The Yellow Wind.

• Author: Horwitz, Tony

The Yellow Wind. David Grossman. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $17.95. It is a measure of the gulf separating Palestinians and Israelis that David Grossman's mission in The Yellow Wind seems so extra-ordinary. Grossman, an Israeli journalist and novelist, set off last year on a seven-week tour of the towns, villages, and refugee camps of the occupied West Bank. Almost all the places he visited lie within an hour's drive of his home in Jerusalem. Yet during 20 years of Israeli occupation, Grossman, like the vast majority of his countrymen, had rarely ventured into his neighbor's communities, except in an Army uniform. "I began to think of that kidney-shaped expanse of land, the West Bank, as an organ transplanted into my body against my wishes," he writes of the period before his journey. "I wanted to go to the places that haunted me most."

Everywhere, Grossman records the toll of the past 20 years on both occupier and occupied. In Jerusalem, soldiers tell of a hate-filled colleague biting off pieces of Arab prisoners' ears. In a Palestinian classroom, a tiny boy aims a plastic stick at a Jewish visitor and shoots; his teachers watch proudly. "We are against Arafat," one of the teachers says, "because Arafat wants peace. We want a solution by force."

For anyone who has visited the West Bank during the current uprising, Grossman's grim portrait is both credible and depressingly familiar. Seeing is believing: that Israelis do hit old women with truncheons; that gun-toting settlers do threaten and kill their Arab neighbors; that the homes of the accused may be bulldozed with 15 minutes' warning.

As an Israeli, Grossman is constantly forced to match what he sees against his own life long...