Should Israel leave the West Bank?

Has Israel's occupation of the West Bank eroded both Arab and Jewish societies in the Middle East? That's the central argument by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Richard Ben Cramer in his latest book, "How Israel Lost: The Four Questions." Cramer was invited to appear on "Today" to discuss his belief that the Jewish state has become a victim of the Six Day War no less than the Palestinians. Here's an excerpt:

Chapter 1: Why do we care about Israel?
Why do we care about Israel? An eyelash of land around the eastern Mediterranean shore, in some spots the nation isn't ten miles wide. North to south, you can drive it in half a day — if you don't get stuck behind some Polish geriatric squinting through the steering wheel of his first automobile, putting to a new test (at thirty-two miles per hour) his life's talent, which is survival. In fact, our care must be more for that turtleish Jewish survivor than for the land he drives. Even if the world called the question tomorrow and awarded to the Jews, or to the Arabs, every dunam of land in Palestine — every hill, vineyard, olive grove and old stone house, every grain of difficult soil that's been fought over for a hundred years — the whole ball of wax wouldn't match in mass, in fecundity or natural wealth, a quarter of a province of the Congo.

No, it isn't a great rich place, nor gloriously old as a nation-state — fifty-years-and-change it has stood. Its apologists and ideologues tend to start their histories in the mist of Bible-time, to enforce an air of eternity, inevitability, permanence. But there's another story in what the Zionists called "the facts on the ground." There are still thousands of houses whose land records go back exactly for those fifty-years-and-change, and then their histories stop, blank and glaring, like the screen when a film snaps in the projector. These are the properties of "absentees" — Arabs who ran away or were chased away in Israel's birth-war of 1948. Still, there are thousands of old men in refugee camps who will show you the keys to those houses — keys they will pass on to their sons as prize and burden. And still there are the old Jewish fighters, whose preternatural vigor shows why the Arabs ran. On a research visit in 2003, I was privileged to tour the old Negev battlefields with Itzhak Pundak, a brigade commander from the '48 War. He marched me from a wrecked railroad bridge, around the Jewish sniper posts, onward to Egyptian artillery bunkers, from time to time regarding me narrowly from under handsome silvery brows. "Is this too much?" asked the eighty-nine-year-old. "Do you need a rest?"

We have never cared about Israel for her political influence — she never held sway in what Bush the Elder called The New World Order. In the U.N., for example, you wouldn't go out of your way to win Israeli approval — unless for some strange tactical reason you need an implacable majority of third-world nations against your proposal. Whatever Israel is for, most of the world opposes. This is one of the few truths embraced with satisfaction by both Arab and Jew. The Palestinians see Israel's unpopularity as confirmation of their cause. (They wuz robbed! They are victims! Their rights must be restored!) The Jews see it as confirmation of a tenet even more deeply held: the whole world is against them — no matter what they do.

In the Arab world, where conspiracy theory is even more popular than Islam (as religions, they offer identical comfort: nothing happens without a reason), it's fashionable to see the West's care for Israel -- especially America's fixation on Israel — as evidence of a grand scheme for global domination. Israel is assumed to be some sort of U.S. foot-in-the-door, behind which glistens the world's wealth of petroleum. There are a couple of problems with this type of theory. For one thing, adults in the region have by now borne witness to interventions, proclamations and general buttinski from two generations of "American experts on the Middle East" — Special Presidential Negotiators, Deputy Assistant Secretaries of State, Regional Ambassadors, Plenipotentiary Envoys ... Hell could freeze over before these guys dominate anything -- some, you wouldn't let 'em change your tire. The second problem is conclusive: no one can explain how America's support for Israel brings the U.S. any leverage over Middle East oil. Sometimes it makes it hard even to buy Middle East oil.

It's also fashionable for Arabs (and for some Jews) to descry within the tapestry of American politics a controlling weft of rigid steel thread — which they call (depending on who's talking) The Zionist Lobby, AIPAC, the Jewish Money Men, the Hollywood Mafia, or most simply and mysteriously: Jewish Interests. Whatever they call it, they use it to explain why the U.S. government and U.S. public cannot seem to hear, or to remember, or take into account for two days straight, the plight of the Palestinian Arabs who lost their country when the Jews took over. In this type of "analysis," congressmen and presidents (no matter their names, their parties, or provenance) are thought to snap to attention, saluting the Israeli flag, whenever Jews show up with threats or the blandishment of their hefty checkbooks. This is also nonsense.

