Kindred enemies: Israeli and Palestinian extremists have more in common than they think.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs was filled with worshipers on a Friday evening in December. The Herodian structure of huge reddish stones towered over the rocky landscape among the ruins of houses built before the age of concrete. South of the Tomb, nicknamed "The Cave" by Jewish settlers, lay the city of Hebron, its lights dimmed in the cold, dry winter night.

My companion, a settler from Kiriat Arba, was proud of the building erected by Herod's slave workers some 2,000 years ago as a house of prayer, supposedly over the tomb of Abraham and his family. He was proud of the last king of Judea, as if that demented monarch had carried the ballot for his party's slate in the last elections. This was a Jewish structure, made of Jewish stones, without American aid and Arab labor.

That night, the building was full of Jews and Moslems who worshiped the same God over the grave of their common father. The Jewish men wore prayer shawls over their white Sabbath shirts, partly covering their pistols and submachine guns. Children, dozens of them, played in the closed courtyard, oblivious to the hundreds of pigeons that flocked above, illuminated from below by military spotlights.

The common prayer, which a Western visitor might perceive as a vision of peace on Earth, was not common al all. There was no eye contact; it was, in fact, a mutual act of defiance. Like the symbolic handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, it could inspire hope, but it was another Middle Eastern mirage. In the coming weeks, Hebron would turn into the killing field of one hope after another.

I had come from Tel Aviv, a bustling city of many young people. How supernormal life is, you think, when you drive through Tel Aviv's urban sprawl, inching in traffic over ever-expanding highways, listening to the same lazy radio talk you might hear in New York or London. That holds true in Jerusalem, too, just forty-five minutes away.

Later, I sat in an old, ugly bus with shatter-proof plastic windows that had already yellowed. Its passengers - all Israelis, some armed - sat quietly as the bus crossed the Green Line in a rocky lunar landscape dotted with green-black-white-and-red Palestinian flags, to the City of the Patriarchs, another forty-five minutes away. The bus arrived after nightfall. It made its last stop in Kiriat Arba, a modern, well-planned Jewish suburb named after the biblical city of the Patriarchs. Kiriat Arba was established by the Labor government in the 1970s as the next best thing to building in Hebron itself. In its early years, Kiriat Arba attracted "ideological settlers" from the Gush Emunim movement. They were heavily subsidized by the government and the Jewish Agency, and the town had grown to some 5,500 residents, most of them attracted by the availability of low-cost housing. Many are recent Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.

After dark, Kiriat Arba is a gated city, its fences patrolled by settlers doing their reserve duty. A big Chevy van, equipped with shatter-proof windows and a metal mesh on the windshield, offered a ride. The driver, a slight, bearded man, held an Uzi on his lap and looked around constantly as he sped on the battered road to the city. Whenever an oncoming car approached, he flashed his lights. If the car had blue plates, meaning Arab, he turned on his high beams, blinding the driver. The settlers say they do it not to humiliate but as a precaution against drive-by shooting. It was a short ride, but it seemed to last an eternity.

Shmuel Mushnik, thirty-eight years old, a Michael Caine look-alike, remarked early in our conversation, "You probably notice that I don't love Arabs." It was part of our small talk, in which Mushnik discussed "the metaphor" of Jurassic Park. He'd loved dinosaurs since his childhood in Russia.

He is an environmentalist, a high-school teacher of Bible and geography, and a talented spare-time painter - one of 500 Jewish settlers who live at the center of Hebron. He was born in Moscow to a Zionist family that was denied exit visas for three years. In 1970, at age fifteen, he came to Israel. In 1976, after his military service as a transport driver, he settled in Kiriat Arba. Since 1984. he has lived with his mathematician wife and four children in a complex of restored Jewish homes a few hundred yards from the Arab market and the Jewish Quarter.

Mushnik's family shares the building - old Jewish property - with several dozen other Jewish families. In 1929, spurred by rumors that Jews were killing Arabs in Jerusalem, Arabs killed sixty-seven Jews in Hebron, putting an end to the Jewish settlement there. In his living room, "where we're sitting." said Mushnik, "the whole Jewish family of Gershon Ben Zion, a pharmacist, was murdered." The Jews living there now are considered the most committed among the Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Mushnik lives there because he is not wanted. His life is heavily guarded by the Israeli military, often by soldiers who disapprove of his being there. In his view, life in Hebron is no more dangerous than life in Tel Aviv, which was bombed by Iraqi missiles just three years ago.

