ONE FRIDAY EVENING THE MUSE DESCENDED ON FIMA, AND HE entertained the company with the story of how he was called up for reserve duty during the Six Days’ War and dumped on a barren hilltop just outside Arnona with a painter and a couple of university professors. They were given a pair of binoculars and a field telephone and told not to fall asleep. On the next hill some Jordanian soldiers were setting up mortars and a machine gun; they were going about it calmly, like boy scouts at a camp. When they had finished all their preparations, they lay down and started firing at Fima and his pals. “Can you guess,” Fima asked, “what my first thought was? No, it wasn’t to run away. It wasn’t to fire back, either. No. It was simply to phone the police and complain that there were some madmen shooting at us. Even though they could see perfectly well that there were people here on this hill. What did they take me for, a friend or acquaintance? Had I seduced their wives? What did they know about me anyway? I had to get the police to come right away and take care of them. That was how I felt.”

There was a news item in Ha’arets that seemed to hint at a slight softening in the government’s position. A kind of sign of readiness to rethink at least one element in the official line. Fima saw in this a confirmation of his theory about tiny movements. He therefore convened the Revolutionary Council for a short morning meeting in Tsvika’s seminar room at the Mount Scopus campus. He announced that he had changed his mind and decided to put off flying to Tunis. This time the peace process must begin not with an operatic overture, in the style of Begin and Sadat, but with an exchange of small gestures that might gradually break down the barriers of hatred and anger. Or set in motion the first stirrings of an emotional détente. Joycean ripples rather than Shakespearean breakers. Tropisms rather than cataclysms. The proposal on the agenda is the following. The PLO agrees to assist in the rescue of the remaining Jews of Ethiopia. Or Yemen. We send a letter of thanks to their Tunis headquarters, thus opening up a chink in the deadlock. Tsvi is wrong to hope for U.S. pressure. And Uri Gefen is definitely wrong in maintaining that the situation has to get much worse before there can be any change for the better. Both attitudes express the tacit inclination of the doveish left to wait resignedly for a change in reality instead of getting up and doing something. Even if it is something limited.