By what lever do these U.S. Jews lift the world? With the power of their massive vote? Maybe they're two percent of the voting public. (They used to be three but they can't even get it together to make Jewish babies.) And they are, by now, the least bloc-ish bloc. The children of reliable Democrats got richer and more Republican (just like white guys), and their children — today's young Jews — are like totally, kind of like ... way uninterested. The savants who whispered that Bush the Younger went warring in Iraq to do Israel's bidding (led by the nose — as half of them added -- by that known Jew, Deputy-Pentagon-Panjandrum Paul Wolfowitz) failed to notice, or failed to point out, that the organizers of the big antiwar demonstrations were also Jews — who whipped up a fine anti-imperialist fervor with a speech by the last burning star of the radical kibbutz movement, Noam Chomsky. (They're everywhere!) ... And the notion that Bush has to dance for Jewish money ignores so many realities that they cannot all be listed. First and foremost, the present Bush — because he is present in the White House, and pro-business — can have for his reelection effort as many millions as he needs, or wants, or could dream of. The flashiest, most-talked-about "Jewish money" comes from Hollywood, where the only true religion is hating Bush. And even the quieter monied Jews of Wall Street look like homeless next to Bush's pals in the oil bidness — pals who would just as soon see Israel go away so they could more comfortably shrimp the toes of the Arabs.

If George W. Bush derives any benefit from caring about Israel, or trying to help Israel, it is not from Jews. (No matter what a president says or does about Israel, there is some group of Jews who'll denounce him as a Nazi.) The only plausible political gain comes from his fellow born-again Christians. The U.S. Christian right believes that the Jews are supposed to have the Holy Land -- number one, because the Bible tells them so. The Bible says, too, that the second coming of Christ will require that the Jews be "ingathered" again in Zion, which will bring on Armageddon, which will cause Jesus to return. There's also a political meeting of the minds, going back to the days when the Christian right saw Israel as a brave anti-Soviet (more recently anti-Islamic) outpost of "Judeo-Christian values."

Curiously, it's this last fuzzy reason that comes closest to answering "Why do we care?" For in the end, there is no rational benefit in realpolitik — either internationally, or for campaigns inside America. There is no lobby or group in the U.S. that could pressure the government to make Israel the number-one recipient of American foreign aid — three billion dollars each year (plus a couple of billion in loan guarantees) — and that's before you start adding in special military credits, trade preference and other backdoor deals. The only other country that comes close is Egypt — we pay them two billion to act like they don't hate Israel. Altogether, almost half of the U.S. aid dollars for the world shower the land for a few hundred miles around Tel Aviv. (Talk about making the desert bloom!) ... And not just by dollars should our interest be measured. There is also the matter of attention we pay. We may spend more than five-billion-a-year in the currency of newspaper words and CNN chat; there are endless and more-or-less deep analyses in monthly magazines, in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and the quarterly Foreign Policy; it's no accident (and not without effect) that The New York Times covers Jerusalem better than Staten Island, or that Redbook, the ladies' mag, responds to its readers' new fear of terrorism by commissioning a personal essay from a mom in Israel (who also just happens to be the head of the Jerusalem office of AIPAC). The fact is, Israel sells. And we have sold ourselves on Israel. Why? Because in some measure we are all like those Christians who see and support shared values there. For decades, we've read and talked about Israel, we've backed and begirded Israel, we've paid for Israelis' first-world standard of living...because we came to assume, somehow, they are like us.

The Israelis, no dummies, did what they could to foster this impression — from appointing a government spokesman who talked like he grew up in Detroit (he did), to allocating scarce shekels for the world (i.e., Western World) tour of the Israel Philharmonic. From '48 on, the most important resource of the young nation was the harrowing and latterly triumphal story of the Jewish people -- which had elicited the sympathy of the world, and spurred the U.N. vote that made the Jewish state. And so, the first growth industry of Israel (even before tart Jaffa oranges found their market in Europe) was what the locals called hasbarah — which literally translates as "explaining," but we might call it propaganda, or spin.

