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 1987, 20 years after the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank of the Jordan River, David Grossman, a young Israeli novelist, received an assignment to write a series of in-depth articles about the Palestinian dilemma.

“The Yellow Wind” is the result of his journey to Palestinian camps and Jewish settlements, to kindergartens and divided Arab villages, to Israeli military courts where Palestinians are tried for terrorist associations, real or imagined, and to Israeli factories where Arab “coolie” labor is a fact of life. Many deep and painful wounds were reopened by this young Israeli writer. When his articles were finally published in their entirety as a book, “The Yellow Wind” became an instant best seller.

According to a legend that Grossman heard from Abu Harb, a Palestinian whom he interviewed, the rih a s far (yellow wind) is a hot and terrible east wind that blows from the gate of hell “once in a few generations, sets the world afire, and people may seek shelter from its heat in the caves and caverns, but even there it finds those it seeks, those who have performed cruel and unjust deeds and there, in the cracks and the boulders, it exterminates them, one by one. After that day . . . the land will be covered with bodies. The rocks will be white from the heat, and the mountains will crumble into a powder which will cover the land like yellow cotton.” It is the disturbing scent of this “yellow wind” that Grossman relentlessly pursues. He dares himself and all Israelis to face up to the moral consequences of 20 years of occupation.

He also listens to Arabs with genuine respect and empathy as they describe their daily despair in no-man’s land. While visiting a dingy, dimly lit kindergarten in a Palestinian refugee camp, Grossman makes a conscious effort “to differentiate their voices, their smiles, their characters and slowly also their beauty and delicacy. It is not easy,” he admits, “and it requires a tremendous investment of energy on my part, since I also have trained myself to look at Arabs with that same blurred vision which makes it easier for me (only for me?) to deal with their chiding, accusing, threatening presence, and during this month of encounters with them I must do exactly the opposite, enter the vortex of my great fear and repulsion, direct my gaze at the invisible Arabs, face this forgotten reality and see how--as in the process of developing a picture--it emerges before me slowly. . . .”

Grossman is amazed to learn in the refugee camp that the Palestinians tell no jokes about the Israelis. The women talking to him “ . . . think for a minute, astounded that there aren’t any. There really aren’t. . . . In other places I received the same answer. . . . It would be interesting to examine what they do with all that aggression and hatred of us. Who is their Sholem Aleichem?”

Some of the children are already fourth generation in the refugee camp. They are fed daily on a diet of hatred and trained to perfection in the catechism of “throwing stones and burning tires to free the motherland.” Grossman asks the kindergarten teacher: “Is this the answer, to bring up another generation and another in hatred? To teach them that this hatred justifies the refusal to work toward a solution? Couldn’t you try maybe another way?”

“There is no other way,” the teachers reply.

Grossman is pained. “I stand and listen and try to be neutral,” he writes. “To understand. Not to judge. And also not to be like an American or French correspondent completely severed from the whole complex of events, and quick to pass judgment. But I also stand here as a reserve soldier in the Israeli army, and as a human being rising up against this education in blind hatred, and against such tremendous energy being expended for the preservation of malice, instead of being spent in an effort to get out of this barrenness, this ugliness in which this kindergarten lies, these little children who are so good at hating me.”

Speaking with Raj’a Shehade, a Palestinian lawyer and author, Grossman discovers another reality, the reality of what an Arab summit conference called the sumud, or endurance, of the Palestinians (the samadin, or endurers). It is the endurance of those who are determined to remain firmly planted on their land just as the Israeli government seems more determined than ever to exile them from it.

“When you are not a free man,” Grossman writes, “time passes more slowly: Your soul is delayed and defeated along the way. You unconsciously moderate your actions and responses in order to be prepared for any evil. Any unexpected capriciousness of the occupier. Or of the situation itself. The time which passes for the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule cannot be measured in prison terms. Its end is unknown and this makes it even harder to deal with.”

Raj’a Shehade holds firm. “Of the two ways open to me as a Palestinian--to surrender to the occupation and collaborate with it, or to take up arms against it . . . losing one’s humanity, I choose a third way,” he explains. “To remain here. To see how my home becomes my prison, which I do not want to leave, because the jailer will then not allow me to return.”

