the Egyptians, has said that it is not proven. The Israelis have now shown photographs and pieces of Mirage fighters shot down. "Our policy of sale to Libya would be re-evaluated if it could be proven," said Monsieur Jobert. By proof, some Israelis believe, the French official means hand delivery of an entire Mirage containing an Arab pilot with his finger on a trigger.

While France sells arms only to the Arabs, its policy is officially neutral. The Paris daily Le Figaro gives a page each to news from the Israeli and the Arab sides. The Figaro correspondent in Jerusalem says: "Of course, if you happen' to find yourself in Israel, it is rather difficult to hold to feelings of neutrality."

"Ah, if we could only find some oil in the Negev," says a French-speaking Israeli. "Then we could have some neutrality on our side, too."

• • •

Beit Shean, October 18

Lilik and Amnon have a problem.

Beit Shean is what Israelis call "a development town." This usually means hardship--inadequate housing, few amenities, many poor Jews and Arabs scratching out their living together--and that's what Beit Shean has meant. The history of the town goes back to Biblical days, when they didn't need air-raid shelters, but there is a Roman amphitheater nearby, and the area has a tradition of fortification and struggle. Portions of the film Jesus Christ Superstar were made in the amphitheater. The people of Beit Shean, who thought to bring culture to their dusty corner of Israel, are uncomfortable today because of that movie and, also, because of the war being fought around them.

They are on the Jordan border. Terrorists like to cross this border. They are very near Syria. The Syrians thought to cross on Yom Kippur but didn't do more than knock at the door. The town is filled with soldiers. And the population--most of them North African Jews who fled from Arab countries--very much desires not to be under Arab rule, even overnight.

Two men run Beit Shean today. Lilik, dark, small, uneducated, but quick and bright, came from Morocco. Now he is learning how to be an administrator of a town in wartime by administering it. He is working with Amnon, member of a nearby kibbutz, who commutes to an office in Beit Shean every day, carrying his lunch in a bag. They have something in common--they are both too old for the army--but little else. One is a North African, Sephardic, from a people depressed for centuries; the other is a socialist idealist, European, his pale-blue eyes surrounded by fine lines from 40 years of squinting into the son of the Beit Shean valley.

Together they decide how to use Jewish Agency funds for such amenities as hospitals, parks, scholarships. They are proud of the new libraries and children's game areas in the bomb shelters. And here is their problem--a serious disagreement because of the matter of the wedding of Joseph, who works on earth-moving equipment, and Achsa, who works at being 19 years old. The marriage was supposed to take place the week of Sukkoth. But suddenly they were at war, despite the fact that the parents had put away the money for an apartment and a wedding party. Joseph was now in a tank-repair unit, directly behind the first line of fire. His commander thought he should get married on schedule. "We'll wait for you," he said. The Syrians, who had called for surrender during the first days of the surprise attack, now seemed willing for Joseph to marry. They were rapidly returning toward Damascus. "Marry," said Joseph's commanding officer.

Joseph didn't want to leave his buddies, but an order is an order. Besides, Achsa was waiting with the usual impatience of a 19-year-old.

But when Joseph arrived in Beit Shean, Achsa decided: "I'm not getting married, I'm not moving into our beautiful new flat."

"You don't love me?"

"I love you, but I won't do it."

The war scrapes something raw in Achsa. It seems that her seven-year-old sister had been in second grade in 1969 and her school was adjacent to Achsa's high school. When the primary school sustained a direct hit from a terrorist shell--this was called the War of Attrition--the children ran out in terror as the building burst into flames. Achsa saw her sister split in several parts by a second shell that landed in the playground near a sandbagged trench that served as a temporary shelter. Now, with her iron logic, and with the passion that Joseph loves in her, she repeated tirelessly: "I won't get married if my house doesn't have an attached bombproof room. When I get married, I make children. When I make children, I don't want my sister to be joined by her nieces and nephews. My apologies to you, Joseph, and to your unit commander, and thanks for that exceptional leave. But I can't marry you today."

