(Photo: Getty Images)

I have been through a lot since 1993. I was one of three of the closest survivors of the attack on the WTC and testified in the 1995 Criminal Trial of Ramzi Yousef. As a Special Agent of the NY Field Office of the US Secret Service I was trained to be a critical incident Counselor and sadly responded to the scene of the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995 -- 6 US Secret Service employees were murdered.

When America was attacked on September 11^th, 2001, I was working at the Waldorf waiting to pick up a head of state. I spent the next six weeks protecting the worlds leaders as they came in to pay their respects.

The primary result of an attack like the one today in Boston is fear. The bombs did damage and injured hundreds and caused death and destruction. But it’s fear and paralysis that are the main goals of terrorists.

Whether this turns out to be a domestic terror incident by a lone wolf or a far more advanced conspiracy, damage to our psyche has been done. That’s the reason terrorists select high-profile targets, even if better opportunities for casualties exist.

The terrorist’s timing here was notable, as well. Complacency has set in--with Newtown and other mass shooting tragedies, the nation has become distracted from terror and its implications. If another bomb goes off in NYC or another high value target--especially if it’s a larger, more advanced device--then anxiety will give way to panic. Judging from early reports, both in the media and from colleagues who funnel me official briefings, this seems to be the work of an amateur. The device did not include projectiles or shrapnel, though ball bearings seem to have been present. Broken glass does terrible damage, though, and most windows here do not have blast mitigation, as they do in Israel.

What will happen now is that the FBI will take charge, as it's domestic terrorism. Does this incident indicate we failed in our security preparedness? I do not believe we have - high profile events like the Marathon get high priority and the first responders seem to have prepared effectively. Every new piece of equipment is tested at events such as the marathon. The fact is, many runners use backpacks to change their clothes--it’s a chaotic and difficult security situation under the best of circumstances. And I'm sure K-9 teams were present but probably overwhelmed.

Large public events in a free society are always tough to coordinate. Sometimes priorities shift or include public safety plans, e.g., closed street routes for Fire/EMS to respond. Attempts to have the remainder of the event and the city remain as functioning as possible. This setting is a lot different from a stadium or arena where walk-through magnetometers and handhelds are used and bags checked to ensure fans' safety.

The coordination of Federal State and City Authorities has been rehearsed in Boston and most major cities. This will help to restore calm. Hopefully it will also help facilitate the real sharing of any intelligence uncovered.

There are some reports of a Saudi National in custody--remember this is an ongoing investigation, so facts are fluid. But the fact that at least three reputable news outlets--Fox, CBS, and NBC--are reporting this despite denials from Boston PD probably indicates that the info was leaked by local PD while Feds want to grill the suspect, who is alleged to be injured. Meanwhile, here in New York City, the NYPD has already amped up its presence and I'm sure the Intelligence Division is in high gear working informants and working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force looking for chatter, clues, suspects, etc.

Even as some of the families of Newtown victims sat in the stands at the Boston Marathon--imagine the horror if they turn out to be among the injured--we are a nation that essentially trusts people to act decently. How many more shoebombers and underwear bombers and Marathon bombers and Unabombers and World Trade Center bombers and Murrah Federal Building bombers we will need to witness before we harden our hearts is not yet known.

Scott Alswang spent more than 20 years in the US Secret Service and retired as the Asst to the Special agent in charge of the NY Field Office. He is currently the Senior VP of SOS Security LLC - a large national/international full service security firm, and has provided security for Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, and Madonna. 

Though he briefly thanked an introductory speaker for complimenting his wife's engagement with Irish issues, including the peace process, and made a glancing reference to her earlier appearance at the Irish American Presidential Forum, the former president made no other allusions to her candidacy.

Instead, he focused upon the Good Friday Agreement, which was reached 10 years ago. He invoked the memory of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who he said had told him after shaking Yasser Arafat's hand on the White House lawn in 1993, "You do not make peace with your friends."

Clinton suggested that Rabin's sentiment had played a significant role in his decision to issue Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams a visa to come to the U.S. in early 1994. And he praised Adams for having operated "with good faith" afterward, admitting that, "If he hadn't, I would have looked like a fool."

Clinton also referred to the incongruously close working relationship that has formed at the head of Northern Ireland's devolved government between Adams' party colleague Martin McGuinness, an erstwhile IRA commander, and Ian Paisley, once the most hardline of pro-British unionists.

"When Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley came here joined at the hip like Siamese twins, I thought, 'Rabin is smiling down on us from heaven,'" he said.

As to his own role, a soft-voiced Clinton said, "I got a lot more out of this than I gave. It was a joy. Every single minute."

He added that the pleasures even included his first meeting with the famously belligerent Paisley. He merely said hello, he recalled, before being treated to a verbal onslaught:

"For 20 minutes, I got it with both barrels. I didn't have to worry about forgetting my talking points, and falling asleep was not an option."

The former president was not entirely self-deprecating, however. When he spoke about the contribution of his special envoy George Mitchell to the peace process, he referred to the former Senate majority leader as "an inspired choice."

He added that because Mitchell's ancestry included Irish and Lebanese strains, "he was well prepared genetically for this. He understood the poetry and the BS"

Diverting at one point from his memories of the peace process, Clinton alluded to the strength of the economy in the Republic of Ireland and contrasted it with America's state of economic health.

"I expect sometime within the next three years, the Irish Republic might be giving foreign aid to the United States," he said light-heartedly. "Lord knows, we're entitled to it."

The former Israeli soldier, blue-eyed, his shirt sleeves pushed up around his biceps, said, "In Hebrew we have a word, Amal. It means, I have nothing to add. I agree with her completely."

(I am sorry not to have these young people's names; I got there late; I will supply them later.)

The news from Israel/Palestine these days is desperate. For the second time in a few months an "errant" Israeli mortar shell has destroyed an innocent Palestinian family in Gaza—

and this time caused tremendous pain in Israel too. Haaretz has castigated the country's military leaders, saying that "more and more pointless military operations... will not lead to anything except to kindling more hatred, we must try a completely different path." At a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin, murdered 11 years ago by an Israeli extremist, novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri, a tank commander, was killed in the last days of the absurd Lebanon war, offered a similar message. The military has long been the most revered institution in Israel, but that culture would seem to be eroding. Last summer a friend said to me that Israelis had to live with the fact that there would be war after war after war. Many Israelis seem now to need to reject this endless cycle of violence.

As a post-Iraq American Jew, I'm attuned to the Jewish/Israeli part in this madness, and so I want to go to something that blue-eyed former soldier said last night: he spoke about the pressure on Israelis from the diaspora Jewish community to maintain militant policies. A Parisian Jew tells him that Israel must never give up Gaza, as he pours another espresso. "Well I am the one who must defend and die for your cause while you are having your baguette," the former soldier said, in a surly tone. "This is something that really gets me going. You know what, it doesn't make me feel good."

He and I later talked about the American pressure. He said that the lobby in the U.S. produces pro-Israel legislation in Congress that is to the right of anything the Knesset could produce. And he noted of the extremist religious settlers who cause such havoc in Palestine—many of them are U.S. exports, called to the holy land by the voice of god and god knows how many other voices. The Palestinian woman had also complained about the American role. "We're not really a happy camper in terms of what America is doing right now..."

Today when Israel is in crisis, and when Israelis and Palestinians are at far greater risk than we are, Americans should examine their part in the craziness. Last summer, we supplied the cluster bombs, despite Human Rights Watch's many objections to the savage devices, cluster bombs that are still doing so much to turn Muslim hearts and minds against us. The Israel lobby made sure that the U.S. would do nothing to restrain Israel. Jerrold Nadler, Upper West Side liberal congressman, said the snatching of the Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah represented an "existential" threat to Israel. That's nuts. Yet it is repeated time and again here, to justify anything Israel wants to do. There are many exceptions to this attitude, including the great blogger Richard Silverstein. But these voices tend to be drowned out by pro-Israel groups that seek to remove the expression "cycle of violence" from our discourse, and replace it with cant: another blow against Islamofascism.

Diaspora Jews have long enabled the violence. This goes back to '48, when (according to The Pledge, Leonard Slater's book) Jews in New York were assembling bazookas and other munitions (in violation of American laws aganst supplying the yishuv with arms) so as to further the "War of Independence." Palestinians and Arab states of course played their bloody part in those hostilities, which they refer to as "the Nakba," or catastrophe, as it resulted in the expulsion of 700,000 Arabs from Palestine.

Last night the former soldier noted that Jews too can perform acts of terrorism. In 1994, a year before Rabin was murdered by a nutbag settler, another nutbag settler, Baruch Goldstein, walked into the mosque beside the tomb of Abraham in Hebron and killed 29 Arabs, before he was beaten to death. For those keeping score, Goldstein was merely performing payback for the Arab murders of Jews in 1929. So Goldstein is now a martyr for the settlers, his grave a shrine.

In the wake of the Goldstein atrocity, Rabin had an opportunity; he could have used it as a pretext to remove the extremist settlers from Hebron, settlers who had imposed an apartheid system on the second-largest city in the West Bank. In his book, The Missing Peace, former Clinton aide Dennis Ross writes that Rabin chose not to. Rabin chose not to. As if it were only his choice. As if the U.S. was not also making a choice, a passive one; as if the American government could not then have demanded the only fair thing, the settlers' removal. For we also were implicated: Baruch Goldstein and his ill wind had arrived in Israel from New York. He had been a doctor here.

You can understand why the Arab world blames us for our part in the cycle of violence, just as we blame extremist culture in Saudi Arabia and Egypt for the ill wind that blew this way on 9/11.

In his book, Dennis Ross (who is associated with One Voice) offers an explanation of how Israeli identity came to be shaped around violence; the Holocaust had taught Jews the lesson that "weakness begets tragedy." In his book, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier, the sociologist Marshall Sklare described the symbolic impact of Israeli militarism on American Jewish identity. "I think in the non-Jewish community people became aware that Jews have guts and stand up and fight—that the Jew is a man, not just a merchant," an accountant told him.

The two young people who were at Columbia last night will be our country's guests for another week or so, doing several more events, including one at Random House today. I hope they get a wide hearing. Neither of them is a symbol.

[Later: The Israeli: Seffi Kedmi, a former pilot. The Palestinian: Aya Hijazi. AMAL: slang for "Ain Mash-hoo Acher L'Geed" ]

Clinton's insight is fascinating but limited: He's leaving out two other assassinations.

If you read Israeli history—as I am beginning to do—you will find that on two earlier occasions, great men who were offering powerful ideas of sharing the land with the Arabs were also assassinated, in 1948 and 1933.

Assassination #2:

In 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swede who had helped Jews escape the Holocaust, came to Israel as the UN Mediator on Palestine. Bernadotte was the unanimous choice of the international community to negotiate between Israel and its Arab neighbors. He came up with a partition plan that included making Jerusalem an international city.

On September 17, 1948, Bruce Stedman, an American working for the U.N., was in the front Jeep of a three-Jeep UN caravan, with Bernadotte in the middle Jeep, when they pulled up to a roadblock in the no-man's land in Jerusalem between Jordan and Israel. Says Stedman: "Two or three guys came out of the bush with tommy guns and went right to the middle Jeep and shot through the dust curtains, killing Bernadotte and a French general."

The guilty parties were never apprehended, though according to Avi Shlaim's great book, The Iron Wall, the assassins were known to be members of the Stern Gang and the assassination was approved by Yitzhak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel.

Assassination #1:

On a night in June 1933, two men went up to a couple on the beach in Tel Aviv and after shining a flashlight in the man's face, shot him. The wife called for help. A few hours later leading Zionist intellectual Chaim Arlosoroff died, at 34, in a Tel Aviv hospital.

No one has ever been found guilty of Arlosoroff's murder, which has reverberated in Israeli mythology for decades because Arlosoroff was a moderate, and a worldly European. He opposed the hardliners' nationalist dreams, thought they were making an "idol" of the Western Wall, and believed the Zionist state would have to share the land somehow with the Arabs.

He even understood that a Arab nation was coming into existence in the 1930s in Palestine, under the administration of the British. Arlosoroff wrote:

He wrote that in the 1920s! What would he have said about the great Lebanon invasion of 2006? As Arlosoroff's biographer, Shlomo Avineri, wrote (and I have taken much of my info from his book, Arlosoroff), movingly, "To an Israel that would still like to be an Athens, and not a Sparta, Arlosoroff—though assassinated&#151is still alive."

Israel is Sparta. I know; I went there this summer. I was as appalled by the culture of extremism as Bruce Stedman was, 60 years ago, especially after his boss's murderers ascended to high office.

Add up Assassinations 1, 2, and 3, and what do you get? Well, you get a polity that has established a clear line in the sand about moderation. When powerful moderates arise, ka-boom. Everyone talks about extremist violence in the Arab world, and with good reason. Lately, Syria has become a pariah state in part because of its alleged role in the Hariri assassination in Beirut in 2005. But what about the 1,2,3 Israeli assassinations? Yitzhak Shamir becomes Prime Minister of Israel a few decades after he orders a political murder of a key moderate and the U.S. doesn't say a word. Arlosoroff is forever mourned by doves (and Menachem Begin tries and fails to put the matter to rest in the 80s), without anyone in the U.S. ever hearing about the dude. And today many in Israel believe that Rabin's assassin did a good thing, and should be released from prison!

One more point. The effectiveness of the Israel lobby is that it has essentially limited American communication to whoever is in power in Sparta, oops, Israel. Meaning the nationalists, who have gained power in ways that we wouldn't approve of here, and for whom violence has always been an essential tool. So the left in Israel is politically marooned in its own country. As are progressives here. What is changing today—I'm a cockeyed optimist—is that bridges are being built between American moderates and Israeli progressives. We have a lot to talk about.

But watch your back!

But we can’t leave it alone. In America, we work out our identities in comfort and moderation. Israel is the shimmering screen, conveniently placed halfway across the world, where we project our every shred of anxiety and chauvinism and guilt (and where non-Jews feel free to project anti-Semitism). So when Israel gets beat up, we feel beat up--which means that we’re feeling rather beat up these days. We glorify its agonies and downplay its attempts at normalcy. (It’s our fantasy, damn it, and we want excitement!)

The philosopher Avishai Margalit writes that Israel has come to suffer from allegory fatigue: “Nothing is what it is; everything is something else.” Every stone and bullet and vote is extrapolated upon until it is no longer the thing itself but an entire history, and this is as exhausting as it is addictive. I pledge, therefore, to dodge whatever allegories I can in the following paragraphs, while still marveling at just how scrambled the American Jewish psyche has become these last few months, a stretch of astonishing Israeli chaos book-ended, also astonishingly, by Joe Lieberman and Marc Rich.

Everyone’s an Expert

I have some cousins near Tel Aviv, suburban leftists whom I love dearly. I met them in New York five years ago. Odi is a high-school principal; her husband, Dori, is a logistics manager. Their trip was a bar-mitzvah gift for the oldest of their three children, Nimrod. (Don’t laugh: Nimrod is a not uncommon Israeli name, even though the Biblical namesake was a Babylonian strongman.) Nimrod, who wants to be an actor, was the sweetest boy I had ever met: honest, earnest, curious.

A few days after their visit, I flew to Israel for the first time, and there our bond was cemented. Last week, I e-mailed to ask how they were bearing up in the wake of Ariel Sharon’s election. I also wrote that I was “ashamed that I have not visited you again” since my last trip. They replied the next day. Their English is far better than my Hebrew, but they are still shy about it and so write with a communal “we” to deflect any grammatical blame: “We are all sitting here together, it’s a Friday afternoon. In two hours Moti and Aviva will come for dinner. We’ll try to have fun, even though as you know, life here makes it very difficult to enjoy …. Nimrod had his final show in theater (got 100) and now is studying intensively to his finals. He will join to the army on the first of September …. We sometimes think how would we explain things to someone who cares about Israel but does not live here. Many times we want to tell you what we think, but it’s so complicated for us in English--so we just give up.”

This is the kindest restatement I have yet encountered of Israelis’ age-old complaint to their American cousins: Feel free to comment upon our politics once you move here; until then, keep your noses out of it. But we don’t. We are experts, all of us, and we constantly editorialize. Nor do we allow facts, or the lack thereof, to spoil a good opinion. At the Rosh Hashana services I attended this year, a well-known writer, a liberal and a feminist, rose to speak about a picture she had seen in that morning’s newspaper. It was the now-famous, much-disputed photograph of a Palestinian boy in Gaza cowering behind his father during a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. The boy had been killed shortly after the picture was taken. The assumption was that the Israelis killed him; it would later be determined that he was likely killed by a Palestinian’s bullet--but none of that mattered now.

The writer (who, it should be said, is known for a certain lack of nuance) dipped into a deep, deep vat of collective guilt and declared, in so many words, that the State of Israel was evil and that Jews are heartless. Did I mention this occurred on Rosh Hashana? A few congregants seemed merely uncomfortable; the rest looked as if, were they not sitting there in suits and dresses in a synagogue, they would have happily beaten the snot out of her.

Had she meant to inflame, or was she simply invoking our God-given right to be sanctimonious about distant affairs? It hardly matters. In this climate, innocuous intentions can have the same result. A friend of mine sends his son to kindergarten at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School on the Upper West Side. The class recently mailed some upbeat notes and drawings to Israel to be distributed, along with homentaschen, to Israeli soldiers for Purim. The Heschel parents thought this was a pretty nice idea. The same idea was soon introduced at a small, liberal congregation at Ansche Chesed, a synagogue some 10 blocks north. There, a heated debate ensued. The opposition claimed that sending Purim gifts to Israeli soldiers was an inherently political statement that was insupportable in light of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. “It feels wrong to me--and inappropriately partisan--to give expression to only one side,” wrote one person in the e-mail debate. As of this writing, there has been no resolution. If in the coming weeks, however, we are treated to photographs of young Palestinians nibbling overseas homentaschen, I would bet they came from Ansche Chesed.

Suckers and Philo-Semites

When the Oslo accords were signed, a smart man I know said that Israel was making a terrible mistake. This man was not a rightist and wanted peace as much as anyone. But not this peace. He warned that Yasir Arafat would prove to be uninterested in arriving at such a peace, and if he did get interested he would prove incapable of delivering it, for he would be cut down by his own side. (A different smart man later swore that it was the Mossad who has kept Mr. Arafat alive these past few years.)

I shrugged this off as cynicism. I did not know what Mr. Arafat truly wanted, but I did know that Bill Clinton was too ambitious to fail and that Yitzhak Rabin was too seasoned to be fooled.

Maybe Rabin would have been. That, at least, is a convenient fantasy. An Israeli friend calls her country’s recent voting history “a collective schizophrenia”--from Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu to Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon--and says, “We still haven’t made our accounting with the murder of Rabin; we’re still in the death spasm.”

And so it was Mr. Barak who sat down with Yasir Arafat at Camp David, and who put on the table everything and then some, including Jerusalem. (The inclusion of Jerusalem was more upsetting to many American Jews, who see it as a metaphor for all Israel, than for many Israelis, who see it as a nest of zealotry.) And Mr. Arafat responded like the high-school kid who reaches up for a high-five and pulls his hand away at the last second. When I think of modern Israel as a character, I think of many roles: pioneer, warrior, pietist, pragmatist, chicken farmer, nightclubber, maybe a dozen more. But I had never thought of sucker before, and now that I did, I didn’t much care for it.

As Ariel Sharon would discover, there were plenty of people to blame. In alphabetical order: Mr. Arafat (for bad faith), Mr. Barak (for what a former staffer calls “impenetrable arrogance, almost a social autism”), Mr. Clinton (for pushing Rabin and then Mr. Barak into Mr. Arafat’s embrace with too much gusto and self-interest).

Could it be that Mr. Clinton, the great philo-Semite, will turn out to have been bad for the Jews? Put aside for a moment his awkward stewardship of the peace talks (although do understand that Israel was so Clinton-crazy that, when he attended peace meetings at the Hilton in Netanya, the hotel changed its rooftop sign to read “Clinton”). The pardon of Marc Rich took its worst turn when Mr. Clinton wrote an op-ed explanation whose thrust was that … the Israelis made him do it. (There seems to be no forthcoming explanation for commuting the sentences of the four crooked New Square rabbis, which is just as well.) The American Jewish establishment, eager to sample Mr. Rich’s celebrated largesse, responded with an uncharacteristic silence. So Mr. Clinton’s explanation hung there like an end-of-the-party helium balloon that nobody had the height to pop. If Joe Lieberman was fresh air for the American Jewish psyche--turning some folks giddy but making others hyperventilate--Mr. Clinton’s explanation smelled all too familiar and all too rank. With philo-Semites like these, who needs antis? But how we scurry to justify! A Jewish businessman I know, even though he is a Clinton hater, assured me that Mr. Clinton couldn’t discuss the best reason for the pardon: that Marc Rich carried out invaluable dirty-hands work for the U.S. in countries where neither our flag nor Israel’s is welcome. I perked up at this news, of course. How nice it would be to think that, in return for being scapegoated by Bill Clinton, Israel got something more than just a few million dollars for the Philharmonic.

The Great P.R. Debate

As things fall apart in Israel, the American center cannot hold. Extremists on either end become more so, and moderates are sprinting toward the edges.

“I was in a taxi today, and the driver had taped to the back of the partition that image of the Palestinian boy,” says a man I know, a documentary filmmaker. “I started talking to him. I’ve become sensitized to the other side. I was before, but now I’m really questioning the validity of the Jewish state.”

“I was a staunch supporter of the Arabs having their own state, even though it was nuanced belief,” says another friend, a female book editor. “But they lost me totally on the day they lynched those Israeli boys. Seeing the picture of their hands dripping blood--that lynching was the Rubicon for me.” Friend No. 2, when told of Friend No. 1’s conversion, voices the oft-heard protest: The Palestinians have great P.R., and the Israelis’ P.R. stinks. How else could Israel come across as the villain after having its peace offer spat on?

“The Palestinians have people who can really convince you that Israel treated them bad, and they talk to people’s emotion,” says a former Israeli journalist living in New York. “When Israeli speakers come here, they fail big-time. Their English is no good. And they’re arrogant. They always think, ‘We are smarter and better and the world is going to understand us much better.’”

Then there is the American Colony Factor. The American Colony is the graceful, romantic hotel in East Jerusalem where the world press corps stays whenever an intifada is playing, and which is also something of a salon for the Palestinian intelligentsia. Covering an intifada from the American Colony is not quite the same as covering the White House from the Lincoln Bedroom, but whatever bias it leads to is surely not in the Israelis’ favor.

So Israel needs publicists? Well, New York is full of them. America already sends Israel its Stan Greenbergs and Arthur Finkelsteins; why not also a Howard Rubenstein type?

Do not be surprised if this happens soon; indeed, a full-scale Israel branding campaign might soon break out. One P.R. guy says he would serve happily: “Neither Israel nor the American Jewish community can continue to do things as they have over the last 40 years,” he says. “It’s a new world, and one of the things that’s been lost is an entire generation of Jewish Americans. So you go to people and they’re raising money for the Clintons and AIDS awareness and Holocaust museums, but why aren’t they raising money and consciousness for Israel and for peace in the Middle East? Because, I contend, American Jews of this generation think of Israel as they think of their parents: We love them, but if they’re not doing well, we still want to believe they are.”

Meanwhile, the hotels in Israel are empty (except the American Colony). In New York, we wring hands and construct allegories. Thank God for e-mail. “We feel that we’re in a bad period,” my cousins wrote last week. “People like us from the left wing have many question marks. Also the self-security has been damaged. We pray for better times. But if you could only see us, you would never believe it’s so difficult here. Life continues like always. We buy new plants for the garden. We had four lemons on our lemon tree. Two figs, and we will have a lot of shesek. You wanna know what is it? You have to come here! It’s a special fruit. Kisses to all.”

more coverage, per capita and per square foot, than any story in the history of

the world. For an American Jew, this is gratifying but also troublesome, since

nothing looks very appetizing under a microscope, much less a pitched,

centuries-old battle between politicians and zealots. (Those are the only two

kinds of people who live in Israel, according to the coverage.)

But we can't leave it alone. In America, we work out our

identities in comfort and moderation. Israel is the shimmering screen,

conveniently placed halfway across the world, where we project our every shred

of anxiety and chauvinism and guilt (and where non-Jews feel free to project

anti-Semitism). So when Israel gets beat up, we feel beat up-which means that

we're feeling rather beat up these days. We glorify its agonies and downplay

its attempts at normalcy. (It's our fantasy, damn it, and we want excitement!)

The philosopher Avishai Margalit writes that Israel has come

to suffer from allegory fatigue: "Nothing is what it is; everything is

something else." Every stone and bullet and vote is extrapolated upon until it

is no longer the thing itself but an entire history, and this is as exhausting

as it is addictive. I pledge, therefore, to dodge whatever allegories I can in

the following paragraphs, while still marveling at just how scrambled the

American Jewish psyche has become these last few months, a stretch of

astonishing Israeli chaos bookended, also astonishingly, by Joe Lieberman and

Marc Rich.

Everyone's an Expert

I have some cousins near Tel Aviv, suburban leftists whom I

love dearly. I met them in New York five years ago. Odi is a high-school

principal; her husband, Dori, is a logistics manager. Their trip was a

bar-mitzvah gift for the oldest of their three children, Nimrod. (Don't laugh:

Nimrod is a not uncommon Israeli name, even though the Biblical namesake was a

Babylonian strongman.) Nimrod, who wants to be an actor, was the sweetest boy I

had ever met: honest, earnest, curious.

A few days after their

visit, I flew to Israel for the first time, and there our bond was cemented.

Last week, I e-mailed to ask how they were bearing up in the wake of Ariel

Sharon's election. I also wrote that I was "ashamed that I have not visited you

again" since my last trip. They replied the next day. Their English is far

better than my Hebrew, but they are still shy about it and so write with a communal

"we" to deflect any grammatical blame: "We are all sitting here together, it's

a Friday afternoon. In two hours Moti and Aviva will come for dinner. We'll try

to have fun, even though as you know, life here makes it very difficult to

enjoy …. Nimrod had his final show in theater (got 100) and now is studying

intensively to his finals. He will join to the army on the first of September

…. We sometimes think how would we explain things to someone who cares about

Israel but does not live here. Many times we want to tell you what we think,

but it's so complicated for us in English-so we just give up."

This is the kindest restatement I have yet encountered of

Israelis' age-old complaint to their American cousins: Feel free to comment

upon our politics once you move here; until then, keep your noses out of it.

But we don't. We are experts, all of us, and we constantly editorialize. Nor do

we allow facts, or the lack thereof, to spoil a good opinion. At the Rosh

Hashana services I attended this year, a well-known writer, a liberal and a

feminist, rose to speak about a picture she had seen in that morning's

newspaper. It was the now-famous, much-disputed photograph of a Palestinian boy

in Gaza cowering behind his father during a crossfire between Israeli soldiers

and Palestinians. The boy had been killed shortly after the picture was taken.

The assumption was that the Israelis killed him; it would later be determined

that he was likely killed by a Palestinian's bullet-but none of that mattered

now.

The writer (who, it should be said, is known for a certain

lack of nuance) dipped into a deep, deep vat of collective guilt and declared,

in so many words, that the State of Israel was evil and that Jews are

heartless. Did I mention this occurred on Rosh Hashana? A few congregants

seemed merely uncomfortable; the rest looked as if, were they not sitting there

in suits and dresses in a synagogue, they would have happily beaten the snot

out of her.

Had she meant to inflame, or was she simply invoking our

God-given right to be sanctimonious about distant affairs? It hardly matters.

In this climate, innocuous intentions can have the same result. A friend of

mine sends his son to kindergarten at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School on the

Upper West Side. The class recently mailed some upbeat notes and drawings to

Israel to be distributed, along with homentaschen ,

to Israeli soldiers for Purim. The Heschel parents thought this was a pretty

nice idea. The same idea was soon introduced at a small, liberal congregation

at Ansche Chesed, a synagogue some 10 blocks north. There, a heated debate

ensued. The opposition claimed that sending Purim gifts to Israeli soldiers was

an inherently political statement that was insupportable in light of Israel's

treatment of the Palestinians. "It feels wrong to me-and inappropriately

partisan-to give expression to only one side," wrote one person in the e-mail

debate. As of this writing, there has been no resolution. If in the coming

weeks, however, we are treated to photographs of young Palestinians nibbling

overseas homentaschen , I would bet

they came from Ansche Chesed.

Suckers and Philo-Semites

When the Oslo accords were signed, a smart man I know said

that Israel was making a terrible mistake. This man was not a rightist and

wanted peace as much as anyone. But not this peace. He warned that Yasir Arafat

would prove to be uninterested in arriving at such a peace, and if he did get

interested he would prove incapable of delivering it, for he would be cut down

by his own side. (A different smart man later swore that it was the Mossad who

has kept Mr. Arafat alive these past few years.)

I shrugged this off as cynicism. I did not know what Mr.

Arafat truly wanted, but I did know that Bill Clinton was too ambitious to fail

and that Yitzhak Rabin was too seasoned to be fooled.

Maybe Rabin would have been. That, at least, is a convenient

fantasy. An Israeli friend calls her country's recent voting history "a

collective schizophrenia"-from Rabin to Benjamin Netanyahu to Ehud Barak to

Ariel Sharon-and says, "We still haven't made our accounting with the murder of

Rabin; we're still in the death spasm."

