Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in the Promised Land

by David K. Shipler;

Times Books, pp. 596, $22.50.

ON FRIDAY AFTERNOONS, Israelis and Arabs--soldiers in fatigues and priests in cassocks, old Hasids in black suits and young Arabs in jeans--pass each other as they go through Damascus Gate into and out of the Old City of Jerusalem. For five years, David K. Shipler watched them as the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of The New York Times. And like many an ambitious Times overseas correspondent before him, Shipler has written a big book based upon his experiences in a foreign land. A very big book.

"I am neither Arab nor Jew," he writes. "By culture and creed, I should suffer neither pain nor passion over the causes and battles that entangle the two peoples. And yet...I cannot help caring." What led him to care was "the human dimension" of the Arab-Israeli conflict: "The question of how Arab and Jew saw each other began to emerge as...the target of my search for understanding."

Arab and Jew is the result of his search. In examining the human dimension of the Arab-Jewish conflict, Shipler pays only passing attention to its diplomatic, military and political aspects. Instead, he focuses on Arab and Jewish images of one another and how the two peoples interact where they live together under Israeli authority.

The book, though, is greatly flawed. Shipler argues that there is an underlying parallelism to Arab and Jewish perceptions and treatment of each other. Stories of ills inflicted upon Arabs by Jews mingle with tales of the woes inflicted by Arabs upon Jews. Chapters on Jewish stereotypes of Arabs follow discussions of Arab stereotyping of Jews. But the analogies he draws and moral conclusions they lead him to make are, at best, forced.

SHIPLER'S THESIS is that "both people are victims." True. But what he doesn't seem to understand is that the cycles of violence and animosity which have made victims of Palestinians and Israelis have their source in the betrayal of the Palestinian people by other Arabs and their own leaders.

The violent path down which Yassir Arafat has led Palestinians has been a complete moral and strategic failure. Palestinians have lived in makeshift camps for nearly 40 years, and their "leaders" have resisted Israeli attempts to provide them with better housing. Saudi petro-billions have bought the Palestinians machine guns, not a better life.

Why? Because the camps foment radicalism and provide a steady-supply of dirty and deprived young boys to send on suicide missions inside of Israel. Peace would be bad for Arafat's personal political fortunes and would not serve the purposes of his Saudi bankrollers. Just this Saturday, P.L.O. spokesmen renounced the peace process and renewed their commitment to armed struggle. If the Palestinians hadn't existed, the leaders of the Arab world probably would have invented them.

The Arab-Jewish problem is geographic--who will live where, under whose sovereignty--and the only solution to it is political. Real, apolitical hatreds may not run as deep as Shipler suggests. On the Israeli side, at least, animosity toward Arabs is not generic. A poll Shipler cites in another context showed that while Syrian Arabs were perceived as being violent by 57.6 percent of Israelis, only 20.7 per cent viewed Egyptian Arabs as violent after Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. That's roughly the same percentage of Israelis who viewed Israelis as violent.

Shipler constructs a matrix of allegedly analogous abuses of Arabs and Jews by each other. The book begins with four chapters on the forces Shipler says drive the Arab-Israeli conflict: war, nationalism, terrorism and religous absolutism. Now one of the strong points of the book is its unscholarly nature. It's the work of a talented and sensitive reporter, not of an academic. Still, the lack of rigor in his argument is astounding. What's especially disturbing is Shipler's imbalanced cast of characters. He introduces the reader, with few exceptions, to radical Israelis and "moderate" Palestinians.

ISRAEL has fought six wars since its founding and in only one did it initiate hostilities. But Shipler's chapter on war is mostly a discussion of how Palestinians have gotten a raw deal from the Middle East's wars in general and the Lebanese War in particular. Nothing about how the Six-Day War started, or why the Yom Kippur War was fought.

Shipler is also on very shaky ground in asserting parallels between Arab and Jewish terrorism. Violence is fostered by most Palestinian leaders--at least those who wish to stay alive--and is accepted by nearly all segments of Palestinian society. Violence by Jews is committed by fringe elements and is deplored by nearly all Israeli leaders.

Shipler is also angered by the relatively light sentences often handed out to Israeli extremists who commit violence--and rightly so. But his sense of outrage is rarely tempered with a recognition that Palestinains who commit violence are heroes and celebrities on the West Bank. Jews who support terorism must be as surreptitious as Arabs who oppose it.