None of this made much sense to me. All you needed was a map to see that Israel was a little sliver of a country, surrounded by more than a dozen retrograde, tyrannical Arab regimes. In June 1967, Egypt’s dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had thrown the UN force out of Sinai, sent his army to Israel’s border, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and called on his brother Arabs to join in a war to exterminate the Jews. Israel had no international support after its only ally, France, abruptly switched sides. After standing alone and routing three Arab armies, Israel had immediately offered to trade "land for peace." But the Arabs, gathered at a summit in Khartoum, emphatically announced three noes: "no recognition, no negotiations, no peace."

In arguing these elemental points with my fellow leftists, I realised I didn’t know enough about the country that I now felt morally compelled to defend. So in the summer of 1970, I left for Israel—my first visit since immigrating to America as a three-year-old in 1939.

It was love at first sight, the beginning of an involvement that changed my life and, ultimately, made me realise how untenable were my left-wing politics. I saw a vital, open society, with virtues that any liberal-minded person should have cheered. Israel was democratic; it was pluralistic; it was egalitarian; it was productive. For progressives, there was a bonus: Israel had kibbutzim, hundreds of collective farms spread across the country—the only socialist experiment of the twentieth century that actually worked (at least for a while) and didn’t end up killing people.

And Israel had all this even though it faced a daily threat to its existence. At the time, a war of attrition with Egypt raged across the ceasefire lines. Israeli soldiers were dying at the Suez Canal almost daily. Palestinian terrorists regularly crossed the borders to murder innocent Israeli citizens.

But Israel’s civil society flourished. In its dozen or so daily newspapers (the most, per capita, of any nation in the world), you could find every possible opinion about every issue. I was able to have open-ended discussions with leading figures from across the political spectrum: leftist critics of the government, spokesmen for the ruling Labor Party, and right-wing hawks—including two of the architects of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, Ariel Sharon and Ezer Weizman.

One of the leftist leaders I met was Ran Cohen, a 32-year-old officer in an elite paratrooper unit. (He’s now a member of Israel’s Knesset, representing the leftist Meretz Party.) At his militantly socialist kibbutz, Cohen told me that he admired the American Black Panthers and sympathised with Third World revolutionaries like Fidel Castro. He complained that the unending Arab threats to Israel’s existence made it impossible to organise politically around the class divisions in Israeli society, like a good leftist should.

I got a very different perspective on Israel’s situation from Sharon, then the commander of the southern front, directing the skirmishes with the Egyptian army at the Suez Canal and trying to keep a lid on Palestinian terror in the Gaza Strip. With two other visitors in tow, the general gave me a personal tour of Gaza to show how he had pacified that hotbed of terrorism.

As for Ezer Weizman, he gave me a charming but stern lecture, explaining why Israel couldn’t afford to surrender its strategic advantage as long as implacable foes surrounded it. With a shrug and a wave of the hand, he brusquely answered my argument that a more conciliatory approach to the Arabs might work. "It’s easy to be a critic from the safety of Berkeley," he said. "Come and live with us. Then you can join the debate."

When I returned to Berkeley, I wrote about my visit for Ramparts, the flagship publication of the New Left, of which I had been an editor. Thanks to my leftist bona fides on virtually every other issue, I had permission to deviate from the party line on Israel. It was the first and last time that anything remotely sympathetic to the Jewish state appeared in Ramparts or in any other New Left journal.

Still, my article was no ringing endorsement of Israeli policies—only an effort to convince my fellow leftists that Israel was more complicated than their vulgar Marxist categories allowed. I made sure to distance myself from the neoconservative writers whose solidarity with Israel I deemed excessive. I cast them as people whose "tribal loyalties" made them unthinking cheerleaders for every Israeli government policy, as if I were apologising for Israel’s support from the Right. I also couldn’t yet acknowledge something else I had noticed on my brief trip: Israel’s extraordinary achievements in just two decades of independence derived precisely from its embrace of such free-market values as individual merit, entrepreneurship, scientific inquiry, and technological progress.

In any event, I doubt I persuaded a single leftist to change his view. On the other hand, opponents called me a lot of names, of which "Zionist Pig" was the kindest.

The next time I saw Weizman, I was dating his cousin, a Hebrew University theatre student. Then I saw him again at our wedding. Building on his immense popularity as a hero of the Six-Day War, Weizman had just forged a merger between the old-line Liberal Party and Menachem Begin’s right-wing Herut Party, creating a new political organisation, Likud. He would soon become minister of defence in the first non-Labor government in Israel’s history.

