COLUMN ONE : Direct Hit on Psyche of Israel : With Tel Aviv traumatized by Iraqi missiles, assumptions on how the country should defend itself have been turned topsy-turvy.

Always, in past wars, Tel Aviv was the carefree heartland that Israelis left behind when they went to defend the country in the far-off sands of the Sinai or the mountainous Golan Heights.

Now, suddenly, it is the front.

For the first time in 42 years of independence through five wars, an enemy has struck deep and consistently into Israeli cities. In physical terms, the damage has so far been light. But in terms of the Israeli psyche, it has been clear and immediate.

With Israel’s coastal cities under repeated missile attack from Iraq, thousands of Israelis have become refugees in their homeland, fleeing to inland cities as far away as Eilat, a resort town on the Gulf of Aqaba in the far south.

It is not the soldiers called to duty who are in danger, but the families left behind. Dearly held assumptions of how Israel will defend itself have been turned topsy-turvy, and in Tel Aviv, a way of life has been profoundly disrupted.

“The ostrich is having to take its head out of the sand,” said filmmaker Stuart Schottman, referring to the languorous coastal city. “And it’s getting a real look at the Middle East.”

Tel Aviv’s trauma has become a point of national debate as tens of thousands of residents head up the highway toward Jerusalem. Mayor Shlomo Lahat sparked an uproar last weekend when he called his fleeing constituents “deserters.”

“Someone who leaves Tel Aviv now would leave the country when times get hard. It’s a direct connection,” he said.

His criticism brought furious rejoinders from parents who left to take their children to safety and Tel Aviv residents who proclaimed their own right to decide where to weather the war.

“You scholars telling women and children what to do--what arrogance!” Chanah Ben-David, an official of the Naamat women’s organization, nearly shouted at Lahat and a panel of professors and journalists who gathered Sunday to discuss the pros and cons of leaving Tel Aviv. The seminar itself indicated the touchiness of the topic.

Philosophy professor Asa Kasher denounced Lahat’s claim that residents must decide between the public good and their private safety, maintaining that a Tel Avivite who goes to Jerusalem “hasn’t hurt me, and he hasn’t hurt the city.”

Still, he said, he will remain in Tel Aviv because “I don’t want to be a refugee, and uprooted, and abandoned.”

Despite the country’s recurrent history of warfare, the issue is brand new for Israelis. As Zeev Chafetz, a magazine columnist, author and himself a Tel Avivite, put it: “Israel’s whole war plan in the past was predicated on making the other guy seek shelter.”

Overall, Iraqi Scud missile strikes have damaged about 1,000 apartments and houses, leaving thousands homeless. Damage from the attacks in Tel Aviv is estimated at $120 million; in Haifa, $10 million.

In the past, Israelis knew that their economy would be shut down for only a short period. Soldiers would go off to war, and the folks at home would sit and wait.

In this war, however, Israel has been pressed by the United States to keep its finger off the trigger of retaliation. Washington wants to avert a wider war that might ensue if Israel attacked Iraq and routed its planes through neighboring Jordan. A blast at Iraq from Israel might also put pressure on Arab allies of the United States, notably Syria, an old adversary of Israel, to switch sides.

And the war is not ending as quickly as Israel, for its own needs, might prefer. “The Americans fight differently than we would. We would act to end things quickly,” said Mordechai Gur, a member of Parliament and former army chief of staff.

Not only has Israel’s policy of immediate retaliation been thrown into doubt, but its sense of space has also been dramatically altered. The threat to Israel had long been considered to be right next door, from its immediate neighbors. Now the danger is coming from hundreds of miles away and is landing in the living rooms of Tel Aviv.

The long-range war is a new element in the debate over whether Israel must keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an added component of its defense--strategic buffers to protect the populous coastal plain.

On the one hand, Israeli analysts say, strategic depth has evaporated. What will be needed now is peace far beyond Israel’s borders and controls on armaments to eliminate missile and long-range bomber attacks.

“If we are vulnerable from so far away, what we really need is demilitarization,” said Joseph Alpher, deputy director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

But emotionally, it will be harder for Israelis to conceive of giving up land--especially to the Palestinians, who have largely applauded the Iraqi attacks on Israel.