Joseph returned to his unit a bachelor.

The two men who run Beit Shean disagree about what to do. Lilik thinks the bombproof room should be built "for humanitarian and feminine reasons." Amnon thinks the money should go into an emergency therapeutic center and that Achsa requires long-range psychiatric help when peace breaks out again.

"You know a lot about psychiatry," Lilik says to Amnon. "But you don't understand the feelings of these people. You weren't born here."

Amnon pulls deeply on his pipe, the very model of a stoical kibbutz bureaucrat. They are standing amid the dust of a building in the development town that will be finished when the workmen come back from war.

"We were all horn in Beit Shean," he says.

• • •

Jerusalem, October 19

At teatime, or in the evening, or whenever and wherever I meet children in this country thrust into war, they play with me in that special wistful or flirtatious way of children who miss their father.

Surely the Syrian and Egyptian children miss their fathers, too. There is no way to connect notions of blame with the injustice of children deprived of their fathers.

I ask everywhere about the arrangements made for the children. The airraid shelters at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel and Kibbutz Nir David are furnished neatly with blankets, toys, books. When the doors dang shut and the children are snug underground, it becomes a wonderful game. The mounds of earth, the concrete and the steel doors keep them exempt from history for a time, barring a direct hit. I didn't like it down there, but the children seemed happy.

For those who know their fathers are at the front, their own comfort is not the problem. Today I visited friends in Jerusalem. "I don't want my daddy to get dead," Debra says. Her mother tries to put her to bed before the evening news, when Israeli TV teams come back with astonishing footage of tank battles, air battles, sea battles, but Debra manages to squirm away and watch along with the adults. Israel is such a small country that someone in the room usually recognizes one of the faces on the screen. They are careful never to show the faces of the fallen, just a stretcher, an arm, a medic holding the plasma, the stretcher-bearers rushing toward the helicopter or an ambulance.

One evening Debra's mother went to her room and found that she had cut off the heads of all her dolls, she had torn out eyes, there were doll legs and arms scattered about. Debra was crying in a corner. She took the child in her arms and said, "I want to talk with you about this."

"I want to talk with my daddy about it," Debra said.

• • •

Natanya, October 20

David Chaplik has very large, soft eyes that open very wide, as if he is permanently startled by what he has seen. You may remember this young Russian Jew. He wanted to leave the Soviet Union, and finally managed to get on a train. And then in Austria he was taken by Arab terrorists--his wife and three-year-old son slipped away--and held hostage while the world watched the spectacle of Austria bargaining for the lives of David Chaplik, an old Jewish couple and a customs official.

The terrorists struck a bargain with the chancellor of Austria. David Chaplik, alive, arrived in Israel a few days before the Yom Kippur attack. A couple of weeks later, while the war continued, I visited him in the Absorption Center for Russian Jews at Natanya, a resort suburb of Tel Aviv, where, as Israel is convulsed by sudden total war, David Chaplik is doing his part by ... what? By learning Hebrew. His task is to study. "My son is in nursery school. He knows more than I do. I'll learn from him," he said.

We met in an unused room to recall a few of the recent times of David Chaplik, construction foreman, hostage, husband and father, Hebrew student. He wanted no pictures taken. He would prefer, in fact, that the whole thing hadn't happened. But it had, and so he talks about it once more. "They took me. ... They shouted. ... I didn't understand. ... They waved weapons and said they would kill me. ... I went along with them. ..."

"Did you then regret the whole venture, going out of the Soviet Union, trying to come to Israel?"

"No."

"Why did you decide to leave Russia?"

"I'm not sure I understand that question. There was nothing to think about. I'm a young man. I wanted to go to Israel."

And so the young man from Chernovtsy arrived a few days before the Egyptian and Syrian attack. As usual, new immigrants are sent to learn Hebrew, to study, to begin to become Israelis. Maybe things are a little different because of the war. "I can give blood--my Russian-speaking blood. We can work a little on the farms, sometimes in the hospital. But mostly. ..."

"Mostly what?"