I did still agree with Ran Cohen that peace in the Middle East was at least partly up to the Jews—that more generous Israeli government policies, together with some creative diplomacy, might help break the ice with the surrounding Arab states and with the Palestinians. Giving peace a chance—a second and third chance, even—was what most of my wife’s friends at Hebrew University’s theatre department wanted to do. They were on average more than ten years younger than I, and it bemused me somewhat to watch them gravitate toward New Left enthusiasms that I had just left behind in Berkeley.

My views on the Israeli-Arab conflict before long moved away from those of my young university friends. At 6 am on October 6, 1973, a series of sonic booms jolted my wife and me out of bed in our Jerusalem apartment. Her air-force training led her to interpret the bangs as a military mobilisation signal; Israel radio and TV were off the air in observance of Yom Kippur, and many reservists weren’t picking up their phones. A few hours later, we heard the announcement: the Egyptian army was crossing the Suez Canal, and Syrian tanks were rolling across the ceasefire lines on the Golan Heights.

The Israeli government knew that a massive, two-pronged assault loomed, yet delayed calling up reserves and refrained from a pre-emptive attack, in observance of an only-for-Israel rule of war, stating that Israel had to absorb the first blow to prove to the world that it was fighting a defensive war. America did not want to give its Arab clients, especially the oil-producing nations, cause for alarm. Moreover, with the cold war at its height, US-Soviet rivalry in the Middle East was intense. The Soviets had their own client states in the region and might intervene if Israel defeated them too thoroughly. But the policy of taking the first punch would exact a significant cost in Israeli lives.

Realizing that this would be a big war, I called Terry Smith, the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, and asked if he needed some help. He immediately hired me as a stringer.

At dawn the next morning, I was heading north in a fire-engine red Ford Mustang and learning more lessons about the logistics of Israel’s military predicament. The entire trip to the Golan Heights, where major tank battles already raged, took less than three hours. Along the way, I picked up hitchhikers, clad in military fatigues, trying to reach their units. One was a young professor of nuclear physics at Haifa’s Technion University. Because he was doing military-related research, the government had exempted him from reserve duty. Yet here he was, heading to the front lines to try to find his old paratroop unit.

I drove the professor up to the northern Galilee region, dropped him off at a designated military crossroads, and wished him luck. The soldiers walked a short way down the road to a military encampment, where the reserve units could pick up their equipment. They then travelled five miles or so down the road and crossed the Benot Yacov (Daughters of Jacob) bridge, which separated Israel from the Golan Heights.

It was the closest I would get to the battlefield that day. Military police were turning reporters back. I decided to drive up to the highest point in the area, a famous biblical archaeology site called Hazor. It was a brilliantly clear day. I sat on a little knoll off the side of the road and, with binoculars, watched at least part of what turned out to be the war’s decisive tank battle on the Syrian front.

A line of Syrian tanks had reached almost all the way across the Golan Heights to the pre-1967 border with Israel. At one point, a phalanx of Israeli jet fighters roared over my head. I could see them swooping in and dropping ordnance on Syrian tanks. After a few hours of this, the tanks seemed to turn and retreat back east.

From my interviews with soldiers later that day, I learned that I had witnessed the deepest point of penetration of the massive Syrian armoured column. The Syrians had actually enveloped an Israeli army base at Kfar Nafakh, just five miles west of the Benot Yacov bridge. When the Syrian tanks broke through the outer line of defence, the base commander, Raful Eitan, ordered a hasty retreat. Eitan was a legendary, battle-hardened officer. The sight of him abandoning an outpost sent shock waves through the ranks. The soldiers knew that if the Syrian tanks had broken through at Kfar Nafakh, the road to the Benot Yacov bridge would have been open. From there, it was just a stone’s throw into the heart of northern Israel.

My story about the Syrians advancing to Kfar Nafakh made the Times front page the next day. I stayed in the north until the end of the war’s first week. By then, some of the Times’s experienced war correspondents had flown in and the paper no longer needed me.

On my last day, I was able to drive across the entire Golan Heights. I passed the charred wrecks of dozens of Syrian and Israeli tanks, and the smell of burning flesh still hung in the air. I only came to a stop at an Israeli military police roadblock at the western edge of the Golan Heights.

After the initial Syrian successes of the battle’s first two days, the Israelis had mauled their enemy so badly that the plain leading to Damascus was wide open. The Israeli army could have reached the gates of the city in a day. But the Kremlin threatened to intervene to save Hafez al-Assad’s regime. The United States then conveyed to Israel that it must not move its forces past the pre– October 6 ceasefire lines. Once again, the rigged Middle East rules were in full effect: the Arab states could break ceasefires without fear of international censure; Israel could defend itself and repel the Arab attacks, but if it made the war so costly to the aggressors as to deter the next one it would meet with widespread global condemnation.