From the moment a U.N. cease-fire ended the first war in the spring of '49, Israelis led the world in guided tours. Their new immigrants were living in squalid tent camps, the air force was maybe two banged-up bombers, but the government still bought fistfuls of boat and airline tickets, and hotel rooms and state-of-the-art buses, to put together freebie trips for eager Swiss or Swedish students, South African "opinion makers," Jewish "pioneer campers" from North America, young politicians and journalists from all over the world and, of course, rich Americans (who might fund the guided tours of the future with a generous gift someday). They had to get their story out — and the hasbarah industry attracted the best and the brightest. It wasn't just the friendly tour guides, who could explain — in their perfect Dutch or Danish, Walloon or Serbo-Croatian (language skills were the other great resource) — how the Arab armies shot deadly artillery from that hill, right there! (And those poor kibbutzniks who just gave us that wonderful lunch live under that threat every day, even now....) There were also the spokesmen, guides and greeters for every government department, every municipality, the big Histadrut national labor union, the Israel Lands Authority, the Jewish Agency — they were all making friends, "explaining." And these guys were good! ...

Long ago, I witnessed one tour of up-and-coming American poobahs — or poobahs-to-be — the Young Presidents Organization. And some wiseacre asked a sticky little question: Are Israelis going to have to pay compensation to the Arabs who ran away? ... Now, the fact was, and is, that Israel won't pay a nickel — but the first "explanation" was palliative: Yes, it's a complicated question...now, a commission is studying the fairest method...but you have to understand, land records under the Turks ... And then, as the tour moved on, the hasbarah man was walking next to that fellow, and issued this pained, confidential aside: "You know, it was a terrible shame — we begged them to stay!" ... which was a bold, but uncheckable lie. And that night at dinner (a slap-up dinner, on the cuff of course), having found out that his new friend hailed from Connecticut, the hasbarah professional inquired — just by the bye: Say, how's it going with those pesky lawsuits from American Indians — aren't they claiming that half the state is theirs?

Whatever the topic, the subtext was always the same: We are doing our best under impossible pressures. Imagine how you would feel — for we are like you. But the hasbarah succeeded better than even Israelis dreamed. By 1960, Paul Newman — no less — was larger than life on the world's screens in Exodus, as a Super-Panavision Jewish underground fighter, with the shiksa-goddess Eva Marie Saint as his home-from-the-holocaust honey. Israel was boffo! So, the message grew bolder. By the end of the Sixties, after the triumph of the Six Day ('67) War, the prime minister, Golda Meir, was asked a similarly sticky question about the rights of Palestinians. "What are you talking about?" she snapped. "There are no Palestinians."

Still, the big shift happened in the Seventies — and not from hubris but need — after the ('73) Yom Kippur War. The surprise, and surprisingly effective, attack by their Arab neighbors reminded Israelis they could be wiped off the map. The Israel Defense Forces, which to that point had seemed invulnerable, now suddenly looked hapless and needy. Israel dropped all her prior reserve and cast herself shamelessly as America's little buddy in the Middle East. She burrowed into every U.S. plan for the region — so deep that without her there wasn't any plan. She had to become indispensable — and the story line she put out to the Western public had to change, as well.

It had to be more than "they are like us." Now they wanted us to know that they were us — or standing in for us — surrounded, outnumbered (that much of the hasbarah stayed constant) ... hungry for peace, but determined to fight — as the Superman serial used to say -- for truth, justice and the American way. Our view of the place had to change: it wasn't just an interesting little desert land (where more U.S. Jews would live, if they weren't so damn comfortable). Now, all Americans had to be stakeholders in the Holy Land, partisans in its conflict. And we were! (Those were American planes — TWA — that the PLO blew up ... and that poor Mr. Klinghoffer, who got shoved off the cruise ship in his wheelchair ... as usual, the Palestinians undermined their own cause with thorough efficiency.)

Withal, it was more than a Middle East friendship — our enemy was theirs. For there was, underneath, a real affiliation between the American public (between citizens and subjects all over the Western World) and this place — which had more or less launched their sense of self. Israel began strumming this chord under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a right-wing true believer who took power in 1977. For almost thirty years, under left-wing Labour party governments, Israel had cast herself as a modern, socialist, secular state. In the shock and dismay after the Yom Kippur War, the Labour party fell apart, and Begin marched in, bearing the Torah. In his first speech as premier, he announced with characteristic drama: "We shall not ask any other nation to recognize our right to exist. We got our recognition from the God of Our Fathers at the dawn of civilization."