"Well, mostly I have to learn Hebrew. I don't want my son to be a better Israeli than I am."

• • •

Qiryat Shemona, October 21

A 70-year-old classical scholar and youth hosteler just happened to take me to see the battle of Mount Hermon, in which Israeli forces reacquired a promontory that was the last bit of Israeli space captured by the Syrians at the surprise beginning of this war.

We were driving early this morning to Kfar Yuval and Misgav Am to see how the farmers on the Lebanese border are bearing up under sporadic bombing and terrorist attack. How are the children? How is life in bomb shelters? How is work being done at harvest season with all the men gone?

Mordecai Schweid, a tall, slightly stooped hiker who seems to know the history of every hillock and valley, was pointing to Mount Hermon and saying, "Too bad. That's where we skied. Many Israelis bought ski equipment and will be rather disturbed to leave it in Syrian hands."

An oily smoke began to rise from the peak. Perhaps they are burning fields? No, Israeli climbers have followed unmarked paths up the sheer slopes. Hollow thuds of explosions reverberate, the deep bass notes of artillery. A battle is taking place. Jets scream across the sky. One is hit and it crashes--another plume of oily smoke--not sure if it's Syrian or Israeli, and then, astonishingly, high in the sky over Lebanon, we see a parachute floating endlessly down.

We hope the pilot is alive. If he's Syrian, he'll be taken by the Lebanese. If he's Israeli, he'll probably be safe, too, unless he fell into the hands of the Fatah. But often the pilots are ejected automatically after they have been too badly hurt to survive.

After a while the explosions cease. We see helicopters buzzing up to the peak, hurrying back to the hospital at Safad, that Biblical city where Jews have lived forever, which they never left. It is an artists' colony now, a little reminiscent of Carmel in California, and there is also a modern hospital filled with the wounded from the Golan.

On the radio we hear a news bulletin. It confirms what we have just seen. On this day when Syria refused to answer the call for a cease-fire, the skier's mountain has been retaken. It also commands the Golan and Fatahland in Lebanon.

The road from the Golan is a crawling trash yard of Russian equipment. Soviet trucks captured in 1967 are hauling away Soviet tanks captured in 1973. Beetle hulks of insectal booty bear specks of men, dusty, grim, bearded soldiers, blank-faced watchers, exhausted warriors. They are leaving the Golan, close enough to Damascus to satisfy them; there are slow clanking noises, but a sense of hurry--now to the Sinai for the climactic battle with the Egyptians.

In "my" war, 1943--1946, if we actually did anything difficult, it was then off to R&R for us, U.S.O., nurses and milk shakes. Israel's soldiers have no furloughs except those constant six-hour leaves to give greetings to their families, take a shower and a few kisses.

A soldier on a tank, gray with dust, saw my notebook, reached into his turret, took out his own notebook and made a note right back at me. He grinned suddenly through the grime. Fair is fair.

A convoy slows down. There is a dull clanging of metal doors in different tuneless vibrations--artillery, cannons, bombs. And the strict percussion of automatic fire. Despite all the infrared, heat-attracted, wire-led, radar-controlled, push-button weapons, we are still in a battle with grimy men striving to murder grimy men. And it's hot. It's dirty. It's murderous. MIGs chased by Israeli Phantoms snarl and shriek across the sky like cats in a sack--a MIG this time, I'm sure of it, exploding in that smear of oily smoke that I already know as well as I know the shape of an oak leaf. The blood tax is taken and taken and taken. Like cats, the planes are gone. Silence. The ejected Syrian pilot floats down under his white parachute and an Israeli helicopter has taken off to retrieve him. He, too, will go to the gleaming-white new hospital in Safad, that ancient city in which Hebrew mysticism kept its roots even during Crusader times. Plasma for one who pays the blood tax.

We drove on to Kfar Yuval, a moshav--cooperative farming enterprise--run by Jews from Cochin in India. They have elegant dark Indian faces, and the old men, working in the fields, look like Indian sages with their thick straight white hair. They are thin and wiry, however, not like your average plump guru.