But he is clearly putting the lives of his children at risk, isn't he? Mushnik offers a story as an answer. His mother's friend had sent her son to study in Germany, believing that by doing so she was saving him from risking his life in the Israeli army. He was spared military service, but did shortly after in an auto accident.

"You can't escape God," Mushnik says, giving the moral of the story. "On a larger scale, someone has to settle in the Land of Israel. Someone settled in Jerusalem when it was judenrein" - Mushnik used the German word for "Jew-free" - "at the time of the Crusaders. In 1929, twenty-three of the Slovodka yeshiva boys who arrived here from Kovna were killed. The ones who stayed in Lithuania thought they made the right decision. In July 1941, the Germans invaded Kovna and killed those who had not already been killed by Lithuanians. The Hebron yeshiva was rebuilt in Jerusalem. The Kovna yeshiva was erased from the face of the Earth."

Mushnik has many more anecdotes to illustrate "God's Great Plan." According to the Plan, the Czech Republic was given to the Czechs, not to the Germans, who settled in Bohemia and Moravia in the Tenth Century. About one hundred years ago, said Mushnik, the Czechs revolted. They put the ethnic Germans on trains and sent them back to Germany. It was justice, made possible by a small war.

Is he praying for another small war in the Middle East, to do to the Arabs what the Czechs did to the Germans? No, he is not praying, no sane person would, but as you know, wars happen. This is sober thinking, says Mushnik. "Judea was not named after the Arabs. We are returning home. The return is difficult; we need to be refined. It is part of the plan. The Bible says, |Expel them bit by bit lest the land be barren.' The plan is for the return of the Jews to their land, the building of Jerusalem, the coming of the Messiah. Jews pray for this daily, just as they pray for rain."

The Israel-PLO agreement, which brought so many hopes to Israelis and Palestinians, caused much pain to Mushnik, who views it as a defiant worldly interference in God's work. But, he says, "we shall live and see. Peres is planning one thing; God is planning another."

What if God goes with Shimon Peres in this matter?

"Come in April and we'll talk. Neither Clinton nor Peres is managing the world. Read Peres's book and see how people can change their views 180 degrees. Things may change."

And what if the government tells you to leave this place?

"We are staying here."

The United States, which saved Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, does not get much gratitude from Mushnik. Neither does Rabin, who headed the army that "liberated" Hebron in the 1967 war. Nor does Peres, who created Israel's nuclear weapons program. These small details of God's Great Plan have somehow escaped Mushnik's attention.

The United States acts like a grown-up child that wants to leave the world on the selfishness level," says Doron Avichzer, twenty-eight, father of four, in his apartment in Hebron's restored Jewish Quarter, near the fruit stalls of Hebron's casbah. "Who shall rule, in the spiritual sense, is the question. The message is positive also in Islam. You will not correct it with your patchwork solutions, just as you did not solve the drug problem. The agreement is negligible. The world will see its falsity."

Avichzer, a thin, bearded, bespectacled man, looked ascetic in his cold living room. He grew up in a secular family in Safed, an ancient city in the Galilee, which, like Hebron until 1929, had been home to a Jewish minority since the days of the biblical kingdom. He developed his interest in Judaism as a teenager, and joined a yeshiva for the first part of his military service - a privilege accorded to yeshiva students in their compulsory three-year service - but never left it, becoming exempt from the military altogether. He spends most of his time in a yeshiva that is a nationalistic holdout, sometimes scribing torahs for extra income.

I hoped to hear from him the reason he chose to live where he did, protected by reserve soldiers assigned to the task and paid for by a government whose policies he denounces. Part of the reason, the material one, became apparent in our conversation. According to Israel's official statistics bureau, a family of six would need an average income of $2,200 a month to get by. Avichzer makes do with less than a fifth of that. He rents his apartment from the government's housing agency, which rebuilt the Jewish Quarter and charges him less than $40 a month for rent. It is a subsidy available to all Hebron settlers.

But according to Avichzer, his life there is a sacrifice. "Why live in Hebron?" he asks. "From a sanitary point of view, it is a problem. From the security point of view, it is dangerous. Every walk could end with an ax in the back. Groceries arrive here in an armored truck. I wouldn't want to live in today's Hebron. I am living here because this is the dam that stops the materialism of the world."

