ARAB AND JEW: : WOUNDED SPIRITS IN A PROMISED LAND by David K. Shipler (Times Books: $22.50; 616 pp., endpaper maps)

I’ve never been to Israel. Like David Shipler, I am neither Arab nor Jew. But through his book, I have traveled from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon to a Bedouin tent in the Sinai, from the white apartment boxes of West Bank Jewish settlements to the bowels of the Russian Compound, Jerusalem’s police headquarters. I’ve met a bewildering variety of people--Arab soccer and movie stars, fanatic Jewish racists, grieving Jewish parents of children killed in PLO attacks, innocent Arabs subjected to interrogation by torture. I’ve witnessed scenes that brought tears to my eyes, been shocked by revolting stories of Arab and Jewish terrorism, encountered remarkable censorship and candor, banality and wisdom, pettiness and nobility.

Despite its eloquence and the diligence of his research, Shipler’s book

has an artless quality. It’s as if Shipler, after five years as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times from 1979 to 1984, has returned to the United States to give us slide lectures on his experiences in Israel. For the book unfolds as a series of interrelated anecdotes, grouped roughly into categories and interspersed with commentary, research data and deft sketches of people and places. But the cumulative effect of the interwoven stories is deep and powerful, and by the end, I had the feeling that I had taken an immersion course in the emotional language of contemporary Israel. Shipler’s book offers no prescriptions for peace, nor does it explore the political, diplomatic or military dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rather, it focuses on the people--the images they have of one another, the causes of their aversions, their fears and hopes, and the kaleidoscope of interactions between them in the small territory where they live, their land of promises and dreams. The anecdotal character of the book allows readers to compose their own views and interpretations.

The book could well have been subtitled “cases of mistaken identity,” since so much of the friction between the Arabs and Jews in Israel stems from the misperceptions of stereotypes and fears. Arabs tend to regard Israeli Jews as “aliens, outsiders, trespassers trying to graft their foreign cultures onto indigenous Arab land,” people who are obnoxiously aggressive, loose living, cold and unfriendly, arrogant and brutal. Jews spontaneously regard Arabs as dumb, violent, duplicitous, primitive, lazy, dirty, sexually dangerous. The realities, of course, are much more complex: For instance, the fact is that Arab women traditionally keep immaculately clean homes, and there are many Jews who agonize over the moral state of their country and the brutal discrimination against Arabs.

The numerous instances of mistaken identity that occur throughout the book symbolize the central fact that Jews and Arabs constantly fail to recognize one another, to see and to understand who they are dealing with. The driver of a hijacked bus, “a swarthy Jew of Middle Eastern origins,” is badly beaten by Israeli soldiers who mistake him for one of the Arab terrorists. Shipler himself is shoved out into retaliatory police fire, because the Arabs he takes cover with think that he’s a Jew. A light-haired Arab woman is harassed by Jews wanting to prevent Jewish students from dating Arab men. A reporter is conspiratorially handed a copy of the virulently anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” by a Pakistani who assumed he wasn’t Jewish.

Since the majority of Jews in Israel are now darker-skinned Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean region and since many Arabs speak flawless Hebrew, it is difficult to know who to hate, who to confide in. To avoid harassment, many Arabs are learning to pass as Jews in modern Israeli society, and some Jews are learning to appreciate just how closely the Bedouin in the Negev and Sinai deserts embody the values and customs of their Biblical patriarchs.

Thus, Shipler’s book is rife with ironies--many profoundly painful, others merely provoking pained smiles. Palestinians ask, especially after Jewish terrorist massacres in the West Bank and Israel’s permitting Lebanese Christian Phalangists into the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where they slaughtered 700-800 men, women and children, why they must pay for the crimes of the Germans and how these people, who have suffered so much themselves, can uproot people from their homes, putting them in desperate camps, jail them on mere speculation of PLO involvement. Though very few Arabs know much at all about the Holocaust and hence cannot really understand Israel, they have learned to twist symbols precious to Jews into bitter taunts, calling their camp Auschwitz, their town a ghetto, labeling their oppressors Nazis. Many Jews, true heirs of that exquisite moral sensitivity that, Shipler suggests, is the ultimate hope and strength of their country, openly worry that the fierce determination to assure a free state of their own, never again to be victims, has given Israeli Jews themselves the character of the victimizer. They fear that they are now no different than other nations, and that the real threat to Israel’s existence is less the military and terrorist threats from without as the callousness and moral decay within.

More mundanely, since the reborn Hebrew language has no swear words, Israeli Jews use Arab curses. The most Orthodox of Jewish groups, the Mea Shearim of Jerusalem, opposes the very existence of the state of Israel and has friendly and long-lasting relations with Arabs. Alexander Finkelshtein, the fierce combat veteran dedicated to purifying Israel of “dirty Arabs,” himself lives in squalor. Some criminal gangs con- sist of Arabs and Jews, with the Jews doing the stealing and the Arabs the fencing. Jerusalem is a much safer city than New York with few acts of criminal violence against people, but between 1982 and 1985, 654 Israeli soldiers died in Lebanon to prevent Palestinian guerrillas from attacks that had cost 29 lives in the four previous years. Jewish prostitutes prefer Arab pimps, because they treat them better, and like to work in the Muslim Quarter of Old Jerusalem because their best customers are traditional Arabs and Orthodox Jews who rigidly enforce codes of modesty and marital purity. At the universally admired Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, an outspokenly anti-Jewish Arab girl received a kidney transplant from a Jewish settler slain in a West Bank Arab market. A right-wing settler on the West Bank prevents her son from going to school with Arabs because she knows he’ll become friendly with them, and as one Meir Kahane deputy puts it, “Love is more dangerous than hate.”

As the noble, incisive Orthodox philosopher Rabbi David Hartman tells Shipler, Israel “wasn’t built by pragmatists. It was built by people with passion and a dream. If we were realistic, we wouldn’t come here. You want to be realistic? So live in California!” One American Zionist realized that he initially had merely exchanged an apartment in Brooklyn for one in Tel Aviv: So he settled in the West Bank to fulfill his commitment to the Jewish state. The Palestinians dream of returning to a homeland that grows more beautiful and verdant the further they are from regaining it.

Many on both sides echo the sentiments of movie director Danny Waxman, “the longer I live here, the less optimistic I get.” But Shipler also introduces us to people like Rabbi Bruce Cohen, director of Interns for Peace, and to programs like Neve Shalom (“Oasis of Peace”), a cooperative Arab-Jewish settlement near Jerusalem founded in 1979 as “a model of a dream,” that operates a school that brings together Arab and Jewish teen-agers for intensive five-day workshops.

The real hope ultimately seems to lie not in compromise and accommodation, but in a fresh dream of passion that flickers in the hearts not only of idealistic students and peace workers but of pre-1948 Arab and Jewish residents who experienced friendly interaction as embattled neighbors. Both the limited experiments in open exchange and the incremental assimilation of each other’s language and ways over the years suggest that Arabs and Jews, in the caldron of “conflicting absolutes” that is Israel, have much to give each other. Israeli Jews are teaching Arabs about striving to live in the modern world with full dedication to ethical, religious and family traditions, and Arabs are teaching Jews the values, customs, loyalties and true love of the land that their mutual biblical ancestors embodied.

In fact, the rich promise of coexistence was present in Israel’s founding Proclamation of Independence, which pledged to “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex.” “In the midst of wanton aggression,” it called upon “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions.” Now that modern Israel is entering on middle age (it will be 40 in 1988), the wild hope is that its finer spirits, though “wounded,” can direct the nation’s competing passions toward a mature dream of a fully shared promised land.