Grossman, still on the scent of the yellow wind, has taken on a prodigious task. He examines and probes the prickly underbelly of the monster “Israeli occupation,” which he describes as loathsome to both sides. He searches for clarity in a murky pool of fear and distrust. No solution is reflected in those muddy waters.

With the increasing Palestinian unrest and violence in the territories, as headlined in all the media around the world; with a divided Israeli government’s lack of consensus about how to handle the unrest; with the growing population of young Arab militants who, like kamikaze pilots, are prepared to die for their cause; with the growing population of young Israelis who objected to Ariel Sharon’s occupation of Lebanon and who now lobby to withdraw from the West Bank; with the opposed but also growing population of Israeli settlers in the West Bank who are convinced that it is their historical and divine right to occupy the West Bank and even Jordan and thereby restore modern Israel to its ancient boundaries; and with the growing indifference of the Arab nations to the fate of their Palestinian brothers, what solution could be in sight?

The Palestinian dilemma is certainly one of the most difficult Israel has ever had to face, more difficult, in many ways, than being attacked simultaneously by all her neighbors. Israel has been as affected by “occupying” the Palestinians as the Palestinians have been affected by being “occupied.” As a master-slave relationship requires the master, no less than the slave, to fulfill certain behavioral patterns, so, too, this occupation has required of the Israelis behavioral patterns which they may find ill-suited to their psyche and their history. As a result, many Israelis have been reluctant to face up to the consequences of the occupation, but Grossman is merciless. He will not let them rest until they have examined just how profoundly they, like the Palestinians, have been demoralized by the occupation.

In one of the chapters of “The Yellow Wind,” Gidi, an Israeli military governor in the occupied territories, has a revelation that will not let him sleep nor enjoy the birth of his first son.

Gidi didn’t want to be in the twilight area created “when two people turn their dark, corrupt sides toward each other, and the thought startled him, because he loved his work and believed in it, and felt that it gave him the necessary rules with which to navigate through his life. But he also knew clearly that when two apples touch one another at a single point of decay, the mold spreads over both of them.”

“The Yellow Wind” does not provide answers. But in a glorious outpouring of prose that, at times, reaches poetic heights, it is perhaps the most honest, soul-searching book yet written by an Israeli--or, for that matter, by a Palestinian--on an agony that neither of them alone can bring to an end.

“The Palestinians, as is well known, are making use of the ancient Jewish stategy of exile and have removed themselves from history. They close their eyes against harsh reality, and stubbornly clamping down their eyelids, they fabricate their Promised Land. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ said the Jews in Latvia and in Cracow and in San’a, and the meaning was that they were not willing to compromise. Because they had no hope for any real change. He who has nothing to lose can demand everything; and until his Jerusalem becomes real, he will do nothing to bring it closer. And here also, again and again, that absolute demand: everything. Nablus and Hebron and Jaffa and Jerusalem. And in the meantime--nothing. In the meantime, abandoned physically and spiritually. In the meantime, a dream and a void.

“ ‘The strongest weapon the Arabs in the occupied territories can deploy against us,’ a wise man once said, ‘is not to change.’ And it is true--when you walk through the Deheisha camp you feel as if that conception has internalized itself unconsciously here, seeped its way into the hearts of the people and become power, defiance: We will not change, we will not try to improve our lives. We will remain before you like a curse cast in cement.

“A Palestinian grandmother remembers: ‘There, in the village in Ain Azrab, we baked bread over a straw fire. Not here. Because here we don’t have livestock, and none of their leavings.’ She falls silent and hugs herself. Her forehead wrinkles repeatedly in a spasm of wonder. The brown, wrinkled finigers go, unconsciously, through the motions of kneading.

“Everything happens elsewhere. Not now. In another place. In a splendid past or a longed-for future. The thing most present here is absence. Somehow one senses that people here have turned themselves voluntarily into doubles of the real people who once were, in another place. Into people who hold in their hands only one real asset: the ability to wait.

“And I, as a Jew, can understand that well.”

--From “The Yellow Wind.”