“There is no doubt that Israelis who claim that we need territory for defense will have the upper hand,” said Mordechai Gur. “This is a natural reaction. How can we trust our neighbors when we face such a threat?”

For now, the role of the home front in this new environment is ambiguous. If Israel is not expected to strike back and end the threat quickly, then theoretically people should go about their business as usual. But with missiles possibly flying through the roof, normalcy is a lot to ask.

Curiously, the central government has been unclear on what Israeli citizens should do. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has been all but silent on the issue. It has been left to Mayor Lahat to speak, if only for his city.

Under a barrage of criticism, Lahat told an interviewer: “It is a strange state of affairs that it is up to mayors to speak to such issues.”

The persistent attacks from Iraqi Scud missiles, coupled with the threats from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to hit Israel with a secret weapon, have clearly raised Tel Aviv’s level of anxiety.

Although most businesses and schools are open on weekdays, the streets of Tel Aviv were empty on Saturday night, a rarity in a town some Israelis refer to as simply as “The Life.” Conversely, Jerusalem, which on most nights looks as if the population has fled elsewhere (usually Tel Aviv), has taken on new life. Tel Aviv newcomers have filled Jerusalem hotels that two weeks ago were virtually empty.

In the sparsely populated Negev region to the south, a city official found the basement of a movie theater filled with refugees who could find no rooms at local hotels. He evicted them.

Communal kibbutzim, which over the past few years have suffered from a decline in membership, are suddenly awash with city dwellers looking for space in the cottages and communal halls. Dormitories at Ben-Gurion University are being taken over by “internal migrants,” the Yediot Aharonot newspaper reported, and refugees are competing with newly arrived Soviet immigrants for space in temporary housing spread over the country.

The well-to-do have found respite in Eilat, the Red Sea beach resort.

In the chaotic lobby of Eilat’s upscale King Solomon Hotel, guests showed a reluctance exceedingly rare among Israelis to talk about why they were there or to give their names.

Medi Meirson, a Tel Aviv-area accountant and the mother of two small boys off romping in the center of the plush hotel lobby, said that she could not bear the pressure that the prolonged fear and the terrifying sound of air raid alarms had on her children.

In Eilat, she said, they had put away their gas masks--like most visitors--and when nationwide air raid alarms rang out, “I tell the boys it’s the bell for dinner. I want them to forget all that now.”

Eilat Mayor Rafi Hochman estimated that 10,000 residents of the populous coastal plain that Iraq has targeted in its Scud attacks had migrated to his peaceful port town, filling the hotels to capacity.

Hochman defended the newcomers who have moved out of harm’s way.

“They say, ‘We are sitting like ducks waiting for the next bomb,’ ” he said. “So you can’t call anyone a coward just because he decided to move to another city.”

Since the first missile attacks 10 days ago, the lines of Israelis at Ben-Gurion Airport ticket counters have lengthened. “People come with cash and credit cards and barely ask the price,” an airport agent told a local newspaper. “The main thing is to fly.”

For those who remain, the harrowing ritual following each air raid siren has been repeated 10 times now.

The main official instruction for citizens is to move into sealed “safe rooms” and to don their gas masks.

Civil defense was never a strong suit in Israel. “If there’s one thing that will surely come out of this crisis,” Chafetz suggested, “it is more spending on civil defense. It’s a new era.”

Otherwise, the Israeli population is subject to a flood of ad hoc advice.

Worried about a heart attack when the air raid alarms go off? Breathe deeply, doctors say. The same goes for pregnant women.

Children crying? Talk the problem over and assure them that the danger is slight. (Sometimes, it appears that the parents need as much calming as the kids; one youthful caller to a radio talk show asked what he could do to tranquilize his mother.)

Given Israel’s varied makeup, one man’s idea of a calming influence is another’s calamity. Religious leaders have complained that rock music and women’s singing meant to soothe the population under fire “gets on the nerves” of strictly religious listeners. The leaders suggested traditional songs instead.

Humor has emerged as a major shield against anxiety. Perhaps inevitably, newspapers ran pictures of a wedding where the groom wore a gas mask. (It wasn’t clear why the bride felt she didn’t need one.)