A Pilgrimage to Palestine : THE YELLOW WIND <i> by David Grossman; translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 216 pp.)</i>

To Palestine or Israel or . . . the United States. The United States counts for more than any other third nation in this protracted struggle, not just because of American Jews who have become Israelis but also because of Palestinians and Israelis who have become Americans.

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. . . .” We need not insist on how nationality is gained or lost or changed or doubled. People who began there are now living here, and vice versa. This would be enough to triangulate the struggle, quite apart from American money and diplomacy.

Below, we review, twice, an Israeli journalist’s report of his journey to Palestine. One reviewer is Palestinian, the other Israeli. Both are living in the United States.

The first reviewer is Muhammad Siddiq, 42. Like many Palestinians who grew up under Israeli rule, Siddiq is bilingual in Hebrew and in Arabic. Unlike most, he has made the study of Hebrew literature an integral part of his career. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and teaches at the University of Washington.

In the fall of 1967, while still a sophomore at the Hebrew University, Siddiq was arrested by the Israeli secret police and kept under administrative detention without charge or trial for nearly two years. Heavy student and faculty pressure at the Hebrew University finally made possible his release and subsequent departure for the United States to resume his studies.

Siddiq and his wife were both born in Galilee. They have two children and talk often of returning home. “But now, the way things are. . . .” His voice trails off. Some Israelis might not welcome him back. One who would is the distinguished Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua, who sent Siddiq a copy of his last book with an inscription in Hebrew: “To Muhammad, hoping that this may speed his return to his homeland.”

The second reviewer, Ruth Broyde-Sharon, was born and educated in Chicago. After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, she worked as a print and television reporter and writer, then as a documentary film maker. One of her films, for Britannica, dealt with growing up on a kibbutz.

In 1971, she emigrated to Israel, where she lived and worked for 10 years, and where she married. Her husband, a sabra, and she have two children. Like the Siddiqs, the Sharons talk often of a return. They speak Hebrew as well as English at home and, since moving to California in 1981, have returned to Israel for a long visit, once a year, to reinforce their children’s Israeli identification. Their 7-year-old son, born in Israel, knows, Sharon says, that “if we return, he will be required, when he turns 18, to serve in the Israeli army.”

In early 1987, the Hebrew weekly Koteret Rashit commissioned the young and gifted Israeli writer David Grossman to write a field report from the occupied West Bank commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Six-Day War and the 39th anniversary of Israel’s independence. For this purpose, Grossman journeyed alone through the refugee camps, towns, and villages of the West Bank where he met with and interviewed Palestinians from all age groups and diverse walks of life. His monthlong excursion also took him to the settlements of Gush Emunim and the terrorist Jewish underground.

One of the 18 pieces that comprise “The Yellow Wind” is a short story; the rest are informal interviews with Palestinians in various locales. Thus, for example, the writer dares the open sewer of the Deheisha refugee camp to visit a Palestinian kindergarten, where 2-year-old Palestinian boys “shoot” him with their imaginary guns. On the Allenby Bridge, the crossing point to and from Jordan, he witnesses the humiliation of grown-up Palestinians and the pain of a child whose doll is confiscated on orders of the military commander.

In Israel, where politics is a national obsession, no other issue arouses as much political passion as the debate over the status and fate of the occupied territories. Grossman is fully aware of this and other general truths about his society’s political behavior. “In Israel,” he writes, “it is easier for a man to change his religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinion.” Hence Grossman’s evident reluctance to tackle political questions directly and his deliberate exclusion of politicians, Arab and Jewish, from the list of his interlocutors in “The Yellow Wind.”

Nor do abstract questions of who is right and who is wrong in the historical conflict over Palestine hold any greater interest for Grossman. Rather, his expressed purpose is twofold:

1--To gauge the impact of the policies and practices of the occupation regime on the daily lives and private hopes, fears, and dreams of ordinary Palestinians.

2--To unearth the ways in which the continued occupation has imperceptibly but tangibly altered the ethical fiber of the Israeli society beyond the national consensus with which Israel won the Six-Day War.

A sabra, Grossman belongs “to the generation that celebrated its bar mitzvah during the Six-Day War.” This confluence of the writer’s personal assumption of moral responsibility with his society’s assumption of the immoral role of military occupier has a profound symbolic significance for Grossman. Twenty years after the fact, he remains morally committed and emotionally attached to pre-1967 Israel--Israel of the “green line.” The sense of personal injury and moral outrage that permeates the pages of “The Yellow Wind” is deeply rooted in this identification. Grossman holds the settlers of Gush Emunim “who see the Bible as an operational order” primarily responsible for tempting unwary Israel down this unethical path. On this account, they draw the heat of his most fiery prose.

“Who are these people, I ask myself, who maintain an almost utopian bubble of a society of values, making great demands on individuals atop a mountain of injustice, impenetrability, and ignorance of their fellow men?”