Israel’s difficult predicament became even clearer to me when I got a chance to visit the other war front. A few days after returning from the Golan Heights, I received a call from Ehud Olmert, a friend of mine in Jerusalem. Olmert would go on to become Jerusalem’s mayor and then a cabinet minister in Ariel Sharon’s current government. In 1973, though, he worked for one of the small right-wing parties in the Knesset. He told me that he planned to drive down to the Suez Canal and try to get to Ariel Sharon’s command post on the canal’s west bank. Did I want to come along? I said, why not?

Starting out from Jerusalem at dawn, we reached the canal by noon. Somehow, using Olmert’s Knesset credentials and my press pass, we talked our way past several Israeli army checkpoints. We received permission to drive his car over one of the pontoon bridges that Sharon’s troops had laid down over the canal a week earlier. At a desperate moment for the Israeli forces, Sharon had found a gap in the Egyptian line, crossed over to the canal’s west bank, encircled the Egyptian Third Army, and turned the tide of the war in the south.

When we got there, I realised again how small Israel was, and the extent to which its wars are family matters. One of the first people I met at Sharon’s headquarters was Gideon Altschuler, another of my wife’s cousins. Another familiar face in the camp was Yossi, the 30-something proprietor of the Taamon cafe. Seeing one of bohemian Jerusalem’s best-known characters in Sharon’s lair was so incongruous that I blurted out, "What are you doing here, Yossi?" — to which he naturally replied: "What are you doing here, Sol?" Yossi explained that, by luck of the draw, he had wound up assigned to the headquarters unit of the division Sharon had patched together during the first two days of the war. It was amazing to hear this Jerusalem peacenik, who would never vote for Sharon, sing his praises as a battlefield commander.

In the evening, Sharon invited Olmert and me into his trailer for a snack. The conversation was off the record, and in any event my Hebrew was inadequate. Still, I caught the general drift—Sharon was venting about the absurd situation Israel now found itself in. Because Israel had to absorb the Egyptians’ first blow to appease international opinion, scores of its best young men had to die in the lightly fortified strong points on the east bank of the canal.

In all, Israel lost 2,400 men in the delayed effort to repulse the Egyptians and Syrians and throw them back to the ceasefire lines.

I remained haunted by the lesson I had learned in 1973 on the Golan Heights and at the Suez Canal about Israel’s vulnerability. Israel had zero margin of error—literally, it could not survive the loss of one war. The Arab regimes had nothing to lose except the lives of thousands of their own soldiers, which they were cavalier about anyway, and some treasure, which they could always replace with the help of one of the big powers or the Saudis. Thus, they were free to try and try again.

Nevertheless, I still found myself suppressing such dark thoughts, because they led to politically incorrect conclusions. Right-thinking people had to assume a certain degree of rationality on all sides. They had to assume that with enough goodwill all differences could be overcome—after all, the US and the Soviet Union were now pursuing detente; Richard Nixon had even gone to China.

This orthodoxy held that anything called a "peace process" was always better than war. Despite all of the failed peace overtures of the past, wasn’t it worth trying yet one more time? To think otherwise, to believe that there might be something inherently violent and unreasonable in Arab Muslim political culture was—well, racist.

Rather than indulge such heretical thoughts, Israeli intellectuals found it easier to look critically at their own country’s culture and history. They produced revisionist narratives of the nation’s founding and ethos. Historians uncovered archival evidence—surprise—that the Israeli government and military’s actions were not always pure. In other words, Palestinians also had legitimate historical grievances.

And who but a fringe of settler fanatics wanted to rule forever millions of Palestinians on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? My wife’s entire family now belonged to the Peace Now movement. Even Ezer Weizman became a leading dove and resigned from the Likud.

It’s amazing how quickly public opinion in Israel had shifted on these issues. After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s official position was that it would never relinquish the militarily strategic outpost at Sharm al-Sheikh, which controlled access to the Red Sea. Moshe Dayan expressed this national consensus: "Better Sharm al-Sheikh without peace, than peace without Sharm al-Sheikh." But it took only one visit to Jerusalem by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat for all of Israel to swoon and forget Sharm al-Sheikh. Thus, in 1978, the allegedly "right-wing," allegedly "rejectionist" government of Menachem Begin evacuated every square meter of the Sinai Peninsula in return for a cold peace with Egypt. It was Ariel Sharon, Begin’s defence minister at the time, who ordered the forcible removal of all Jewish settlers from the Sinai. In the 1980s and 1990s, two separate Israeli governments offered a similar "land for peace" deal to Syria. Given what I had seen on the Golan Heights in 1973, I found this gesture astonishingly optimistic—and I secretly sighed with relief when Hafez al-Assad rejected the offer.