More specifically, Avichzer is there promoting the establishment of heavenly rule. "All other efforts [to solve the world's ills] are doomed, because there are 200 million other problems. There is only one solution: the Halakha state that we are establishing today. It is a worldwide project. When this state is established, it will bring forth a new message, a totally new life. People will see a state that has everything. They would want to emulate it, and the whole world will change."

By the Halakha state, Avichzer means a theocracy based on Jewish law, as envisioned by the biblical prophets, in which there will be justice for all. "I prefer to call it ideal, rather than religious. After the people learn what is the ideal state, they will want to live in it. It won't be a democratic state, but based on expertise and knowledge. Democracy arranges life in the technical sense. It has nothing to do with the big idea. What about values? Democracy reinforces the idea that life has no ideal."

And the agreement between Arafat and Rabin in Avichzer's view. will not bring peace. "It is a way of maintaining interests between the Left, which rules the government, and the PLO. Because it is not peace in the true sense, it will not bring redemption. It will leave the region in the same egotistical, superficial form."

The harder times ahead do not worry him. "In the macro, the wars, the difficulties, are but preparation for the final form: the Temple, Priesthood, Prophecy, Kingdom. Until then, there are pains, like labor pangs. Since we are in a process of redemption, every stage along the way brings us closer to the final goal."

Hatred is all over the stairway to the office of Khaled Amayreh in a shabby, misplanned, unfinished office building in central Hebron. The floor is sprayed with stars of David for people to stamp on. The walls' arabesques are dense red-and-black graffiti. Amayreh, a writer, translator, and devout Moslem, explains in flowery Oxfordese that the authors were illiterates who can hardly spell. They do not represent the Islamic Renewal Movement in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The Islamic Movement has covered much ground since the beginning of the Intifada six years ago. According to recent estimates, its numbers have increased from a negligible few to just about half the Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Its factions, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, represent, along with the Jewish settlers, the most serious threat to peace.

To set the stage for my interview with Sheikh Tayssir Tammimi, Amayreh, who volunteered to translate, asserts that the PLO is corrupt and that Arafat, the person most credited with the revival of Palestinian nationalism, is "a thousand times a traitor," if not a rabid dog. Amayreh, whose vocabulary is impressive, runs out of insults when he talks about the organization that had the effrontery to sign an agreement with Israel. No settler I spoke with was as vehement in denouncing the PLO and Arafat as were the Islamic Revivalists.

The forty-one-year-old sheikh, clad in gray clerical robes, wearing a sparkling white band around his red tarbush, and repressing what could be a natural smile, seemed every bit as rational as his rivals, the Jewish settlers. He is the kadi of Durah, the largest village in the Greater Hebron area and a prominent member of the Islamic Renewal Movement in the occupied territories; his father, the kadi of Hebron, was deported for incitement. The sheikh opposes the Arafat-Rabin agreement totally, as it "gives Israel the maximum it wanted in return for nothing."

Tammimi does not think in narrow terms of improving the daily life of the Palestinian masses. His scope is Islamic, which means total. Islam is not something that you do on a Friday morning in a mosque; it encompasses all aspects of life. It provides answers for all questions. The agreement, he says, will open the gates of the Arab world to the influence of Israel, which is the spearhead of the West, especially of the United States, in the region. Once the gates are opened, Western economy and culture will stop the reemergence of Islam. This, according to the sheikh, will be done as a "conspiracy between the Jews and the dictatorial regimes in the Arab states."

Like Mushnik, the sheikh believes God is the orchestrator of worldly matters. He insists that the strong shall not be strong forever, nor shall the weak remain weak. History proves this principle every day, the sheikh asserts: Look at Russia, which used to be a superpower and now cannot supply bread to its people. The larger principle is that patience pays. Arabic has a precise term for it: sabber. Wait patiently, stoically, until God turns the tide for you. However, the ultimate goal, says Sheikh Tammimi, is the establishment of a Shari'a state. It will be based on justice, and not a democracy. It is, I would say, the same state that Avichzer, less than a mile from where we talked, envisioned.

Hamas was founded in 1987 by Ahmed Yassin, a paraplegic sheikh now serving a twenty-year sentence in an Israeli prison. Its inspiration comes from the Moslem Brotherhood, a worldwide organization of Shi'a Moslems who interpret the Holy Koran literally. Hamas, in its covenant, states that there is no middle ground in enforcing the ways of Islam. "The Moslem Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times," states the founding document. "It is characterized by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension, and complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice, and judgment, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult, and conversion to Islam."

