LEONARD FEIN is a passionate and gifted writer, teacher, and veteran social activist. Mr. Fein served as director of the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, and is the founder of Moment magazine; Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger; and the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy. A Board Member of APN, Mr. Fein facilitates an online conversation which can be found at conversation.peacenow.org.

BEFORE THE WAR, DURING THE WEEKS OF GROWING panic that preceded it, but I hadn't really caught the words. So on June 15th or so, just days after the war had ended, I stood on a Tel Aviv sidewalk outside the music store where I'd bought the sheet music and read them for the first time. And wept.

Yerushalayim shel zahav; Jerusalem of gold: the city "with a wall in its heart," now miraculously reunited, made whole.

It was all so simple and straightforward back then. Goliath had been defeated, and sweet little David (fighter planes in place of slingshot) was singing his newest psalm. His, and ours.

By the time, several months later, that my publisher asked that I add an appropriate postscript to a new edition of my book on Israeli politics, the bloom was off the rose, thorns had begun to appear. I wrote about some of them, but did not imagine how sharp they would soon enough become. And since then, in the 40 long years that have ensued, the roses have died, what's left is only the thorns.

It is tempting to assign responsibility for the thorns to the continuing refusal of the Arabs to accept Israel's presence in their midst. Alas, the story is much more nuanced than that, and Israel shares a full measure of responsibility. Here a poor choice, there a missed opportunity, over and again, 40 years now and no promised land in sight, nor promised time.

Interesting, I think, that when it comes time to write of Israel these days, it's an elegiac tone that seems most natural.The checkpoints, the corruption, above all else the Occupation and the settlements, no need here for the entire litany. But there's something fundamentally wrong with such a tone. After all, the sun also rises, some roses are hardy beyond belief, there are new roses, too. But if it is the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War that is here our concern, then what most wants saying is that Israel's stunning victory has proved prelude, step by misstep, to this very day, the day I write these words, the day on which the news reports on a BBC sponsored survey of 28,000 people in 27 nations who were asked whether each of 12 nations (and the EU) had a "mostly positive or mostly negative influence in the world." Canada was the most positively appraised, by a score of 54 to 14. And Israel? Seventeen percent of respondents said Israel had a "mainly positive" effect on the world, compared with 56 percent who responded "mainly negative." The differential of 39 percentage points was larger than for any other nation, larger even than for Iran (18-54), for the United States (30-51), for North Korea (19-48),

True, nations do not survive on image alone, and Israel's circumstances don't lend themselves to victory in popularity contests. But that's not the whole of it.

"The truth shall set you free"- but along the way, it stings. So it was when Israel's Channel One broadcast, just weeks ago, a documentary reporting that in the '67 war, soldiers led by Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, now infrastructure minister, may have killed 250 prisoners of war in the Sinai peninsula rather than transferring them to POW camps.Where do we file such information? What balm heals the sting of it? And where do we file the tragedy and the travesty of the Occupation?

We choose instead to sing Jerusalem of Gold and to recall The Seventh Day, that quite touching book of memoirs and writings of Israeli soldiers in the aftermath of the war. It confirmed our sense that Israelis, even at war, killed reluctantly, killed only when the logic of war required them to kill. And we are not wrong to recall it; it is a truth. But it is not the whole truth.

Well, it will be said, who could have known? The early Gush Emunim settlers were infused with the pioneering spirit, the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular were villainous, treacherous, murderous, not at all interested in peace. That, too , is true-but that, too, is less than the whole truth.

It is exceedingly difficult for a people that feels threatened, that has always felt itself threatened, a people that was the day before yesterday the victim of genocide and was yesterday and remains today the object of genocidal intentions, to render its horizon sufficiently broad to encompass adjacent truths, competing truths, its own murky narratives and the narratives of the Other.More satisfying, for sure, to focus on the brilliant victory of 1967.

The moral of the story? Knowing how to win a victory is not the same as knowing how to use it.