The children all stood up and said shalom when we visited the nursery school. Most had that dark Indian look; a few Kurds, a few Europeans. They were sorting a heap of books that had come as a gift from America. They looked refreshed after their night in the shelter.

At Misgav Am, a kibbutz flat on the Lebanese border facing Fatahland--an area controlled by terrorists--our host went on talking about chicken production, egg production, fruit trees as the pounding of outposts near Mount Hermon continued. An air-raid siren wailed. We went to lunch underground.

At Metulla, too, the fighting continued.

Soldiers were hitchhiking south for a few hours' leave. We talked about the possibility of peace today. Kissinger is in Tel Aviv, maybe Kosygin in Damascus.

A column of jeeps roared northward. Each one carried four or five young soldiers, with fresh equipment, in sunglasses, unsmiling. They were going toward the Golan. We just heard the Iraqis say they won't accept a cease-fire. And Qaddafi of Libya has just declared that it is never a question of land or rules of war. The only aim of jihad--holy war--against Israel is to kill Jews. Neither Iraq nor Libya has a border with Israel; no matter.

Mordecai Schweid points to forests, ruins, monuments, places marked on the maps of the Bible as we drive through the blacked-out country, four hours home to Jerusalem. We pick up hitchhikers. I ask a soldier who came on the famous "magic-carpet" rescue of Yemenite Jews a generation ago: "What are. you fighting for?"

He is cradling his Uzi submachine gun in his lap and answers sleepily, "Peace."

• • •

Tel Aviv, Night, No Sleep. October 22

I spent an hour, ate a sandwich, had an espresso at the press building on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. A khamsin, that blistering wind from the southeast, was sweeping the country; everyone looked a little haggard, even the new war correspondents, freshly arrived in Abercrombie foreign-correspondent shirts with the beige epaulets of the active-verb man. Israeli officers and couriers dashed in and out of the building with its snakes of television cables in front; the canteen was crowded with hands reaching for food and drink; a crowd of Olivettis outside on the temporary tables set up in the shade, tape recorders, transistors--the world press rewriting many of its dispatches from "our man in Israel" straight off BBC London or Radio Amman.

Two Israeli combat correspondents were sleeping exhausted on the grass; one was on his bedroll, staring straight up into the sky like a dead man. Nearby, a plump blond-bearded German, modified middle-aged hippie, was curled on his side near his typewriter, his transistor and an Israeli girl in uniform. Every wiggle expressed delight, the dream come true: a war, a warm day, a sandwich with beer, a pretty Israeli. She was nodding agreeably as he told his story, and when she smiled, she really did have perfect small white buds of teeth. War always makes it for some.

"Briefing, gentlemen, in five minutes!" a colonel announced through cupped hands. A few stirred. One, who had his ear to the BBC, followed the colonel into the map-festooned briefing room. I talked with an English reporter about our friend Nicholas Tomalin. killed a few days ago by a stray Syrian shell in the Golan. The last time I saw Nick Tomalin, he talked in that puzzled English way about the oddness of Jews. They didn't really seem so odd to him. His death is like many of their deaths now.

Moshe Dor, poet. He looked like an exhausted owl behind his glasses. "Tragical situation it is," he said. "Yes, we won this time the battle again--at all the cost. But they intended to destroy us. Now either we remain strong and fight these wars every six or seven years until they bleed us to death or ruin our Jewish spirit. Or we give up to international pressure, squeezed and chewed up and spit out--and bleed to death just now. It is tragical situation for three million people who only wish to live on this sandy bar of land, yet here we are."

Gershon Shaked, professor of drama and literature at Hebrew University: "Seventy thousand men and tanks overwhelmed four hundred boys at the Suez Canal--a great victory! They should be proude And we held them, and three days later we were beating them again! But now, if they say they have a great demonstration of pride, will they talk to us and make a peace? Oh, a pleasure, let them declare a victory. Only let them now talk and make a peace."