Begin would put the holy back in Holy Land. And in the West — which was also swinging to the right under the whip of Margaret Thatcher, and Ronnie Reagan's homey little chuckles — the Jews of Israel were depicted as heroes. Beset by despicable acts of terror, cruelties, massacres of women and children ... still, they hadn't budged an inch, but had managed (against all odds — against evil!) to stand in, and even to rebuild and reconsecrate their special place, which was our special place, too (whether we're religious or not) ... because there — here — we became who we are ... as Western souls, endowed by God with a right to bestride His planet. (Bestriding was Thatcher/Reaganism writ in one word.) ... Here the promise happened — here.

We all belonged to this place (and Jews all had at least a sneaking suspicion that they belonged in this place). Here man invented God, or knew the God who invented man — and that gave us all a place to stand. This sparked a loyalty that needed no reason. It was pre-rational — from some deeper part of the brain than words could get to — or call it a piece of our collective unconscious. Whatever the name, it's not the sort of thing that mere thoughts, or daily facts, can easily grind away .... Which makes it the more remarkable what has happened, lately — or was it lately? This is one of those big stories that doesn't break, but just seeps into being. At some point in these latter years, Israel ground away, or gave away, her birthright of loyalty from the West.

You could see it happening in a hundred ways, little and large — when you look back, and the pattern shows. The Israeli Minister of Defense has to pack his bags and scuttle out of Europe, because he got wind somehow that he might be arrested and charged with war crimes ... a small dispatch from London notes the departure "for Palestine" of a group of Britannic do-goods who are going to the West Bank to protect Palestinian olive-pickers against the depradations of Jewish "terrorist settlers" ... the Canadian government cancels the tax break for some Israeli affiliated charities, because contributions (for instance, the gift of an ambulance) might be used in the occupied territories....

The one that stood me on my ear (and fetched me onto this story) was in my home, America, and in my home-business, in the news columns of The New York Times — no less! — and not just for one day, but day after day. On the front page, two stories would be "tombstoned" (i.e., matched, side-by-side). One story would tell about the latest terrorist suicide bomb in Israel; and the other would report on what sort of killing the Israeli army did in response, in some West Bank town or Gaza. The stories were equal — no judgment and no moral distinction was drawn between them. And this from the former house organ of American zionism!

Clearly, the ground had shifted — something big was up. This book project was born to answer the question: What happened?

Maybe it was the daily dose of video, flashed around the world — Israeli tanks blasting holes in buildings, and Palestinians weeping in the West Bank or Gaza ... maybe the deaths of some nice, well-meaning Westerners, Americans or Brits, who were trying to stop Israeli bulldozers from destroying the houses of Arabs ... or maybe the simple realization that the Israelis sang us a song of David, when they'd long since become Goliath. One way or another, Israel lost control of the narrative that is her lifeline.

Support began eroding first — twenty years ago? — in Europe. (Israeli hasbarah pros dismissed this as traditional European anti-Semitism.) Americans, less burdened by knowledge of the world abroad (and perhaps less cynical in all their faiths), lingered in their loyalty until ... these days, they don't know what to think. This, too, I see now in a thousand little ways: the fund-raiser for the United Jewish Appeal who tells me he's getting pitched out of nice Jewish homes — or he never even gets in the door ... the dear old Hadassah ladies in the "assisted living" complex, who tell me they've stopped picking up the paper ("It's so terrible what you read in there about Israel, I don't even look.") ... or the friend from my little American town, whom I tell that I'm doing a book about Israel: "No offense," she says (for she knows I'm Jewish), "but that president over there — or, it's not president, prime minister — I just don't like him, he's not a nice man!" ... Sure, the freshet of U.S. aid still flows — but that's the government. If the American people fall off the bus, the government will follow someday soon. One thing's for sure: Thirty-five years of occupation doesn't make it smell like home — to us ... Or put it another way: somewhere along the line, we got the feeling, "they aren't like us." Or maybe we don't want to be like them. And this is just one of the ways — one big one — how Israel lost.

Where I grew up, in a suburb of Rochester, New York, there was a temple called B'rith Kodesh — which (I now know) means Holy Covenant, though I never thought about it at the time. It was just B'rith Kodesh, as normal and established a landmark in my life as the public library, which was more or less across the street. The temple had a Sunday school to which I had to go. Why did I have to go? There wasn't any why about it. I had to go to Sunday school like I had to be bar mitzvahed, like I had to get through high school and go to college — those were my jobs. And I thought even less, at that time, about what they taught us in Sunday school. It was just Jewish stuff I had to learn, like my Catholic neighbors had to learn about saints, and Latin. At least we didn't have to go to confession.