Regarding Israel, the Hamas Covenant opens with a quotation from Imam Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Moslem Brotherhood: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

As unbelievable as it may sound, the Islamic movement in the territories operated with the blessing of the Israelis until the militant Hamas was founded in 1987. The Israelis viewed the Islamists as a positive force with a social agenda that included clinics and schools. The main reason for Israel's tacit support, however, was the Islamists' opposition to the secular PLO, which Israel then regarded as a threat to its existence.

For some time it seemed easier to be hit by Hamas than to get an interview with one of its members. One arranged meeting after another failed to materialize as Israel's General Security Services (Shabak), conducted a holy war against its operatives.

Hamas targeted the settlers, knowing that they would retaliate. When a settler is killed, Hamas gains points among the Palestinians, and the settlers are sure to retaliate, which increases the pressurre on the government. The deadly Ping-Pong with the settlers served the agenda of both sides: shooting down the peace process.

The Hamas operative who finally showed up was a tall, athletic man in his early twenties. He was bearded, wore an electric-blue sweater, and had an intense, piercing gaze. He did not express any emotion in the beginning. He refused to talk about his current activities with Hamas. Unlike most Palestinians, he did not smoke. He spoke in monotone about the most dangerous organization operating today in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The meeting took place two days after Hamas operatives killed two settlers, including a young kindergarten teacher. Was that the revenge promised for the killing of their leader, Imad Akkel, two weeks before? The question disgusted him. "Yesterday's killings were just a routing operation. You can expect deadlier actions in the next few days."

Unlike Amayreh and Sheikh Tammimi, this young man had no interest in presenting the enlightened side of Islam. When he talked about the execution of some 900 alleged Palestinian collaborators convicted by Hamas summary courts, he insisted, "Hamas always acts according to justice."

Are you willing to die? "Of course," he answered. It is the highest honor to be a shahid, a martyr, an honor equal to being a prophet.

What drove him to Hamas? I found the warmth I sought in the movement. I felt like coming home."

According to the young man, this period has all the signs of pre-redemption.

The Prophet Mohammed said that before the establishment of an Islamic state, the world would be ruled by dictators, like Assad, Mubarak, and Hussein. They are all dictators, all heathens, including Arafat."

Will he ever accept Jews in Hebron? "Not in Hebron and not in the whole of Palestine," answered the Hamas member. "Only those Jews who came here before 1917. and are willing to live under the banner of Islam, or in the shadow of Islam, will be allowed to stay."

And the others?

"They should return to the countries from which they came. To Russia, Germany. They have no right to be here."

Does he know Israelis personally? He sure does, he said. He sells to them, including settlers. He treats them as a merchant treats customers. Some of them are good people, and some are bad, like everybody else.

If there is still hope in the Middle East, it is embodied in people like Mohammed al-Lahham, my escort and translator. Al-Lahham, widely known as Abu-Khalil, is thirty-eight years old. He spent the best years of his life in an Israeli prison.

"I, too, talked like that," Abu-Khalil broke the silence as we were driving north to Bethlehem after the chilly interview with the Hamas member, "before the prison."

He used his.time in the Israeli prison to get to know his enemy. He studied Hebrew, becoming an expert in Hebrew literature and poetry. He can recite poems by old and new Hebrew writers. He is in the top I per cent of Hebrew scholars.

When he knew his enemy, he stopped fearing him.

We later sat in one of the few restaurants in Bethlehem that is still open after dark, Margaret's Cafe. The music in the background was Zehava Ben's, an Israeli singer from a Moroccan family. She sang sad songs in Arabic about heartaches. Before the Intifada, Israeli singers of Arab music, sons and daughters of families who emigrated to Israel from Arab countries, did well in the occupied territories and beyond.

It's almost all gone now.

Margaret, an unusually independent woman, had to close her business when the Intifada began. Now she's fighting the slow encroachment of Islamic activists into the daily life of Bethlehem, which is losing its status as a center of rich Christian Palestinians. Many have already emigrated to English-speaking countries.

