Between two homes and two peoples: as a boy, Muhammad Hussein--the son of a Palestinian father and an Israeli mother--confronted Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. Today, he's a sergeant in the Israeli army.

• Author: Bennett, James
• Position: International - Cover Story

At first glance, the photograph of an anonymous helmeted soldier in combat gear, crouching in the sand, M-16 rifle in hand, looked like another of the countless images published in Israeli newspapers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--this one taken during an Israeli offensive into the Gaza Strip last fall. Yet the truths of the image were more complicated than that. To begin with, there is the question of the soldier's name.

To his Israeli, Jewish mother, Stella Peretz, and his friends in Dimona, the Israeli town where he went to high school, the soldier is Yossi Peretz. To his Palestinian, Muslim father, Adel Hussein, and those who knew him in Nur Shams, the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank where he grew up, he is Muhammad Hussein.

To his divorced parents, when they speak of him together--and they seem to speak of little else at such times--he is simply "the child," their only one.

It may seem that this child of twin identity was given a rare gift: the ability to understand both Israelis and Palestinians at a depth few reach. But he sees his story as a tragedy.

TORN BETWEEN TWO SIDES

In his 21 years, Sergeant Hussein first lived peacefully as a young boy in a Palestinian village, visiting relatives in Israel at will. Later, he donned the uniform of a Palestinian fighter and chased Israeli soldiers with other boys, stones in hand. After his parents divorced, he moved to Israel with his mother, finished high school, and joined the Israeli army.

To be near his son, his father left his Palestinian town and lived as an illegal immigrant in Israel. When an Israeli policeman arrested him in January, he was briefly deported to the West Bank, where his son round him and brought him back to Israel.

Sergeant Hussein firmly identifies himself as an Israeli and a Jew, though he chose to serve in the army under his birth name (Muhammad Hussein). Yet he says he belongs with both his parents. "Once I thought, 'This is where my mom and dad are, and this is where I'll build my life,' " Sergeant Hussein says. Now he fears his mother and father will end up on different sides of an irrevocable boundary. "And I don't know where I am in all this."

AN ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN MARRIAGE

It's hard to tell where stories of lives warped or ended by the conflict between Jews and Arabs begin: in the Arab Israeli War of 1967 that led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip; in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 at Israel's creation; in the Old Testament story of Abraham's divided family and the origins of Judaism and Islam.

Sergeant Hussein's parents met in 1973, two runaways from broken homes, in a Tel...