It was Bible stories, mostly — Noah and the ark, Moses getting fished out of the Nile... That, and a lot of Jewish history, which mostly consisted of non-Jewish tyrants with lumpy names (like peanut brittle in your mouth) — Nebuchadnezzar, Ahashueras — who at different times in different places tried to do in the Jews. But then God showed up and smote them a Mighty Smite, and things were better till next Sunday, when the Jews were in trouble again. (It's like my friend Ilan Kutz says about Jewish holidays — they all pretty much add up to the same thing: "They tried to kill us. They didn't succeed. So, let's eat.") ... All the stories were taught in a seamless succession, and no one made much fuss — certainly, I did not — about which ones came from the Bible, and which from later books, or from no books at all (like that impoverished little Hanukah story, which we all pretty much recognized as a plot to keep us from succumbing to Christmas).

And the last strand in this skein of woes was Hitler and the holocaust. Maybe this was taught with a little more heat because it had happened in the time of our teachers' lives. But there wasn't any more detail than we got about the Babylonians or Assyrians. Nevertheless, this Hitler business was my favorite Sunday school story. For one thing, I knew from independent sources (a series of wartime boys' books called The Yankee Flier — I'd inherited the set from my uncle, and read them all at least three times) that, in this case, God's Mighty Smite had arrived in the form of glorious U.S. Air Force squadrons, and George Patton's smashing Third Army — which, I felt, put me on the side of the angels ... And the other good thing was the end of this story — the creation of Israel — which I thought had potential to keep the Jews out of hot water for several Sundays in a row.

We didn't learn much about what Israel was. The teachers seemed to exult in it mostly because it was a place to speak Hebrew — which was another excuse for us to have to learn Hebrew. We did learn that Israel was a desert till the Jews showed up and made it bloom. We had to make it bloom, too, by slotting dimes into little cut-outs on a piece of cardboard with Hebrew writing on it — each dime would buy a pine tree to make Israel green. (It seemed to me, God ought to smite up some pine trees, while I used my dime for a big Three Musketeers bar.)...We were taught that the Arabs tried to kill off Israel at birth, by attacking all at once — which fact was presented as a modern confirmation of all the other stories. ("See? They're still trying to murder us.") ... And we knew that Israel was definitely innocent and excellent: Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, Yigal Allon and Abba Eban were added to the roster of good-guys — on the same page, as it were, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, Queen Esther, sage Solomon, King David and a bunch of prophets. In fact, it was all one mudpie to us, straight from the Bible to Ben-Gurion -- monotheism and zionism were both good isms the Jews thought up.

What I liked about Israel, apart from the fact that it was the end — last stop on the Sunday school train — was the slogan we heard every time the subject came up: "Israel was a land without people for a people with no land." ... This was the tersest, most powerful storytelling — as good as all the other jingles that filled my head at the time: See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet ... Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should. (They were probably also the work of Jews.) But this was so neat a turn of phrase, and a turn of history, that it seemed to confirm for me the biggest of all Sunday school stories: the sense and economy, the goodness of God's creation. It all locked together in the end, neater than Legos — a land without people for a people with no land. That was what I knew.

It was a testament to my misspent school years that it was still just about all I knew fifteen years later. By that time, I was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, happily at work in that newspaper's New York Bureau. In fact, I was the New York Bureau, which was our only bureau — we weren't a rich paper at the time. My editor called me on the phone one day, in December 1977, and asked: "How fast can you be in Egypt?" I thought it was some stupid knock-knock joke. I said: "I give up. How fast can you be in Egypt?" But it turned out he was serious. The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, had just traveled to Jerusalem to propose peace — huge news. And now, it was announced, Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel, would return the visit, at Ismailiya, Egypt, on Christmas Day. The paper had to do something to cover — but what could my bosses do? They couldn't uncover something important, like City Hall, or the Phillies! But the New York Bureau was already gravy — and in it was a Jew, who would work on Christmas. "I'll be there tomorrow," I said.

For the next seven years, I was a Middle East reporter, in and out of Israel a hundred times, and all over the Arab world. By the end, I thought I knew what I was doing. But what I had to learn first was the depth of my ignorance. On that first flight to Egypt, I could tot up my certainties on two fingers: The Jews were the good guys; the good guys always won. I never knew that much for sure again.