• • •

Night and solitude. The babies must miss their daddies. Battles are the busiest human activity, just as the garrison waiting I recall from my Army days is the most glacially slow. Howling jets overhead, heading to the Sinai and back. Death's isolation, its solitude, here a few miles from the battle. Pumping explosions, dull kettles pounded together. Men who feel lonely are bombing bridges, missile sites, the canal; men who feel lonely are sending Russian SAM-6s up to knock down these young men.

Sleepless. Tanks cranking by. Jets. Trucks. Julie Munshin used to tell me, "The important thing is to lose desire." He's dead now; he's lost it.

What he meant was deeper, more terrible: to lose caring, to stop caring. It's the way out, all the way out.

Millicent, a fat, heavy-featured, lumbering girl of 23, worked in a hospital with a ward of skin-seared tankers. A hit tank explodes, the gas burning, blackening, shriveling. They sent her away when they saw what was happening to her. She tried to tell me about it, but her eyes filled with tears.

"It's rather difficult to explain," she said, her voice very British and controlled as the face flushed and darkened.

Again last night I watched the war on TV. Sport: our boats exploding their boats, our tanks knocking over their tanks, our guns poking their planes out of the sky. But at breakfast I saw the kibbutz wives and mothers. No sport in it at all. The Syrians and Egyptians have their TV version, too, and their wives and mothers for whom it is not sport.

When the surprise invasion of 70,000 Egyptians crashed through the line held by 400 men at the Suez Canal, there was a certain satisfaction among the New Leftists of San Francisco. You see, the Arabs can fight. You see, it's their land. Why don't the Israelis just give up and live in an Arab world as part of an Arab state?

It's wonderful how the left and the oil companies can agree, how men who call themselves socialists can march along with the sheiks and feudal oppressors, how people who talk about the right of national self-determination can deny the small nation whose enemies continually threaten extermination. After 1967, the Israelis asked to negotiate and offered a withdrawal from Suez. The victor begged for conversations; the loser demanded total surrender. And the world, right and left, said: You see, the Jews are intransigent. "Jews, like women, always complicate things."

A Jewish friend said after the second day: "The Arabs are fighting with élan because they know they're right. The Israelis have retreated because it isn't really their land."

After the third day, when the Israelis began to push the Arabs back, the world stirred uneasily, the United Nations mumbled. And when it was becoming a clear defeat for the Egyptian and Syrian armies and their Soviet suppliers, the world demanded: OK, cease fire. Golda Meir asked for a cease-fire at the very beginning and the Arabs and the Soviet ambassadors mocked her.

Why should I not let myself be eased by the pleasures of my own short life on earth and forget the suffering of my people? Who cares about Biafra now? Who will care about Israel when the oil is divided up among those who want it?

I've seen the children bombed nightly by the rockets supplied by the Soviet Union. My friend Tal, once a Marxist, said as we walked near his fishponds on the Jordan border: "I was never fooled by Stalin, I always knew what he was. But I thought Russia was different and would eventually find socialism. Now I know what Russia is. It seeks oil and power and doesn't care if Arabs and Jews bleed until it gets what it wants." I remember with shame my own sentimentality about our gallant Soviet allies. I trained as a Russian interpreter and was an 18-year-old "progressive." Since Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Biafra and Israel--and well before, of course--Russian proletarian socialism means czarist brutality plus the new element of modern technology. With all the old ingredients, including anti-Semitism, "the socialism of fools."

Ambassador Malik of the U. S. S. R. screamed hoarsely when he was accused by Ambassador Tekoah of Israel of sending weapons and experts to help bomb Israel's border farms and towns; Mr. Tekoah said he was not being helpful. Watching a session of the United Nations Security Council on television at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, along with the women and the old people, while their husbands and sons were fighting to repel the thousands of Soviet tanks at the Syrian and Egyptian borders, I didn't realize how many of these grizzled farmers understood Russian. A roar of hilarity swept the room in the recreation hall of the blacked-out farm as Mr. Malik answered Mr. Tekoah: "Some of my best friends are Jews."

