Conflicts and contradictions.

• Author: Rubin, Trudy

Conflicts and Contradictions.

Meron Benvenisti. Villard Books, $15.95. Few Israelis are more qualified than Meron Benvenisti to offer insights into where Israel has come from and what it has become and its tortuous relationship with the Palestinian Arabs. A Palestine native whose relatives have lived in Jerusalem since the sixteenth century, Benvenisti served for years as the very visible Jerusalem deputy mayor in charge of Arab affairs.

A burly man with a shock of electric grey hair, he is known for his brilliant mind and his knack for offending all sides with controversial analyses, like his argument (made as a man of the socialist left) that Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has become irreversible for the foreseeable future. Benvenisti now runs an institute funded by American foundations and dedicated to gathering and studying data on the West Bank that has become possibly the best source of hardcore and detailed facts on the impact of occupation.

Given this background, Conflicts and Contradictions is far less gripping than one might have hoped, although still peppered with interesting theses and fascinating, though too infrequent, anecdotes. The problem, as hinted at by the opaque and tractlike title, is that the author never quite decides whether his book is a memoir or a piece of political analysis explaining Israel's tortured relationship with the Palestinians. In the process it never quite fulfills the promise of either option.

Yet as food for fruther controversial thoughts, the book is well worth reading, reflecting the malaise felt at midlife by many members of Mr. Benvenisti's "lost generation,' the children of the founding fathers. Raised on a diet of utopian socialism, they believed that they were the elite born to build a new form of humanitarian society. But they have discovered painfully that the third generation of Israelis, many of them children of post-independence emigrants from Arab countries, neither understand their values nor fined them relevant.

Benvenisti describes the passionate search for rootedness in Palestine, undertaken by the secular socialist generation of his parents, summed up by the near worship of "moledet' or homeland. It was expressed in his generation by a passion to till the soil and to possess it through archeology, nature conservations, and emphasis on exploring the outdoors with the Bible as a guidebook.

But this secular passion for the homeland provided no adequate guidelines...