And when I got to Israel, a few weeks into my new career, my confusion was complete. Sure enough, there were the pine trees. (I was glad of that, and they'd done splendidly. Which ones were mine?)...For the rest, I was reminded of a line old Harry Truman spoke about his opponent: "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me. It's what he knows for sure that's just plain wrong."

Those assholes honking at my rent-a-car, as I puzzled out some Hebrew road sign — were these the heroes of the Six Day War?

My first guide to Jerusalem, who cheated me out of a hundred bucks, and favored me with this axiom: "The good Arab it's the dead one." Was he the heritor of thirty centuries of humane Jewish wisdom?

And then I met the Arabs — live ones — and they were good: hospitable, dignified, rational, articulate and oppressed. But that wasn't the most surprising and disturbing fact that I had to work in. The true astonishment was, simply, they were here. They were here, their fathers were here, their grandfathers ... for centuries!

What about the land with no people for the ... well, you know the rest. In '48, the Jews, in fact, had no land. Okay ... But there was a people here!

I began to write their stories, too. Not the big picture — I didn't know the big picture. But I wrote what happened in front of my eyes, to people I had met and talked to. My newspaper was beset by protest — committees of Jews who came to complain, and try to lose me my job. "What kind of Arab apologist did you send there?" ... "Is it really Ibn Cramer — is he an Arab?" ... "Oh, we know his kind — the self-hating Jew!"

To their enduring credit, my bosses never told me about all the trouble — for years — which was a wonderful freedom ... and a kindness to me, because I would have been hurt: by that time, I utterly loved the place.

To be precise, it wasn't the place, it was the people, and their stories. For a reporter, this may be the greatest place on earth. Every day's a smorgasbord. You leave your hotel or house in the morning and plunge into a sea of talk — news, explanations, wooing, slogans, argument, imprecations, jokes ... it's a wonder they had time to build a country, when they're talking eighteen hours a day. And what a brilliant brand of talk! Everybody you meet has a story, is a story — a big multinational, complicated light-and-shade saga. They're all articulate. (Practice makes perfect.) Anywhere you go, there's somebody who'll speak English — or any other known language. It doesn't matter where something happened — you can get anyplace in a couple of hours ... And it's always life-and-death.

Even stuff that doesn't matter is life-and-death. I've seen ladies jump out of their cars and engage in a screaming ten-minute argument — that ended with them spitting on each other — over a parking space. (On my street in Tel Aviv, during research for this book, I watched a citizen filibuster a cop and a tow-truck man for twenty minutes, until his car was finally hauled away, while he ran down the street, beating a bass-drum tattoo with his fist, first on the tow truck, and then on his own car.) It must be the hummus that gives them the energy. Or maybe it's the lamentable pressure of mere existence that spurs exertion — demands it — a decades-long stress test. But life is lived here at a pitch I never saw elsewhere.

To be perfectly honest, I should say one more thing: I may have had as many friends among the Arabs — or the Palestinians as they now should be known. I had as many pleasant encounters, conversations, meals (a lot more tea). Certainly, I found as many good stories ... But I lived among the Jews. And enjoyed them, and laughed with them and about them (nobody makes better Jewish jokes than Jews) ... and probably I studied them — as a grandma will study her daughter's child — to see if and where the family resemblance would show up.

I had a couple of American friends there, Ben and Minnie Balter — friends of my parents, really — honorary uncle and aunt to me. They were Rochester folk who, in retirement, had moved to an apartment north of Tel Aviv. And I remember Benjie, when I first arrived, trying to explain the joy of the place. "See that mailman?" he'd say. "He's Jewish ... See that guy sweeping in front of his store? See the cop? They're Jewish, too!" That was a punchline that for him never lost its wonder, humor, comfort. I guess his generation had grown up with such an unshakable, undermining sense of being "other" — outside the mainstream — that for him it was enough (It was a miracle!) that everywhere he looked, there were Jews. It wasn't that way for me. But I think I love Jews precisely for that sense of being "other" — so many of them have it within their breast. It gives them not just the sense that they are different, but the imperative: they have to be different — because they are Jews. So, there's an earnestness about examining life (or at least living it by some rules and standards) that makes it interesting to me — or makes it seem to matter ... and since this — how lives are lived — is also my study and line of trade, you could say it conforms to my own prejudice.