Over a table set with Margaret's delicious specialties, Abu-Khalil told a personal story of beatings and humiliations after an arrest early in the Intifada. The soldiers - military police and basic trainees - beat the detainees with clubs and iron bars. The Palestinian prisoners were ordered to recite: "Arafat traitor, Peres bastard, Long live Kahane." They refused. He spoke to the officer in charge in an hour-long monologue about Judaism and Zionism, after which the officer apologized and promised that there would be no more beatings. There were no more beatings.

Abu-Khalil believes in the peace process, however meager its results may seem. He will continue his struggle for peace, as he pledged in a Hebrew song that he wrote in prison:

I have already promised

In my past, the olives the grass,

If the cuffs on my wrists and ankles are tightened.

I shall continue

To play the old violin.

Between the First World and the Third

Can the Israel-Palestine conflict be resolved now? The problem is not just extremists of the sort I encountered in Hebron. who do not need to shed much blood to arouse suspicions and hatreds. The question is whether parity, or its semblance, can be achieved between these two peoples.

The military checkpoints between Israel and the territories. along what Israelis call the Stitch Line. separate the First World from the Third World. Why, after twenty-seven years of occupation, is the gap still so wide? According to Israeli statistics, an average Israeli family of four pays $1,700 a month for goods and services: in the occupied territories, the estimated average is $200 a month for a family of ten. The Israelis could have achieved peace with the Palestinians, a strikingly well-educated people, if they had shared with them the opportunities offered to Jewish citizens. If the Arab minority in Israel had made peace with the Jewish State. the Palestinians in the territories could do the same.

This did not happen and probably never will. The Israelis have never wanted to become part of the Middle East. Israel's cultural links are with Europe and the United States, and Israeli society has a phobic attitude toward anything Middle Eastern. The fear of being Middle Eastern is so powerful that it can be credited with the recent agreement. The Israeli Left's most convincing argument for peace with the Palestinians was the fear that the occupation was creating a binational state in which Arabs constitute about 40 per cent of the population. Environment Minister Yossi Sarid of Meretz. then the loudest voice on the so-called Left, issued warning after warning against this eventuality.

Israeli right-wingers charge, with some justice. that the Left is composed of bigoted intellectuals who want to rid Israel of Arabs because they fear them and despise them. From this perspective. there is not much difference between the Left and the extreme Right, whose formula for solving the conflict is the "willful transfer" of Palestinians to Arab countries.

People on the Left often express their longings for the pre-1967 Israel, when an Arab was a rare sight on the streets of Tel Aviv and when Jewish immigrants from Arab countries had little influence in politics. Such anti-Eastern sentiments peaked in the 1983 election campaign, which ignited a cultural war between the elitist Left and the rest of the country. That war, fought in newspaper columns, is still traumatic to many Israelis who wanted to believe that Israel had built an egalitarian society.

Palestinian fears of being totally disenfranchised in any deal with Israel are substantiated by the fact that after forty-six years of Israeli independence and presumable equality, no Israeli Arab has been appointed as a minister or supreme-court justice. The twelve-member supreme court has never had more than one justice of Middle Eastern origin.

The fear of being it Middle Eastern nation breeds another fear - of social chaos once the attention of Israelis turns away from the Palestinian "threat." Forty-six years of independence and $100 billion in financial aid, as well as a very high tax rate, have not produced the enlightened society envisioned from biblical times through the days of modern Zionism. Israel has too many poor and undereducated people.

The Palestinians and the 27 per cent of Israelis who live below the poverty line could have been spared much suffering had Israel been compelled to sober up after the lightning victory in 1967. It could have begun then to face up to the formidable problems confronting it. But the victory of the Holocaust survivors warmed the hearts of Jews everywhere, especially in the United States. Israel became their pet country.

Israel should have done what its founder, David Ben Gurion, an old, emaciated man in 1967, thought it should: Get out of the occupied territories and negotiate a peace settlement. The victorious Israelis, however, suddenly gained political power in Washington, through the arm-twisting of many Jewish organizations, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC lobbying, especially during the reign of the Likud governments, resulted in more American aid and more arms to a regime that became ever more dependent on Washington, yet forced its will on its chief benefactor.

Meanwhile, most of the money that the Jewish agency invested in the settlements in the occupied territories came from American Jews. Now, as always, the settlements are the most conspicuous obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Did an old Holocaust survivor on retirement in Miami intend to disenfranchise a Palestinian family with the money that she gave the United Jewish Appeal? Probably not, but that was certainly the effect of her philanthropy.