There goes the neighborhood By Berel Wein (November 23) One of the great shocks to Israeli society emanating from the current Palestinian violence is the behavior of our Arab neighbors toward Jewish neighborhoods and villages. The only way to describe it is bitterly disappointing. This applies not only to Yasser Arafat's Arabs - whose enormous sense of frustration and anger at the corrupt, brutal, and dictatorial regime they are forced to live under is poured out against the Jews as a safety-valve - but also to the Israeli Arabs. Encouraged by the demagoguery of the Arab MKs and by the bleating breast- beating of the leftist media regarding Israeli "injustices," our Arab fellow citizens and close neighbors have also turned violent. They have clearly and openly declared their allegiance and identification with Arafat - though their benefits and welfare still come from Ehud Barak. All over the country, on both sides of the Green Line, there is amazement and wonderment as to how supposedly good neighbors of decades-long standing turned into vicious killers and rioters. How, indeed? One of the recurrent themes in all Holocaust memoirs is the amazed horror of the Jews of Europe at the behavior of their own "good" neighbors. In many towns and cities in Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine, it was the local population that did most of the dirty and violent work against the Jews even before the Germans standardized the killing. In the small town in Lithuania where my father came from, a town where Jews had lived for five centuries in close neighborliness with the gentile population, not one Jew survived the onslaught of their neighbors in 1941. Holocaust survivors told me how the non-Jewish neighbors of their town stood and cheered as the Germans methodically rounded up the Jews and shipped them off to their deaths. All of these Jews mentioned that there had been excellent commercial and even social relationships with these neighbors before the Holocaust. Yet, at the moment of test and decision, these non-Jews (with rare but holy exceptions) became killers and pogromists. Only at that awful moment of human choice did it become clear that the non-Jews of this city, town, village, county or country had never been good neighbors! And it is that realization that caused the shock to their Jewish victims - a shock from which most survivors have never recovered. The guilt-laden Jewish Israeli intelligentsia, shocked by the uncivilized and undemocratic behavior of the Arabs - which living in our society was supposed to have eradicated - immediately rushes to the microphones and/or the op-ed pages with a mea culpa. It must be our fault that our neighbors do not truly love us. We must be guilty of terrible crimes against them in order to provoke such violent behavior. Therefore our media leave no stone unturned in searching to record all Arab sob stories, accurate or exaggerated or even invented out of whole cloth, in order to explain to themselves and to us unwashed, insensitive Jews the just cause of the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs. It is considered primitive and unintelligent to imagine that they really do not want to be good neighbors. It cannot be that their education and culture preclude neighborliness. To say such things is bigotry. If they are not the good neighbors that the Left promised us they would be, then somehow we Jews must be guilty of not allowing them to be good neighbors. And this hogwash is purveyed to us incessantly, even in the midst of all the neighborly violence and bloodshed that is currently being inflicted on us. The great American poet Robert Frost, who lived in taciturn Yankee New England, stated that "good fences make good neighbors." The idea of unilateral separation from the Arabs therefore sounds very appealing. However, like all simplistic answers - "we here and they there" - unilateral separation is not really feasible or practical. The Arabs and the Jews, the settlers and the Palestinians, we and our neighbors are inseparably intertwined in this small land and intolerable situation. It may be that there is little if anything that we can do to change the true and sometimes deeply hidden animosity of our neighbors toward us. After all, the seeds of the Holocaust planted by the pogroms of the Crusades and the Black Death lay dormant in European soil for centuries before sprouting in the 20th century. There was nothing in Jewish society or behavior that justified the behavior of non-Jewish European society during the years of World War II. All the wonderful stories about the gentle "Shabbos goy" and the peasants who begged the rabbis for blessings were irrelevant when the opportunity for a Final Solution to "the Jewish problem" presented itself. There is a frightening lesson here about the tenacity of hatred and the perfidy of neighbors. It is only fear of retaliation and deterrence, tenacity of will and purpose, patience and spirit that impresses unfriendly neighbors. It is the realization by our Arab neighbor that the other party is not going to give up and move, that pogroms are no longer allowable, and that the Jewish neighbor is in no way inferior to his Arab counterpart, that can then begin to build Frost's magic fence. In trying to be good neighbors, we Israelis should also realize the dangers of long-planted, unreasoning and unjustified seeds of hatred that still drive our neighbors. By seeing that reality for what it truly is, we can deal with the situation and yet hope for a day when our neighborhood, if not completely peaceful, will at least be as quiet and safe as possible.