Tel Aviv, Oct. 7--Some of them came in the '80s with a dream. They wanted to plant a garden in the wilderness.
  Some of them came after the 1905 revolution that failed in Czarist Russia, for then there were pogroms.
  Some of them came in the '30s fleeing Adolph Hitler's Germany and some much later, barely alive from the camps at Auschwitz and Belson and Dachau and the other resorts of death. 
  A million more began to pour in after 1948, because then the dream had come true. They didn't need to wander the earth any more. There was a garden in the wilderness. It was stained with human blood but wonderful things grew in it.
  You have to consider all this today when you think about the mounting trouble between Israel and the Arab nations. It is very important. It tells you why the little Jewish state is utterly tranquil on what could be the edge of the battle. It tells you why life goes on here, why nobody talks about war but the men who have to run it.
  There's another big item, too.
  There were Arab-Jewish riots, here in 1921, in 1929, in 1933 and from 1936 to 1939 and there was a small war in 1947 and a bigger one in 1948 when the British mandate ran out and Israel was born and now for four years there has been bloodletting. On the Gaza Strip. So this is the drama as before--the same terrible, tragic drama. Israelis who have been here down through the years put it this way:
  "We have always fought the Arabs. We have never really had peace with them. It is no different now. If we have to fight again a real war then we have to fight. We have something here that we built, ourselves with our own hands. We have to keep it."
  If you talk to those who came from Germany or slipped through the Iron Curtain from Romania or Bulgaria they will say:
  "It is a very simple thing. We cannot run any more. This is our home. We have to fight for it. We have no place to go."
  But you have to draw it out of them.
  Nobody stops you in the streets or on the farms or in the factories to tell you these things. They're just as likely to talk about whatever Hollywood western or musical is in town or about Nat King Cole's "A Blossom Fell," or the high price of food, or maybe about the burning bright promise of great oil stores in the Negev.
   Maj. Daniel Gov, 34, a veteran of Britain's Jewish brigade in World War II and a captain in the Israel army in the 1948 war of liberation, offered me this explanation today:
 "You can't expect to find any unusual excitement among the people in this country. First Palestine and then Israel, the business of fighting with the Arabs goes all the way back to the time the resettlement started, so many years ago."
   There was always someone getting killed in the streets, in buses, in the fields, on the border. You talk about war and it doesn't have much impact on everyday life. In a sense there's always war and always a readiness to fight and it's not hard to understand.
"The people have the feeling that they are for the first time among their own. They can become anything they want. They are free to talk straight. They left another life behind. They'll die for this one if they must. How else can it be?" 
  The major is the Army's official spokesman, but he must speak for the people, too. I haven't found anyone who says it any other way. There is courage and spirit here without limit. Peace would be good, too, for a change. It would be very good.