Babies and Bombers By CLAIRE BERLINSKI DAVID HOROVITZ. Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism. ALFRED A. KNOPF. 266 PAGES. $25.00

JUDITH WRUBEL LEVY. Babe in Arms: Dispatches from an American Mother in Israel. Unpublished.

I MET Judith Wrubel in 1991 at Oxford University, where we were both graduate students in international relations. We became friends walking back to Balliol College each week, along the leafy Banbury Road, from a seminar at St. Antony's College on the international relations of the Middle East. Both secular American Jews - the only ones in the class - we found in one another a measure of intellectual and ethnic solidarity against our classmates, who tended to view the region through the prism fashionable in academia: The violence and misery of the Middle East devolve from Israeli territorial expansionism and its abuse of the Palestinians. Once when a suicide bombing in Israel claimed the lives of a number of children under the age of 10 - it is often forgotten how common an occurrence these were even during the Rabin years - a fellow student, upon hearing the news, proclaimed with satisfaction, "Good. They deserve it."

After graduating, I moved to Thailand to take a job as a journalist. Judith returned to New York to work for an investment bank. We lost touch. Years later, she found my name on the Internet and wrote to me. I was delighted to hear from her, and we soon established a prolific correspondence. I had returned to the United States and was living in Washington, D.C.; she had married an Israeli mathematician and moved with him to Rehovot, an Israeli city well within the Green Line. She was now Judith Levy. She was expecting her first child, a boy. But her romantic and maternal fulfillment came at a cost: She now reckoned each day, as she wrote to me, with the possibility of her own murder.

In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, as Judith passed through her second trimester, we wrote to one another daily. Her accounts of her pregnancy were rhapsodic, almost curiously so. I had never heard of a woman so free of complaints about pregnancy and the prospect of parturition. "Growing him is pure pleasure," she wrote, "and the bigger he gets, the more exciting it is." Yet the context of her letters to me was unrelentingly grim.

Two mornings ago I woke up, looked at the headlines and read that the bombing in Petach Tikva the day before had been in a cafe packed with mothers and their babies. I'll say it again because it's so mind-boggling: The bomber had quite deliberately chosen to explode himself in the midst of a large crowd of mothers and babies. I marvel at the depravity. I knew there had been a bombing, of course, and I knew that a grandmother and her 18-month-old granddaughter had been murdered and that there were between 40 and 50 injured, but I didn't know that a large proportion of those 40 to 50 were small children.

The explosive was packed with metal shards so better to maximize casualties. Judith wondered whether the bomber had cased the area in advance, or whether it was an impulse - "A shop packed with Israeli kids, how tempting!"

Sometimes she would write to me in the early hours of the morning when, overwrought with fear for herself and her husband and child, she was unable to sleep. I often asked her why she didn't return to the United States, although of course I had to concede that living in the United States no longer conferred an immunity against suicide bombers. "I'm not willing," she wrote back, "to wreck my home life, break my husband's heart and deprive my son of his father so that I can try to anticipate Arab violence. It can't be done. I have to do the best I can with the choices I've made." Beyond this, the intifada - and the international response to the intifada, which she found intolerably tainted by antiSemitism - had cemented her Zionism. Never before, she wrote to me, had she been so convinced of the necessity of Israel's existence. "Sometimes," she wrote, "when I hear European 'statesmen' apologizing for Palestinian outrages against people exactly like me, I hear not just the voices of benighted, distant nitwits talking out of their depth but old-school Europeans who feel, when Jews die, that all's right with the world."

JUDITH'S LETTERS WERE not only notable as a personal report from the front lines. The evolution of her political thought was telling. She had moved to Israel in an optimistic spirit, eager to believe that as a consequence of the process initiated in Oslo, she would raise her son in a relatively peaceful Israel coexisting with a fledgling Palestinian state. She had been earnestly determined to understand and sympathize with Palestinian aspirations and grievances - her ideals, she later ruefully remarked, as "innocent as ducklings." The rhythmic and ever-encroaching violence drowned her optimism. As she witnessed Arafat's rejection of Barak's offer of statehood, the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, and Palestinians taking to the streets to celebrate the destruction of the Twin Towers, she began to doubt the ideals of tolerance upon which she had been raised. She was outraged by the international condemnation of Israel's military responses to the terror attacks, by the sight of juxtaposed headlines such as these: