ISRAEL SURVIVES BY LEARNING FROM ENEMY.

Byline: Dennis Gura LOCAL VIEW

WHEN I was 9, my best friend's father led Armand and me into his formal, European-style living room, the best room in their chicken ranch farmhouse. Bernard, a Vilna-born Auschwitz survivor, took down from his book shelf ``Mein Kampf.''

``Read it,'' he told us. ``Believe it. Take every word seriously. Know what your enemy plans to do.''

Jews have taken those directives seriously over the last 55 years. They have recited ``never again'' too often to believe that those words really echo in the world. The list of genocides and murders undertaken in the name of the greater good or out of simple revenge is numbing: China's Cultural Revolution, Cambodian ``liberation,'' Rwanda's ``unification,'' Balkan ``purification,'' Islamic ``triumphalism.''

But the crimes have too often been ignored. The world has not heeded the threats and warning words of the criminals.

So Jews have learned a very simple, and very tough, lesson: Listen closely to what people say and write. Take those words seriously.

Whom shall we believe? Educated, Westernized, photogenic and articulate Palestinian speakers like Edward Said and Hanan Ashwari? The Palestine Authority's politically vetted, well-considered and highly effective public relations apparatus? The fractious political debate inside the Palestinian political organizations?

Who speaks truthfully about ultimate Palestinian goals?

The current round of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, and the interlocutors on either side of that yawning divide, demonstrates this conundrum at its most painful and tragic.

I cannot pretend to speak for the Palestinians. But the issues, as they effect both Israeli and the American Jewish community, impact every level of our personal and institutional lives.

Clearly the Israeli left's dismay since the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada comes from what it perceives as hypocrisy and lies on the part of its Palestinian peace-advocating counterparts.

The Israeli right pointed to the words of the fanatical maximalists and claimed that the balm offered in English and Hebrew belied the threats and exhortations offered in Arabic.

We in the United States often failed to grasp the significance of the Israeli insistence that the Palestinian Covenant and other documents be modified publicly and clearly so as to validate Israel's right to exist.

For a Jewish world traumatized almost beyond recognition by the Shoah (the Holocaust), this insistence made complete sense.

If Jews take the words of their enemies seriously, and if it is only with their enemies that peace can be made, they need to be assured that their enemies can at some point stop being enemies, even if they aren't exactly friends or allies.

But if their basic documents proclaim Israel's fundamental illegitimacy, how can Israel take Palestinian reassurances seriously?

In this context, perhaps we can come to understand how Israel sees its battles through the lens of the Shoah, and though the lens of potential mass destruction.

``Nonsense,'' people cry, ``Israel is the military power in the Middle East. Regardless of what happens with a Palestinian ministate, or with nearby Arab states, the future holds no substantive military threat, let alone the power that could make a genocide. Since Israel now holds the bulk of military prowess, it should step up to the plate and take the necessary risks for peace. Besides, the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, and, of all peoples in the world, Israeli Jews should want to readdress the legitimate rights and sufferings of the Palestinian people.''

Maybe so, but the Germans had a legitimate complaint in 1923, and 1928 and even in 1933. And post World War I, a defeated, emasculated, bereft Germany was ostensibly guaranteed to cause no more continental problems for at least three or four generations.

The historical analogies, all imperfect and all incomplete, reinforce the seriousness with which popular Israel reads the Palestinian press and listens to the Palestinian speakers.

In part, the current deep mistrust on the part of Israel stems from the Israeli peace camp hubris. For 20 years, or longer, the peace camp dreamed of a Middle Eastern Benelux, failing to recognize that Belgium, Luxembourg and Netherlands were subject to centuries of deadly warfare, invasion and religious and national strife before achieving a sometimes wobbly domestic peace (the extremist Flemings and Walloons in Belgium to this day occasionally try to blow each other up).

Inflated by Yitzhak Rabin's boldness, and buoyed by Ehud Barak's determination, the Israeli peace camp's failure to deliver has only reinforced Israel's skeptical read of Palestinian politics.

The original Israeli-Palestinian agreements spoke of periods of confidence building. What the Palestinians haven't yet convincingly presented to Israel is that they who speak of and for peace speak wholeheartedly and unconditionally.

Until the Israelis gain a true and deep trust that the words of rapprochement and peace are the true and serious words of the greater part of the Palestinian people, they will read such declarations of peace as a cover for a declaration of war.

Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Commemoration Day) is clearly not a Palestinian commemoration, but they could use this day to learn how to speak to their enemies.