I love the Jews for being so ably mercantile, agile and glibly hucksterish. Every business, every cause, has a splendid slogan — or a catchy musical jingle. Tin Pan Alley is now in Tel Aviv. (During my research visits, the election jingle for Arik Sharon was so irresistible — impossible not-to-sing-along-to — I almost signed up to vote for the old bastard myself.) ... I love the Jews for being learned. I remember sitting, one Saturday, with an Israeli Arab professor from the University of Haifa, Ramzi Suleiman. (Actually, I should identify him with the ethnic moniker that he helped to invent — he is "a Palestinian in Israel.") And Ramzi was marveling at the Jews, too: "You know, I was watching TV," he said, "and there was a panel in Hebrew — three scholars talking about the difficulties of translating Japanese poetry. In what other country this size could you find three people to discuss it?" ... I love the Jews for being smart — and for the shameless way they show it. An Israeli who's about to inform you precisely how, where and why you are wrong (the national sport is competitive talk) will figuratively roll up his sleeves by announcing (in Hebrew, of course): "Now, I'm going to show you where does the fish pee." The first time I heard this (being a true American), I thought it must be "where do the big fish pee" — more or less like my friend in our poker game, who used to announce, when he started to win: "The big dog walks late." But no, it's not about the "big fish." It's about who among us knows — where is the invisibly tiny hole on the fish where the pee comes out of ... that's what he's going to show you — knowledge!

I love the bare-knuckle brawl that is their public life. The newspapers each day are a festival of personal attack ... with a level of personal knowledge that keeps institutions human-sized. General So-and-so screwed this other general out of a coveted district command — they've hated each other since officer college. Minister So-and-so has no choice but to take what Sharon gives him — his ambitious wife only married him because she thought he could be prime minister. In part, this personalness is owing to the size of the country: everybody knows everybody, or something about everybody — usually just enough to convince them, that guy is an asshole. During this last election, when the list of candidates for the Likud party was announced, I sat with a trio of ladies, who went down the list one by one and told me why each was unfit to be in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament: This one is nothing but a driver for that lady minister (and God knows what else he does for her) ... this one left his wife for some hussy they had gone to school with (they'd never liked her, either) ... this one, as an officer in the army, used to hit on the eighteen-year-old soldier girls ... Of course it wasn't a strictly fair test — because the ladies were all Labour-Meretz style left-wingers, and were honor-bound to hate everybody on that right-wing party list. That, and the fact that the Likud list was, even by Israeli standards, unusually thuggish this time.

In the spirit of strict fairness, I should confess to one more love I developed — if not a love, then at least a disposition to love -- a prejudice in their favor. Like the Israelis, I came to trust and believe in the army more than any other institution in the land. For one thing, I liked the soldiers, who were wry, clever, brave, cocky, whiny about soldier-life and amazingly candid. But I also liked the institution's lack of chickenshit — covering the IDF in the field for a day here and a day there, in what must have added up to months, I don't think I ever saw anybody march or salute. A dogface soldier could call his colonel by his first name (everybody knows everybody) — or tell him he thought he was wrong. I liked the way soldiers would wonder if they were doing wrong — in fact, they were honor-bound to refuse an order that they thought was indecent. (This was a tradition in the IDF, going back to the underground days before statehood — it bore a grand name: The Purity of Arms.) ... And as a reporter, I loved them for showing me who they were. I remember the first time I ran into an IDF platoon during the first (1978) invasion of Lebanon...and the soldiers divined that, at some point, I would be going back to Israel (surely, before they would) ... and they lined up to write on my notepad their home phone numbers and mothers' names — so I could call, to say, "I saw your son, and he was okay." I hadn't truly understood before that the fearsome armored killing machine was really just boys — most of them scared to death, too.

Later, I saw the IDF boys do even tougher duty, when they squared off against other Jews, settlers in the rocky Sinai, who claimed that they were the real custodians of the zionist dream. The IDF had to get them out, because peace had arrived — at least a deal with Sadat ... the Sinai peninsula was going back to Egypt. And these two groups of Jews went at each other with a zealous and personal fury. The army boys had orders, from the only general who was mule enough to get this done — Arik Sharon. And the settlers thought they had orders from God -- the imperative to live in this desert, where He gave His law — and they had the worst insults: "Nazis!" "Gestapo!"... and they had God's own supply of stones with which to pile up barricades, and tires to burn for acrid thick smoke, and their bodies chained to this and that...and it got to be dangerous, devilish and finally a dismal business to get them out. But, they did get out. And stayed out ... Which is one reason I know it can still be done.