Then, under the 1993 Oslo agreements, the Israeli government allowed the terrorist organisations to return to the West Bank and Gaza to begin creating the infrastructure of a future Palestinian state. Before there was even a peace treaty or ironclad security arrangements, Israel handed over tens of thousands of weapons to Yasser Arafat’s militias, supposedly for "peacekeeping." All the while, the Palestine National Covenant stated explicitly that the goal of the liberation struggle was not a state next to Israel but rather the replacement of Israel with a Palestinian state from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River.

Why did so many well-meaning Israelis and Americans believe in the early 1990s that a reasonable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians was within grasp? One answer is that the Soviet empire had just collapsed, and the cold war was over. In Israel, as in other places, hope arose for a peace dividend. For Israel, the dividend included the fact that its traditional enemies, big countries like Syria and Iraq, could no longer count on Soviet military aid, so they were less of a threat. Israel could now take more chances trying to solve the problem of the West Bank and Gaza.

Among those who saw through the illusions of the time were the neoconservatives, of whom I had been so wary in the seventies. From the beginning, they viewed Oslo as a trap that would lead not to peace. And they made their case in the face of almost overwhelming support for Oslo within the Jewish community and the Washington political establishment. I vividly recall a dinner I had at an East Side restaurant with neoconservative dignitaries Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, shortly after the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. Podhoretz and Decter were in despair, convinced that Oslo would lead inexorably to another major war with the Arabs, and on terms far more disadvantageous to Israel.

Things didn’t turn out exactly as the neoconservatives predicted—with, first, the creation of a Palestinian state, which would then become a springboard for another assault on Israel by the Arab states—but they correctly assessed the pathological nature of the Palestinian liberation movement. Like the premature anti-fascists of the 1930s, who understood the radical evil faced by the democracies of those days, the neoconservatives have had the bad taste to show us what we wanted to avoid admitting—that this conflict is not about disputed territories. It is about Israel’s right to survive as a democratic Jewish state. And after September 11, it’s clear that it is also about whether the Islamo-fascist movement that is at war with our civilisation will succeed in making the Middle East safe for obscurantism and tyranny.

The late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban once famously noted that the Palestinians "have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity." It was a clever line—except that it implies that the problem with Palestinian leadership is absentmindedness. In fact, Palestinian leaders have carefully thought out everything about the current suicide-bombing campaign, with the far from unreasonable expectation that it would bring tangible benefits to the Palestinian cause. After all, that cause was never as popular in the chancelleries of Europe and the campuses of America as it became after the first round of suicide bombings.

All of Israel’s concessions and offers of "land for peace" have not only failed to appease its enemies; they have actually intensified hatred for the Jewish state and for Jews period. Thirty years ago, when I first started arguing with the Left, only a few groups overtly supported the Palestinian cause. Today, even as the Palestinian movement indoctrinates its children into a death cult, anti-Israel sentiment has reached fever pitch even in the most respectable intellectual and academic precincts: Harvard University’s English department invites a poet who called for the murder of Jews on the West Bank; Columbia University’s Middle East studies program becomes a virtual ministry of information for the PLO. The most popular guest speakers on American campuses are Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, both advocating the dismantling of Israel.

Yet what I saw moved me deeply and renewed my hope that the Israeli people would bend but not break. I felt this most clearly on the afternoon we spent on Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Street with some of my wife’s family. These ten or so blocks in Tel Aviv’s oldest neighbourhood have been transformed over the past decade into one of the city’s most popular gathering spots, with the dilapidated Bauhaus-style buildings spruced up, and new boutiques and cafes opening for business. Every Friday afternoon, Sheinkin Street becomes the closest thing that this gritty city on the Mediterranean can call a movable feast—and the celebrations have continued without stop through one of the deadliest assaults on its civilian population that any free society has ever had to endure.

The Sheinkin Street cafes overflowed, the sidewalks and streets full of young people pulsed—with families with children, with veteran Tel Avivans, with hawks and doves, with postmodernists and with traditionalists. All knew that the suicide bombers had already struck many times in adjacent neighbourhoods and regularly target popular places like this. So to this visitor, the lively scene represented an uplifting display of the defiance of evil. Indeed, I found myself wishing that George W. Bush could magically be there, because this president understands what many of his supposedly enlightened and articulate critics find so difficult to admit: that there can be political movements, like Islamic terrorism—in which the jihad and the intifada merge—that are so pathological in their hatreds that we can solve the problems they purport to care about only after they are defeated.

That Friday afternoon, Sheinkin Street was more important in understanding what will secure a decent future for the Middle East than any State Department– or UN-crafted "roadmap." That’s why Israel now deserves the support, without apology or equivocation, of every fellow democrat in the world.