Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

For a series that may turn out to be a television rarity-- a work of genuine historic importance -- Arabs and Israelis (PBS, Wednesday, 8 p.m. E.S.T.) presents itself with almost recessive, if becoming, modesty. Its eight programs run only half an hour each; there is not the slightest hint of showmanship about them. Essentially they are nothing more than interviews with ordinary citizens of the nations locked in permanent cri sis in the Middle East for a quarter of a century.

Nor can it be said that these people reach startling conclusions about that impasse. The Arabs say they harbor no irreconcilable enmity toward the Israelis; the Israelis say the same about the Arabs. All agree it would perhaps ease tensions if common folk could visit each other's countries and get to know more about one another's cultures.

Chance for Peace. It could probably have been predicted that they would take this line -- but that is pre cisely the point. People have been so bemused for so long by the abstractions of official communiques, extremist state ments, political journalism, that they have forgotten the simple fact that real people are trying to live everyday lives in a place that could instantly be turned into a gigantic combat zone. Inevitably they are bound together by a mutual abhorrence of war. The most effective speakers are people who have the great est reason to be bitter: the wives and parents of young men killed on both sides of the Yom Kippur War. Their remembrances of their loved ones, of ten spoken through tears, render the desolation of personal loss, and make one ashamed of glib generalizations spouted from a safe distance west of Suez. "I understand their feeling of loss," an Israeli father says of Egyptians who also lost sons in 1973. "It is more than the loss of life, it is the loss of hope, of plans." "Give him my sympathy," says a similarly bereaved Egyptian. "Tell him to be brave, that this is something we all hate, this type of violence be tween nations."

These halting voices are very moving; and Arabs and Israelis is a kind of candle sputtering bravely in the dark ness. It was made by Boston's WGBH, which used two field producers, an Egyptian newsman and an Israeli tele vision journalist. They could not visit each other's homelands, but they worked together closely, if often argumentatively, in neutral Switzerland to shape each program. The series is now being offered all over the Middle East. Though no nation has accepted it yet, Israel, Jordan and Egypt have expressed interest in it. One cannot help believing that if this moderate, moderating voice could be heard in the area it so affectingly reports, it might in some small way help to give peace a chance.

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