The same misguided attempt at evenhandedness underlies Shipler's chapters on the images Arab and Jew have of each other. He tries to prove his point with examples of stereotyping in Arab and Jewish schoolbooks. While Israeli textbooks are guilty of condescension toward Arab culture, Jordanian textbooks used in West Bank schools--and Arab newspapers in general--exhibit virulent militarism and anti-semitism and never mention peaceful reconciliation as a goal. Instead, Arab elementary school children read poems such as "A bullet in the chest of the criminal aggressor/Is more delicate than the whisper of the poem and more merciful..."

Bits and pieces can be found in the 556 pages of text demonstrating that Shipler understands the difficulties Israel faces in trying simultaneously to maintain its security in a hostile environment and to preserve its liberal ideals and aspirations. In describing the lack of awareness of the Holocaust--the basis for the existence of the Jewish state--among Arabs, Shipler captures the underlying tension of Israeli society. But this paragraph, the most important and perhaps the best written in the book, is as isolated in Arab and Jew as Israel is in the Middle East.

Because Arabs fail to try to gain an understanding of the importance of the Holocaust, Shipler writes, "they cannot understand Israel."

That essential feel for the trauma, the tragedy, the aloneness of the Jews in that dark period is simply missing from the Arabs' sense of history and from their grasp of the present...They cannot understand the fierce sensations of vulnerability, the lusty devotion to military strength, the stubborn resistance to international criticism, the waves of guilt that soften the core of the hardness. They cannot comprehend the gnawing fear of powerlessness that grinds beneath the arsenal of tanks and planes, the lurking conviction that it could happen again, and that again the world would look the other way."

Many might read that as more an indictment of Israeli culture than a defense. Shipler doesn't, though. But he does not allow his understanding of Israeli society to sufficiently temper the critical tone of his book.

SHIPLER holds the Jews to a much higher standard than the Arabs, and rightly so. Still, if his admittedly vague "solution" to the Arab-Jewish problem appears especially pat and simplistic--they will only find peace, he writes, "by looking into each other's eyes"--it is because over the past 40 years, the Israelis have stood much taller than their Arab foes.

There are many problems Israel must grapple with, the sooner the better--how to assimilate Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, how to keep its economy under control and how to deal with the West Bank while maintaining the Jewish identity of the country. There is much that is rotten in Israel.

But because Shipler only looked at the Arab-Jewish confrontation in the small area in which Israel is hegemonous and the Arabs are the underdogs, it was perhaps inevitable that he would be so angered with the Israelis and sympathize with the Arabs. His outrage over domestic tensions in Israel, however, would be more justified if it were joined by even greater outrage aimed at the leaders and powerbrokers in the Arab world outside Israel's tiny borders.