Taking a Vacation From Hating : Peace: Even on neutral ground, some beliefs are just too strong to stay silent.

The AAA guy who showed up a few weeks ago at Los Angeles International Airport to jump-start my mother’s stalled car turned out to be from Iran. I had just arrived on an El Al flight from Israel, where generally speaking, you don’t make friendly conversation with Iranians.

“Oh, you’re from Iran?” my sister inquired cheerily, as if greeting a long-lost relative. She’d flown down from Oakland and had come with my mother to meet me at the airport. “We’re Jewish!”

The young man paused as he opened the hood and gave us a wary but not unfriendly smile.

“And my sister,” she gestured happily toward me, “lives in Israel. In Jerusalem.”

I squirmed. Didn’t she realize that the man jump-starting our car was in all likelihood a believer in the doctrine of Jihad, by which it’s every Muslim’s religious duty to remove the infidels occupying sacred Islamic soil? The Iranian, however, nodded cordially. “Shalom, “ he greeted me, with that I think was a hint of amusement at her ever-so-American innocence and goodwill. His eyes met mine in mutual relief: Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have to hate each other.

“Shalom, “ I said, amazed.

During my 10 days of vacation, there were other encounters the likes of which I’m not privileged to enjoy back in the Middle East. In America the Beautiful, Jew and Arab can be next-door neighbors meeting far from home. There was a conversation in Manhattan with a Lebanese dress shopowner on Second Avenue and another with an Iraqi businessman’s wife on a downtown bus. And around the corner from my hotel on 51st Street, there was the counterman at the local delicatessen: At 5:45 a.m. on my first day in the city, he noticed me waiting outside on the sidewalk. “You wake early?” he asked as he unlocked his door.

“I’m not on New York time yet.”

He asked where I was from and I told him.

“Ah!” he said. “I am from Jordan. Shalom!”

Again that sense of uncanny camaraderie. Every morning that week, he opened up for me while it was still dark and graciously served me coffee and the New York Times. It was almost as if we were the cousins that in truth we are.

It became self-evident that I longed for this friendly banter, which seemed with ease to dispel 2,000 years of murderous antipathy. On my way to the airport to return to Israel, the taxi driver’s dashboard identification plate was unambiguous.

“Nasser?” I asked the driver, thinking dimly of the Suez Canal in 1956, the invasion in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973. “That’s an interesting name. Are you from the Middle East?”

He adjusted the rear-view mirror to get me in view. “Egypt.”

“Oh! I’m from Israel!” I exclaimed lightheartedly. Two weeks in America and I was already sounding like my sister from Oakland. “We’re enemies!”

His eyes in the mirror moved darkly behind his tinted glasses. Perhaps Nasser didn’t think that was funny.

But thank goodness, he smiled slightly and through 10 miles of heavy traffic we shot the breeze about falafel, the Pyramids, Anwar Sadat. Then I popped the question. “So what do you think of the peace process now? You think we’ll have peace?”

He lifted one hand off the steering wheel, palm up, toward the ceiling of his yellow cab and the smoggy New York sky--in that same wordless gesture of surrender to God’s omnipotence that Israelis use. I nodded in agreement. We share one God, Nasser and I, that’s for sure.

Then he said, “There will be peace only when Arafat possesses Jerusalem.”

“What?” There in his back seat I felt the adrenaline soar instantly. “What do you mean, when Arafat possesses Jerusalem? Arafat’s not going to get Jerusalem, ever. He will never get Jerusalem.”

He was eyeing me in the mirror. “You ask me when there will be peace and I tell you. When the Muslim world again controls Jeru. . .”

“You will never get Jerusalem. Jerusalem is ours forever.” I heard my voice rising. “I promise you, 100%, have no question about it, forever. With all your thousands upon thousands of miles of land, all those incredibly huge countries of yours, and our ridiculously tiny country! Jerusalem is the one corner in the world you will not take away from us! Ever! That’s a promise! I promise you!”

Another example of open communication that one wouldn’t wisely indulge in, back in our own back yard.

We were soon pulling up to the El Al terminal for my flight to the Holy City. Nasser helped me with my bags, wished me a safe and pleasant journey and we bid each other farewell, his cab vanishing in traffic to the Long Island Expressway.