Unease in Zion the Siege: the Saga of Israel and Zionism by Conor Cruise O'Brien Simon & Schuster; 798 pages; $24.95

By R.Z. Sheppard

As Ireland's representative to United Nations discussions of Palestinian refugees, Conor Cruise O'Brien sat between Israel and Iraq. That was 30 years ago, and the refugee problem, once bad enough, has grown worse than anyone would have imagined. O'Brien, a former member of the Irish parliament and ex- editor in chief of the Observer of London, now suggests that a solution to Middle East anguish may not even be possible. That so bleak a view is the basis for so enlightening a book can be attributed to the author's capabilities as a historian, journalist and political analyst, not to mention storyteller.

Unlike a purely political epic, The Saga of Israel and Zionism has a broad spiritual dimension. For nearly 2,000 years a dispersed people kept telling one another, "Next year in Jerusalem." That turned out to be 1948, the year Israel actually became the autonomous homeland of the Jews. It is an oft-told story and one that is usually orchestrated for axes and grindstones. O'Brien is diplomatic but not impartial; he accepts the rationale of Israel and its right to defend itself against surrounding enemies. He sympathizes with Palestinians who feel they have had to pay for the persecution of Europe's Jews, but also believes that the Arabs are the victims of the vanity and fantasies of their leaders. Above all, he appreciates the sweeping drama of the return: "a train of efforts and events so strange and unprecedented as to appear to some almost miraculous and to others literally miraculous."

Still others, O'Brien among them, find bitter ironies, particularly when the ideals of religion are made to serve the expediencies of nationalism. In the Middle East, as in the author's own Ireland, mixing God and politics has been a formula for intractability. O'Brien carefully works his way to this point, noting that rhetoric does not always reflect reality. For example, the Jewish state derives its reason for being from ancient texts that have little relationship to liberal theories about the consent of the governed. Yet Israel is a vigorous democracy. By contrast, the 1968 Palestinian National Covenant calls for the establishment of a secular democracy even though, as O'Brien notes, "the rulers of the region, in practice, assume and enforce the consent of those they govern, as the rulers of the region have done from time immemorial."

The clarity of The Siege stems from its strong attachment to Western intellectual values. The book is also in the best tradition of readable historical narrative. O'Brien recounts the varieties of 19th century anti- Semitism in Europe and Russia. He follows the emergence of leaders like Theodor Herzl ("I shall be the Parnell of the Jews") and Chaim Weizmann, who successfully lobbied Britain to pass the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The document was an important seal of approval for Zionism, although His Majesty's government had ulterior motives. Among them was the need to get American Jews behind full U.S. involvement in World War I.

The linkage between Hitler's Holocaust and the birth of Israel is familiar. Less so is the period between the two World Wars, when Jews began immigrating to Palestine, then under British authority. As O'Brien describes it, the Arabs were slow to resent the newcomers. But by the late '20s there were outbreaks of violence. In August 1929 a Jewish boy was stabbed to death after kicking a ball into an Arab garden. Zionists demonstrated, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem delivered an incendiary sermon, and his followers went on a rampage. The death toll was 133 Jews and 110 Arabs. The attacks compounded hatreds and led the Jewish minority to establish fighting cadres. Too soon, both sides could invoke memories of massacres to feed the mutual enmity and justify hard measures. Today, for example, Israel answers terrorism with "asymmetrical response," a variation on biblical justice that amounts to an eye for a tooth.

Could Israel buy peace with territory won in the Six-Day and October wars? O'Brien has his doubts, despite the success of the Camp David treaty, which returned the Sinai to Egypt. The only bold step that might get the attention of competing Arab factions would be Israel's withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. And that, says O'Brien, is only "an agreeable international pipe dream." His own reverie is for a "tacit accommodation" with Syria, the most powerful opponent on Israel's border. That proposal calls for Israel to abandon Lebanon to Syria. It in turn would use its P.L.O. faction to leash fedayeen terrorists. Syria's reward would be the eventual return of the Golan Heights.

The evidence of O'Brien's own book casts doubt on such an accommodation. For one thing, it seems too simple for the entangling Middle East. For another, the plan does not include a solution for the Palestinian population. Without that, a state of siege would seem assured for years to come. In the meantime, this excellent book should be translated into Hebrew and Arabic immediately.