It was put more honestly by a cabdriver in Moscow a few years ago when I persisted in trying to find the synagogue. "Nyet sinagogi," he said. I insisted. I gave him the address. He shook his head. Finally I told him to take me to the intersection nearby. "Zhid," he said, which means kike.

• • •

Jerusalem, October 23-24

"The first few days of the war, it was rather cold around here," an Israeli said about the narrow market streets of old Jerusalem. "The Arabs were listening to Cairo and Damascus. The transistors were busy. But they were careful this time."

"And then?"

"And then the situation is almost normal."

One of the astonishing things about this war has been the unforced calm of the Arab quarters of Israeli cities and of the West Bank. Israeli Arabs have given money and blood for the Israeli war effort; they have kept vital services going. For them it has been business more than usual.

Fewer tourists in the ancient streets leading to the holy places, however. From the little shops, and sometimes from atop the donkeys that transport goods into the soukh, the transistors blare out the news. The salesmen of leather goods, Bedouin shirts and souvenirs still want to strike a bargain if you're willing to do business.

A solemn trio of English girls in tennis dresses and Adidas sneakers was following their guidebook from church to church. "Is this a holy place?" one asked me politely.

"I think it's a Y. M. C. A. office," I said. "Depends on your point of view."

She smiled politely. She knew I was being funny. Normally I'm capable of a whole laugh, not merely a polite smile, from bored English girls on holiday.

I walked alone in the soukh. The young men of Jerusalem's Arab quarter are selling their leather and handcrafts; they are inviting the visitors into their restaurants; they stand in the streets with their transistors tuned to Jordan. But there are few Israeli police and no incidents. These Arabs have almost as much to lose from an Israeli defeat as the Jewish Israelis. They have lived and prospered with Israel. Their cousins would not forgive it.

I had thought to shop for souvenirs for my wife and children, but there is no haste; no itch for purchases during this third week of war. A few old Jewish tourists are picking among the trinkets piled at one door. A soldier, his arm in a sling, is looking at genuine imitation San Francisco Levis handmade in East Jerusalem while the Arab merchant urges him in Hebrew: "Yes, your size. Yes, of course, your size. Please, your size, your price."

Suddenly I recall my travel agent in San Francisco, who remarked, "I love Cairo, I had such fun. The Jews will just have to compromise. The reason the Egyptians don't want to sit down to talk with them is the Jews, I mean the Israelis, are such good talkers."

I need a new travel agent.

I'd rather be here than in garrulous San Francisco, which I love, although the world is still very close and nothing escapes anything. As the war rages on, and the jets scream overhead, and a few walking wounded appear with distracted eyes in the soukh, I find some international hippies at a café near the Jaffa Gate. These pilgrims are wearing love beads, embroidered Arab shirts; they have jeans and girls; they are digging the scene. A boy with long straggly blond hair tells me he is Dutch, "the first bopper of Amsterdam"--not sure what his version of American jive means. I think he intends to play an instrument, though right now it looks as if the only instrument played in Jerusalem is the transistor radio.

"Hey, where's it happening, man?" the first bopper of Amsterdam asks me.

A soldier with a pack is trudging through a narrow alleyway. I follow him.

It is a direction I have followed before. We find the Wall together. There is a cease-fire, but the transistors tell us that both sides are still shooting. Maybe a second cease-fire will take hold, or a third one. Facing these ancient stones, now no longer called the Wailing Wall, stands a rank of Israeli flags, a blue-and-white flutter in the wind. A few old men, called to duty, guard the central place. Arab cabdrivers, children, curious watchers are lounging in the clearing. Old men in black, with beards, with the ritual wrappings about their arms, are bobbing and praying. There are also young men, soldiers, including one boy in full battle dress, with a pack on his back. A donkey browses at a few blades of grass growing between the paving stones. Many old Jews are standing in the sun in their shiny black coats, praying. The soldier with the pack is just leaning his forehead against the Western Wall.

• • •

Israel-Rome-New York-San Francisco, October 25-26

As the second cease-fire seems to be taking effect, I am leaving Israel. Tel Aviv is hot and humid; the khamsin still blows. Suddenly the blackout is lifted and I have no more use for the little flashlight I bought. I'll give it to my children as a souvenir.

