And to compound problems, Timerman, possibly because of his language problem, never realizes that Begin would almost certainly have won a strong majority had an election been held up at any time up until the massacre. The Lebanese invasion unquestionably did not have the unanimous consent of earlier conflicts. But Timerman mistakes a significant opposition for national disgust with the war and the government. His misunderstanding is startingly fundamental and stems from a profound and inexcusable ignorance of the physical and psychological toll the Palestinian terrorists have taken on Israel.

TRULY, TIMERMAN misunderstands the Arab-Israeli struggle, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in particular; he only states clearly once the problem that gnaws at him, and then only near the end of the book. He writes: "Who gave us the right to decide that those civilians must die because they could not or did not know how to escape from the terrorists in time? Where did we get such omnipotence?" He has circled around it throughout the book, and having finally said it with a measure of clarity, he leaves it and moves on. Possibly if Timerman had a more informed sense of what the PLO actually is--he speaks of it, like many rational optimists, as though it were a benign bunch of rowdy children--his point would seem more credible.

He pooh-poohs the many tragic terrorist attacks by mentioning them only in passings, and he seems oblivious to the repeated border incidents which the PLO knew would eventually draw the Israelis into Lebanon. Is Timerman so naive, so purblind as to think the PLO hadn't intended to use the Lebanese they had so long terrorized as a spit on which to roust the Israelis in world opinion? It was an option they always knew they had.

As for the rest of the gluey mass in which this "argument" floats, it is equally bothersome. Timerman devotes a great deal of space to lucubrations on the relationship of Israel to the Holocaust, which he feels is inextricably tied up in Israel's militarism. Apparently, he spends a lot of time lying on a hill near Yad Vashem and comes eventually to some monumental understanding which appears either unfathomable or meaningless to lesser minds trying to get a peep of it:

I understand that at last I had removed a big tombstone off myself. It wasn't one of those from my interior graveyard, but the huge tombstone which covers the Jews. I could do it because it wasn't betrayal, or a subterfuge. I had discovered where to place it and how not to forget it. The country could accept the Holocaust as a measure of its destiny, not simply within the framework of remembrance and lament.

THE FINAL TOUCH Timerman tosses into his salad is the house dressing of pseudo-intellectual speak. The finest example of this blather comes when Timerman is discussing with a friend of his from Buenos Aires the friend's plans for emigrating to Israel. Drawing a parallel with Camus' Stranger. Timerman remarks when his friend tells him his mother was Christian:

I was not disheartened, and went on: "This makes you the perfect Stranger forty years later. A Stranger because you are a Jew, a Stranger because you're not a Jew. A Stranger because you believe that you have your place in life, and finding it will be enough. But once you find it, it will make you a Stranger for the rest of humankind. In brief, you are the Stranger who has never been and will never feel the Stranger because, for you, your life is identity and destiny. The world's indifference is, for you, sufficient reason to seek destiny, just as it was for Meursault to seek the guillotine. Forty years later you have a good identity. What does it matter if you are Christian? In these times only a Jew can move with such case in the realm of destiny and identity. But to accomplish this, one must choose--and you have made a choice. After a life of pleasant experiences, you arrived here, not some other place. It was a perfect choice. Perhaps as perfect as Meursault's in his indifferent assassin's cell."

This, one can easily see, is the kind of talk which could depopulate a country faster than any terrorist organization. It also contributes to the whole work's effort to make everything Timerman touches trite and annoying.

This monologue, like the rest of the book, brings us no nearer to the facts of the summer nor to the moral realities of the situation. So long as it remains the latest word on the Lebanese war and the condition of Israel, 1982 will remain a bad year for journalism.