And so it was Mr. Barak who sat down with Yasir Arafat at

Camp David, and who put on the table everything and then some, including

Jerusalem. (The inclusion of Jerusalem was more upsetting to many American

Jews, who see it as a metaphor for all Israel, than for many Israelis, who see

it as a nest of zealotry.) And Mr. Arafat responded like the high-school kid

who reaches up for a high-five and pulls his hand away at the last second. When

I think of modern Israel as a character, I think of many roles: pioneer,

warrior, pietist, pragmatist, chicken farmer, nightclubber, maybe a dozen more.

But I had never thought of sucker before, and now that I did, I didn't much

care for it.

As Ariel Sharon would discover, there were plenty of people

to blame. In alphabetical order: Mr. Arafat (for bad faith), Mr. Barak (for

what a former staffer calls "impenetrable arrogance, almost a social autism"),

Mr.  Clinton (for pushing Rabin and then

Mr. Barak into Mr. Arafat's embrace with too much gusto and self-interest).

Could it be that Mr. Clinton, the great philo-Semite, will

turn out to have been bad for the Jews? Put aside for a moment his awkward

stewardship of the peace talks (although do understand that Israel was so

Clinton-crazy that, when he attended peace meetings at the Hilton in Netanya,

the hotel changed its rooftop sign to read "Clinton"). The pardon of Marc Rich

took its worst turn when Mr. Clinton wrote an op-ed explanation whose thrust

was that … the Israelis made him do it. (There seems to be no forthcoming

explanation for commuting the sentences of the four crooked New Square rabbis,

which is just as well.) The American Jewish establishment, eager to sample Mr.

Rich's celebrated largesse, responded with an uncharacteristic silence. So Mr.

Clinton's explanation hung there like an end-of-the-party helium balloon that

nobody had the height to pop. If Joe Lieberman was fresh air for the American

Jewish psyche-turning some folks giddy but making others hyperventilate-Mr.

Clinton's explanation smelled all too familiar and all too rank. With

philo-Semites like these, who needs anti's? But how we scurry to justify! A

Jewish businessman I know, even though he is a Clinton hater, assured me that

Mr. Clinton couldn't discuss the best reason for the pardon: that Marc Rich

carried out invaluable dirty-hands work for the U.S. in countries where neither

our flag nor Israel's is welcome. I perked up at this news, of course. How nice

it would be to think that, in return for being scapegoated by Bill Clinton,

Israel got something more than just a few million dollars for the Philharmonic.

The Great P.R. Debate

As things fall apart in Israel, the American center cannot

hold. Extremists on either end become more so, and moderates are sprinting

toward the edges.

"I was in a taxi today, and the driver had taped to the back

of the partition that image of the Palestinian boy," says a man I know, a

documentary filmmaker. "I started talking to him. I've become sensitized to the

other side. I was before, but now I'm really questioning the validity of the

Jewish state."

"I was a staunch

supporter of the Arabs having their own state, even though it was nuanced

belief," says another friend, a female book editor. "But they lost me totally

on the day they lynched those Israeli boys. Seeing the picture of their hands

dripping blood-that lynching was the Rubicon for me." Friend No. 2, when told

of Friend No. 1's conversion, voices the oft-heard protest: The Palestinians

have great P.R., and the Israelis' P.R. stinks. How else could Israel come

across as the villain after having its peace offer spat on?

"The Palestinians have people who can really convince you

that Israel treated them bad, and they talk to people's emotion," says a former

Israeli journalist living in New York. "When Israeli speakers come here, they

fail big-time. Their English is no good. And they're arrogant. They always

think, 'We are smarter and better and the world is going to understand us much

better.'"

Then there is the American Colony Factor. The American

Colony is the graceful, romantic hotel in East Jerusalem where the world press

corps stays whenever an intifada is playing, and which is also something of a

salon for the Palestinian intelligentsia. Covering an intifada from the

American Colony is not quite the same as covering the White House from the

Lincoln Bedroom, but whatever bias it leads to is surely not in the Israelis'

favor.

So Israel needs publicists? Well, New York is full of them.

America already sends Israel its Stan Greenbergs and Arthur Finkelsteins; why

not also a Howard Rubenstein type?

Do not be surprised if this happens soon; indeed, a

full-scale Israel branding campaign might soon break out. One P.R. guy says he

would serve happily: "Neither Israel nor the American Jewish community can

continue to do things as they have over the last 40 years," he says. "It's a

new world, and one of the things that's been lost is an entire generation of

Jewish Americans. So you go to people and they're raising money for the

Clintons and AIDS awareness and Holocaust museums, but why aren't they raising

money and consciousness for Israel and for peace in the Middle East? Because, I

contend, American Jews of this generation think of Israel as they think of

their parents: We love them, but if they're not doing well, we still want to

believe they are."

Meanwhile, the hotels in

Israel are empty (except the American Colony). In New York, we wring hands and

construct allegories. Thank God for e-mail. "We feel that we're in a bad

period," my cousins wrote last week. "People like us from the left wing have

many question marks. Also the self security has been damaged. We pray for

better times. But if you could only see us, you would never believe it's so

difficult here. Life continues like always. We buy new plants for the garden.

We had four lemons on our lemon tree. Two figs, and we will have a lot of

shesek. You wanna know what is it? You have to come here! It's a special fruit.

