(The writer of this article spent eight weeks working on the kibbutz Ayeleth Hashachar last summer.)

For Israelis, the view from the Syrian heights is nothing short of a fifth dimension. Above Israel's northern Huleh Valley, kibbutzniks still shudder with relief and joy as they gape from Syrian bunkers at their pitifully exposed homes. This is how the Syrians saw it for 19 years as they casually lobbed shells onto valley settlements.

But for the visitor, the panorama and the sullen concrete gobs have a different message and raise different questions. They testify above all to the vitality and persistence of the Israelis.

In the valley below, citrus orchards and cotton fields block out green patterns laced with white plumes from irrigation pipes. The guns have been silent a bare two months, but burned out fields have been replowed, gutted buildings rebuilt. After 19 years under enemy guns, the Israelis in the Huleh have not only survived but prospered. Survival would have been miracle enough.

The story, of course, is the same all over Israel. Until last June, Tel Aviv itself lay within range of Jordanian guns. But the Israelis did not grumble. And when war came, involvement was total, not just because it had to be, but because the Israelis went to battle with a spirit which is conquering the desert.

From the Syrian heights, the Israeli achievement seems superhuman. The farmers in the Huleh Valley, and the soldiers who manned Israel's defenses are not the pale timed Jews Hitler marched uncomplaining to a ghastly death. And the inescapable question is clearly: if they are not the people of the European ghettos, then who are they and how have they changed?

Ayeleth Hashachar (in Hebrew, the Morning Star) is one of Israel's oldest kibbutzim. In 1916 it pioneered the settlement of the Huleh Valley, then largely marshland. The kibbutz proper-living quarters, communal dining hall, stables, cowpens, storage facilities--lies two miles from the muddy Jordan River as it flows south toward the Sea of Galilee. The Jordan River forms the border between Israel and what used to be Syria.

The chief crop at Ayeleth is apples. During the season, it packs 40 tons a day, producing 2000 before the harvest's end. It has 2600 acres of land, 750 members, and a total population of about 1000--a relatively large and rich kibbutz.

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Young Israelis sometimes kid Nehemiah about his accent. Born in Germany in 1916, he has never mastered Hebrew's chesty gutterals and lilting inflection. The problem is common among immigrants, and Nehemiah accepts the jests with a smile of characteristic good-nature. Both he and his hecklers know that his Hebrew is as correct as any native's. They also know that Nehemiah and men like him molded Israel with European skills and breathed life into it with European culture.

Like many of his generation, Nehemiah has made a determined effort to block out the past. Though his wife is German, he never speaks German unless forced to. More important, he has substituted a gun and a plow for the European Jew's book and pen.

The switch has not been easy. Nehemiah was orthodox before he fled Hitler in 1935, and the orthodox scorned physical activity. The only place for a man, they believed, is in the study. Thus when he stepped off the gangplank onto the promised land, Nehemiah lacked even a rudimentary feel for physical labor.

For his first few months. Nehemiah enrolled in an agricultural school near Tel Aviv. Then he headed north for a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee, near Ayeleth Hashachar. But it would be some time before he would feel the dirt in his hands and bring his new knowledge to fruit. The kibbutz was struggling. It needed money. So Nehemiah and some others hired themselves out.

Nehemiah's job took him to Sodom and the potash works at the southern tip of the Dead Sea. The potash works are still flourishing, but workers no longer live near Sodom. At the lowest point on earth, the heat is so intense that life is literally unbearable, even in the age of air-conditioning. So laborers live at the new city of Arad in the Northern Negev and commute to work.

But for three years Nehemiah sat with two other Jews in a concrete blockhouse, and rifle-in-hand, guarded the three hundred Arabs who scoured minerals off vast earthen pools as the tepid Dead Sea water evaporated. Nehemiah earned 37 Agorah (12 cents) a day, and learned Arabic.