The thought that hangs over all others is the one of death, the immediate pain for which there is no explanation or cure but forgetfulness. That remedy takes time, and now there doesn't seem to be any. "Did you know Jossi? He was the son of my cousin." "Yes. Did you know Uri? Our next-door neighbor's boy." "Did you know ... ?"

The faces of my friends have grown skeletal since I last saw them in August. The easy flesh of comfortable people melts away. Haunted eyes, strained and distant expressions; a crisis politeness in the streets and restaurants. Many businesses are closed--Away on vacation for a few days. Visiting Africa--and people hurry by, glancing at the scrawled joke with grim faces.

The rule in Israel is to notify the families of the dead at once, in order to eliminate doubts and rumors and anxious brooding if a man hasn't communicated with his parents or wife. The radio also keeps busy all day long, broadcasting messages: "Shalom, I send love to my dear----

Here is the routine: An officer and a nurse or doctor come to the family. They knock at the door. Mothers scream. Wives scream. They seem to know from the knock. Some refuse to answer. The officer will tell all he knows of the circumstances. The nurse or doctor will try to help. The visitors stay with the bereaved, they talk, they tell, they explain, there is nothing they can explain, they listen, they make arrangements for a friend or neighbor to sit with the mother, father, wife, children. They say they are sorry, they must go on to the next call. Everyone says sorry. Some sit stonily. They go on.

And they are beginning to lose count of these wars.

Meir Zorea, a retired officer and kibbutz farmer, had two sons. He lost his first in June 1967. His second son married the young widow. This son also became a tank commander. He was killed in the Golan. The young wife is now twice a widow in the same family. There are children.

Meir Zorea somehow got permission to enter the battle zone while the fight still raged to bring his son's body home for burial. He went from one burned-out tank to another until he found his boy. He brought him back to the kibbutz, dug the grave himself, and the boy was buried.

Meir Zorea bought a bottle of whiskey and went about the farm, stopping his sons' old friends and demanding that they drink from the bottle. To the health of his sons and of Israel.

I've said goodbye to my friends, to my daughter. There is no joy in this fragile peace. I am relieved to be going before the public announcement of all the names, the day of mourning, when the names will be printed in the newspapers and read one by one on the radio.

• • •

A young man limped onto my flight to Rome. He is bound for Vienna, where he is a medical student. He had hurried back to Israel to join his unit as a medic, was wounded not too badly, and now, two weeks later, is returning to his wife and his studies. "I'm from Ramallah, you know, it's just a dusty little town near Jerusalem, dusty, but I like it."

"Don't apologize. It's a beautiful old town."

We talked with the idle intimacy of travelers. "I am four months away from my medical degree. So I ran behind a tank to help the wounded. So much blood, so many Israelis and--I don't wish it--so many Arabs dead. Oh. So horrible. I am soon a doctor, but I am not used. Some maybe will live but better they don't. I am shame for thinking such thoughts. Oh, the burning."

"You were in the hospital?"

"A piece of shrapnel. One here, one here. Not so bad. In the hospital, such wonderful treatment. You want your left toe scratch, a lady to scratch. Your left toe, your right toe, all toes, ten-fifteen ladies to scratch. They want to help. It must be horrible for them sometimes."

"You'll be OK?"

"Very slight. No worry. Only my wife doesn't know I was wounded. I hope she is not disappointed."

He was ready to apologize to his wife for being wounded as he had apologized to me for being born in the ancient dusty town of Ramallah.

We had a cappuccino together at the airport in Rome at three A.M. and then separated, he to finish his medical studies in Vienna, I to rejoin my family in San Francisco. He saw I wanted to say something to him besides that his wife will be happy to see him despite his limp, and that Ramallah is dusty but beautiful, and that nearby Jerusalem will always be the world's golden city. But I was too tired to say what I wanted to say.

"It's all right," he said. "No worry. Goodbye. Shalom."