PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION : It Was Israel’s Optimists, Not its Cynics, Who Changed History : The budding Mideast peace can teach something to the pessimists who prevail in American politics today.

Not only Jews should celebrate the latest breakthrough toward Middle East peace. The accord signed by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat is one more proof that the cynical realism and sophisticated pessimism that are the hallmarks of American political debate are often unrealistic.

Moral passion and prophetic vision can sometimes break the stalemates imposed by our stereotyped fears of “the other.” When anybody tells you that the selfishness and cynicism that dominate American politics cannot be broken, that it’s “common sense” for people to refuse to move beyond narrow self-interest to embrace larger ethical concerns, tell them about the remarkable transformation that is going on inside Israel.

For years, the Israeli peace movement and its supporters in the United States have been maligned as naive optimists who did not understand that “the Arab mentality” only wants war and conquest. For years the vocal minority of American Jews who control the institutions of the organized Jewish community have denounced as “self-hating” or “disloyal” the tendency of the American Jewish majority to support the exchange of land for peace.

For years, Jews have been told that the biblical injunction to “Remember what was done to us by Amalek,” (the biblical tribe that attacked us in the Sinai when we were vulnerable escapees from Egyptian slavery but later applied to all those who threatened Jewish extermination, from the prime minister of Ahasuerus’ Persia to Hitler) should be applied to the Palestinians.

Not to worry that Israel has one of the most powerful and sophisticated armies in the world, while the Palestinians have none and live under occupation--the terrible enemy would reassert itself, putting Jews into great danger.

Jewish fears were understandable. It’s only 50 years since one out of every three Jews alive in the world were murdered. But one of the many terrible consequences of this trauma is that it paralyzed us and made us exaggerate the power of our enemies and made us so distrustful of our potential allies that at times Jewish paranoia became self-fulfillingly true. The obsession with our vulnerability made it difficult to imagine that anyone was really our friend or that anyone could ever be trusted.

As Jewish life increasingly focused on self-defense, Jewish commitment to the poor and the oppressed was replaced with a narrow focus on “is it good for the Jews?” No wonder, then, that so many younger Jews began to seek spiritual and moral truths outside of their Jewish heritage: the Judaism they had encountered in the organized Jewish community was dominated by pain, a manipulative use of the Holocaust to generate big bucks and blind loyalty to Israeli policies, and a suspicion of anyone who thought that Jewish values implied caring about the poor or the oppressed.

Israel has now begun to chart a courageous new direction for Jewish life. Mutual recognition, validating the rights of “the other,” recognizing the humanity of our enemies--these are steps that break the pattern of mutual hostility that has too often dominated our history.

If the inevitable escalation of provocative acts, both by Palestinian terrorists and by Israeli settlers opposed to the accord, does not succeed in derailing the peace process, we might see an escalation of trust that would provide a basis for the creation of a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. But if Israeli settler violence and civil disobedience plus Palestinian terrorism succeed in frightening Israel back into policies that deny Palestinians the dignity and self-determination that they deserve, we could yet see a disintegration of all that has been accomplished.

And this is the real point: Cynicism and pessimism are never just a description of reality; they create the reality. Conversely, the degree to which we reach for our highest vision and highest hopes makes it more likely that some of that vision will be realized.

This is a moment when all the world should be proud of the state of Israel. It’s never a surprise when those who have been victimized become scared and distrustful. But what the Jewish people have done is to provide a different model--a model of hopefulness and trust. Though the cynics will certainly jump on every setback as “proof” that the hopefulness is “unrealistic,” the Israeli government has shown that sometimes the best Realpolitik is to reject the pessimism and narrow self-interest that pass for common sense in American life, and instead embrace a politics of morality, hopefulness and idealism--what I call the politics of meaning.

If America would allow itself to learn this lesson from Israel, the whole world would benefit.