Or maybe it can't be done now. Maybe the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza are too many — near a quarter million they number, now — or too committed, dug-in, too God-struck-crazy, to be removed by any method....Or maybe Arik Sharon is too old, now, and has no more will to fight with other Jews ... And maybe the army's different, too — boys, still, but different boys?...That was one reason I had to go back — to see. I had read in the newspaper: So-and-so, a photographer, was killed when a shell from a tank was fired into a crowd in Gaza. Wait a minute! Who fired his tank cannon into a crowd of civilians? On what orders? And what happened to him? ... There were no more stories about it. Nothing happened! ... Nothing? ... Was there no more examination of how a life is to be lived? Then, that was an even bigger way, how Israel lost.

See, I thought I knew the country — but it turned out, I didn't. At least I couldn't understand how the country I knew was doing the things that I read about now. Maybe the country I knew was gone — buried under some new kind of nation, which was also Jews. But what kind of Jews were they? (What's the point of being Jews, if there's no ache of humanity left in you?)...And what happened to the guys I knew? As I remembered, they weren't the kind to give up.

If I had to sum up what I thought I knew — twenty years ago, after seven years' contact with Israel -- I would have called it "a nice little socialist country, with one problem." The problem, of course, was the Jews' relations with the Arabs — inside the country, in occupied lands, and in the nations nearby ... Now, I'd say, the "one problem" (which Israelis refer to in shorthand as "the conflict") has eaten up the rest of the country.

For one thing, success at arms in the conflict, coupled with the policies of annexation and settlement, has made the country not-so-little. It's a land of major-league highways, now — a lot of new ones ("bypass roads," as they're euphemized) cut and blasted right into and through the rocky hills, so the settlers won't ever have to see any Arabs. Then, too, the long national fight about the settlements is producing, for the first time, a generation where everybody doesn't know everybody. When I told my well-connected Tel Aviv friends that I was going to a party at a settlement near Nablus, they looked at me with horrified concern — they'd never been near there, didn't know anyone "out there" (nevertheless, they knew they were assholes), and as for driving through the West Bank for a visit — just for fun! — they'd sooner shop for their shabbas cakes on Mars.

The socialist bit — that's gone altogether. When Israel became America's little buddy, she also changed over — not coincidentally, during the Reagan years — to a hard-edged capitalistic economy. You could call the operation a success: the suburbs north of Tel Aviv are a bustling hive of high-tech; there's a lot more money in the economy, now; and it's easier to do business. (You can take as much cash as you please into or out of the country; there's no more waiting list for phones — that used to last for years — and a cell phone you can have the same day, so you can fit right in, talking every waking moment.) But for the first time, there are also homeless people, and families who say they can't find work, or enough to eat, who were camping out in a Protest of the Hungry in a Tel Aviv park for months.

As for the "nice" — well, it's not-so-nice, now. I'm not talking just about the not-nice things that a suicide bomb does to people on a bus, or the equally not-nice effect of a missile fired from the air into a Palestinian neighborhood. Those are terrible events, but discrete — the kind of thing that CNN-chat can wrap up in a day or two. And, as a consequence, that's more or less exactly what CNN-chat covers — and never chronicles the holes left in the lives of survivors: the long fight to regrasp the sense that you are yourself and whole, after the loss of a limb; the marriages that break up after the loss of a child; the strain in a family when their house is blown up and they move in with relatives; or the effect on a boy when he looks in his father's eyes and sees, all at once, there is no hope there.

But I'm talking about even more than that — the effect on the lives of people who were never near an explosion of any sort — the effect on a whole society. For in this way, too, the conflict is not nice — in the older sense of that word — its effects cannot be nicely delimited. And after thirty-five years of occupation, after two Intifada uprisings, after a three-decade cycle of grim, dry determination (or resignation), followed by a few drops and then a wave of hope, followed by a bloom of elation ... till elation is burned away again by horror, and the grimness sets in anew ... there are no lives in Israel or Palestine that have not been heated and hardened. On the Palestinian side, there are so many lives and dreams on hold ("We are under occupation — what we can do?") that the conflict has more or less replaced life — or cooked it to a standstill. The only consolation is that everything can be (and is) blamed on Israel. Among the Jews, the effects are harder to pinpoint — and, to me, more insidious — because the whole point of Israel was to create a place where Jews could live the best life — and liveliest — in accordance with their values.

Excerpted from “How Israel Lost: The Four Questions” by Richard Ben Cramer. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Ben Cramer. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission.

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