Grossman’s mastery of the Arabic language (a rare phenomenon among native Israeli writers) puts within his reach cultural and personal experiences accessible only to members of a linguistic community. He had already put this advantage to remarkable use in his first novel. “The Smile of the Lamb” (Hebrew, 1983), which features an Arab from the West Bank among its major characters, utilizes Arabic idioms and sayings, and blends narrative conventions from the Arabic and Hebrew traditions of storytelling. The combined presence of these features in “The Smile of the Lamb” and “The Yellow Wind” creates a climate of cultural binationalism that brings contemporary Israeli fiction one step closer to the partly non-Jewish reality of the Jewish state.

Within the context of political Zionism, the representation of the Arab in Hebrew fiction has always carried a potential for ideological subversion, or at least an implicit moral challenge. Somehow, it never quite jibed with the wishful Zionist description of Palestine as “a land without a people, for a people without a land.”

As a literary motif, the image of the Arab in Hebrew fiction underwent significant permutations in the course of this century before it could command the kind of credible treatment it now receives at the hands of serious Israeli writers. To judge by the latest works of A. B. Yehoshua, Shimon Balas, Sammy Michael, and, of course, David Grossman, the future bodes well for the Arab in Israeli fiction.

In contrast, the status of the actual Arabs of Palestine in both the Zionist ideology and the state of Israel remains anomalous. Israel is in effect a highly segregated society whose Jewish citizens have little cultural or personal commerce with their Arab counterparts. (See Ian Lustick’s book, “Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority” (Texas University Press, 1980). “I told a friend of mine,” Grossman writes, “that I wanted to visit some classes at one of the West Bank universities. He said: ‘Classes? They go to classes there?’ and laughed in amazement. ‘It never occured to me that they go to classes. All we hear about them is that they throw stones and burn tires.’ ”

Segregation seems to have produced a curious consequence: Debarred from direct access to knowledge of Arabs, the Israeli reading public vicariously satisfies this evident need through recourse to the imaginative depiction of the Arab in Hebrew fiction. As the case of “The Yellow Wind” and other recent publications shows, serious works that thematize Arab-Jewish relations stand a good chance of becoming instant bestsellers in Israel.

The prospect of such popularity presents serious Israeli writers with the awesome responsibility of making their Jewish countrymen see their hitherto invisible Palestinian counterparts. While not quite representative, such works as S. Y. Yizhar’s “The Prisoner” (1948), “Khirbet Khiz’a” (1949); A. B. Yehoshua’s “Facing the Forests” (1963) and “The Lover” (1977), and David Grossman’s “The Smile of the Lamb” (1983) may suggest how well Israeli writers can meet this responsibility.

Grossman applies a two-layered writing strategy in “The Yellow Wind.” On one level, he poses questions to his Arab interlocutors and records each response in its entirety: words, facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice. On another level, he carries a running commentary that couches these responses in a familiar Jewish-Israeli context. On the basis of compeling analogies that he discerns between Jewish and Palestinian experiences and attitudes, Grossman constructs a complete symmetry between the fate of the two national entities. For example, in the opening section, Grossman compares the nostalgic yearning of Khadija (an old Palestinian woman from the refugee camp) for her home in Palestine to his own grandmother’s nostalgic yearning for her birthplace in Poland.

It is this alleged symmetry that the Israeli literary critic Hannan Hever finds especially objectionable in “The Yellow Wind.” Writing in the Israeli daily, Haarets, Hever argues that Grossman’s forced symmetry conceals a gaping asymmetry between the occupying Israelis and the occupied Palestinians, just as equating past Jewish suffering with current Palestinian suffering distracts attention from the fact that it is the Israelis who at present are inflicting suffering on the Palestinians. In the final analysis, Hever believes, “The Yellow Wind” abets the occupation by duplicating its thought patterns instead of challenging them.

While Grossman’s self-centered display of his scars at another’s deathbed may be in bad taste, there can be no question here of conscious complicity with the aims, policies, or practices of the occupation. “The Yellow Wind” makes amply clear Grossman’s ardent desire to see the end of occupation, if only for the sake of salvaging what remains of his image of pre-1967 Israel. The fact that this idealized image has never borne more than a tangential resemblance to the reality of Jewish rule over Arabs does not in itself impugn the sincerity or legitimacy of the anti-occupation sentiment. And the rising blood toll in the occupied territories may portend a higher priority for ending the occupation even on the part of Israelis far less idealistic than Grossman.

For me personally, as I am sure for many Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews, who cherish a dream of a sharing a just and equitable life in the same land, these are exceptionally trying times. As the spectacle of Israeli soldiers shooting, gassing and clubbing Palestinian children in front of TV cameras becomes a daily occurrence, I instinctively double my vigilance to protect my dream. The challenge for me as for all like-minded Palestinians and Israelis is to start building now the bridges that will carry us beyond the occupation and into a more peaceful and more humane coexistence.