It was a reasonable question, to be sure. If, after all, what Yitzhak Rabin once called "protracted war" remains Israel's only future, the country's young WILL quickly move off to Los Angeles. Yet, if, for the forseeable future, intermittent war is truly inevitable, should this fact be disguised? Should Israel's leaders sanitize the truth, so as to keep Israel's young people from seeking more hospitable American venues? I maintained, to the ambassador, that the truth is the truth - and that it cannot and must not be hidden.

In another part of our discussion I lamented the post-Zionist character of the Israeli state, and the diminishing Jewishness of the country. The ambassador objected strenuously. Israel remains, he said unequivocally, very much a Jewish State. How did he know this? I asked, recalling the Government's policies on Jerusalem, Jewish land, Jewish values and Jewish settlements. "Because," replied GEN. Ivry, "on Yom Kippur the entire country stops its normal business and goes to the synagogue."

I inquired also about Israel's newly formed National Security Council - first headed by AMB. Ivry. When, I asked, will this Council begin to provide much needed strategic counsel and organization? "In a few years," replied the ambassador, identifying bureaucratic and political obstructions that were pretty much generic. "But Israel doesn't have a few years," I complained. The ambassador disagreed.

Just before the final minutes of our meeting, it occurred to me that the Government of Israel - and its representatives - have no use for historical memory. They simply cannot imagine a planet without Israel. They take it for granted that the State of Israel is necessarily forever. But they are wrong, incontestably and unforgivably wrong. Throughout history, civilizations far richer and older have been ground to dust and burned into oblivion. And all this long before the arrival of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Hope endures in Israel, and this is as it must be. The ambassador is completely correct in this point of view. But at this uniquely fragile stage in Israel's history, as it enters into a Clinton-contrived summit with Arab parties committed to Israel's annihilation (for the PLO, ALL of Israel is "Occupied Palestine"), hope should be sung quietly, in an undertone. Israelis have yet to learn that the visible Earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something momentous. Now it is time for Israelis to imagine and reimagine the phantoms of great ships of state, and to understand that the disasters that sent them to the botttom of the sea are pertinent warnings for present-day Israel. These disasters should not be ignored.

Our meeting ended on the matter of strategic studies in Israel. The ambassador maintained that the IDF planners were altogether up to the difficult tasks before them. I maintained that Israel now requires a cadre of the most experienced and broadly educated thinkers (rather than "experts"), scholars who realy understand the importance of theoretical knowledge and who are prepared to develop an all-embracing "Master Plan" from which critical strategic and tactical particulars might easily be extrapolated.

The ambassador promised to consider my various points. He had been reading my books and articles, he said, for almost twenty years, and knew full well my apprehensions, warnings and concerns. It was a gracious and courteous meeting. I hope, in some small way, that it might even make a difference.