Kisses to all."

When my mother passed away last month, quite suddenly, of a massive cardiac at age 81, I found it well-nigh intolerable to answer commiserating phone calls, asking me prying questions about how I was doing; but the letters of condolence that flowed in were thoughtful and soothing. And surprisingly well-written. I have never been able myself to write a decent condolence letter, as if respect for death precluded me from turning a phrase well; but these people rose to the occasion. It made me wonder about the properties that might best comprise a healing reaction to such final loss. Sincerity, certainly, seems a requirement, and gravity; but some honesty and intelligence are also much appreciated, to cut through the fetor of cliché, which is one of the most strangulating aspects attending grief.

And now this collection of responses to death has arrived in timely fashion, enabling us to sharpen our thoughts on the matter. The editor, Jill Werman Harris, who seems young and industrious, has written a serviceable introduction, pious and restrained in tone, in which she sets out her intentions: "It is my hope that the many selections in this book will enable ordinary people, not just writers and natural orators, to give eulogies that are affecting and meaningful." The book thus seems aimed for practical utility rather than literary edification–a how-to guide for the mourner in a hurry to consult before the memorial service. The entries are short, kept shorter still by maddening abridgments. Still, the editor has tracked down enough surprises from other countries and centuries to keep it interesting.

The book is intelligently divided into four sections: eulogies, letters, elegies and epitaphs. Eulogies take up more than half the book, which is a pity, since many of them have that stodgy diplomacy one would expect from public address. Sugar-coating and lofty, patriotic vacuity are much in evidence. A chance to consider the eulogy historically, as a rhetorical genre from the Ancients on, is denied by the editor's decision to pick mostly from the 20th century. "On the whole," Ms. Harris writes, "earlier funeral orations tend to be monotonous, unimaginative, and, from my perspective, essentially without charm." This is a pretty ignorant statement, especially as most of the modern eulogies selected for inclusion here are decidedly dull. Ms. Harris rightly says in her introduction that a great eulogy captures "the idiosyncratic essence of an individual;" but, caught in the old funeral orator's dilemma between honoring or speaking truth about the dead, she usually chooses filial respect over idiosyncratic candor. Very occasionally, as in Alfred Kazin's clear-eyed appraisal of his friend, the critic Mark Schorer, or Ned Rorem's mischievous assessment of Leonard Bernstein, we actually get a chance to see some judicious, balanced intelligence applied to the contradictions of personality.

As one might expect, the freshest, most human traces of poignant pain are generally found in the letters, which are more unguarded. Sometimes the griever is the actual correspondent, as when Horace Greeley writes to Margaret Fuller about the death of his 5-year-old son, or Charlotte Brontë tells her friend Ellen stoically of the death of her sister Emily. "Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the church pavement. We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffering is over." There is an eerily whimsical letter by Sir William Osler to his wife, in the voice of their dead boy; and a chilly but deeply correct note from Abigail Adams to her political enemy, Thomas Jefferson, on the death of his daughter; and an anguished cri de coeur from Tennyson.

The tone of the collection careens between decorous and raw, almost as if the anthologist were torn between muffling the survivors' pain for their own good, and exposing wounds anew. The consolations offered by the speakers, to others or themselves, tend to boil down to a few ideas, repeated to the point of threadbareness (but whatelsehavewe?):Timehealsall wounds; the deceased are in a better place; their suffering is at an end; they are not really dead–their souls remain immortal, while our memories of them live on.

The section devoted to elegies–poems commemorating a loss or addressed to mortality in general–has many of the good old standbys: Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion," Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," William Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy," and so on. It seems a little too traditional to me, however, being composed almost entirely of rhymed, metered verse, which results in a conventional air.

A sometime anthologist myself, I cannot help but be struck by the amount of work that went into the selections, as well as the inevitable distortions. The point in reviewing an anthology is not to take to task an editor for this or that omission, since all collections are finite and must exclude something; but rather, to disentangle the hidden narratives and emphases.

Each anthology is a sort of disguised confession of neurotic fixation. That's what makes anthologies fun. In the case at hand, we have not only the ostensible obsession with death, but a strange preoccupation with political martyrdom. Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Biko, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Andrew Goodman, Mahatma Gandhi, Medgar Evers and Yitzhak Rabin are all commemorated. The heroic victim, alas, often inspires a flatly self-righteous response, but there are some touching moments: Ossie Davis' memorializing Malcolm X as "our own black shining Prince" and the almost unbearably moving tribute King Hussein paid to Rabin, followed by the more personal speech of Rabin's granddaughter. A more persistent if unacknowledged pattern is that almost everyone commemorated in this book is famous–Diana, Princess of Wales, Jerry Garcia, Jackie Kennedy. Instead of Remembrances and Celebrations , perhaps it might have been better titled Remembrances of Celebrities .

But finally, all quibbles aside, the book under review is a valiant, valid and useful effort to bring past words of comfort to present sufferers. If these words often prove unsatisfying, that may have more to do with the inconsolable nature of death than with any inadequacies of selection.