BOOK REVIEW : Israeli Soldier Writes With Lyric Power : CONFESSIONS FROM A JERICHO JAIL <i> by Stephen Langfur</i> , Grove Weidenfeld, $21.95, 257 pages

As one who calls himself a Zionist but still lingers in the Diaspora, I always feel the sting of self-reproach when I venture an opinion about Israel and its problems in making peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. Who am I, after all, to live in safety and freedom in America and tell the Israelis how to conduct themselves in the face of a bitter and determined enemy?

Stephen Langfur, on the other hand, is an American Jew who has earned the right to his opinion. Twelve years ago, he emigrated to Israel, married and fathered two children and put on the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces. But when he was posted to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank in 1989, he simply refused to go. And for his act of conscience, Langfur ended up in the jail cell where he wrote “Confessions From a Jericho Jail.”

Langfur likens himself to the prophet Elijah, who was denounced as a “troubler of Israel” by the faithless king whom he dared to condemn. Langfur’s refusal to serve in the Territories was intended to be a public rebuke of the Jewish state.

“If that troubles Israel, so be it,” he announces. “It is a needed troubling.”

“Confessions” is, at one level, the prison diary of a man with a distinct political agenda. He concedes that he has broken the law by refusing to serve in the Territories, but he prides himself on having done so “cleanly, clearly, purposefully.” And he does not hesitate to criticize his country for its occupation of the West Bank and its mistreatment of the Palestinians.

“We hone their hatred and the hatred of our neighbors,” he writes of the intifada. “In killing their children, we condemn our grandchildren.”

But, like the confessional literature of classical tradition to which Langfur aspires, the book is much more intimate--and much more intriguing and satisfying--than a mere political tract. It’s a glimpse into the heart and soul of a man in middle age who is struggling with his ideals, his identity, his passions and his destiny.

“I am,” he writes, “a synagogue of identifications and unknown longings.”

Langfur, who is married to Israeli novelist Noga Treves, is gifted with the novelist’s power of observation and the poet’s command of metaphor. At times, his prose is so deeply lyrical, so full of imagery and allusion, that it becomes a kind of poetry, as when he contemplates the ways that Arab and Jew alike regard the indifferent soil of the Holy Land as something sanctified and full of elevated meanings.

“The surface of the earth in the West Bank is all mind,” writes Langfur, who works as a tour guide in Israel and displays an intimate familiarity with the land and its history. “The red soil brought up from the wadi is mind. . . . Or the grape vines, sleeping with a stone for a pillow like Jacob, or crucified on a wire, to spread out the ripening, to lengthen the time on the market. All mind.”

“Confessions” is freighted with intellectual conceit, and we begin to see why intellectuals make poor soldiers. Langfur is self-reflective to a fault, not a little arrogant and obsessed with the acute ethical dilemmas that are the stuff of undergraduate philosophy seminars. His idea of “a great creator” is not the Almighty but William Faulkner, and he carries a book of Cheever stories as a kind of talisman: “I bear him on my thigh,” Langfur cracks, “as Zeus did Dionysus.”

Langfur is too deeply afflicted by his own doubts to come across as sanctimonious. “What is philosophy?” asks one of Langfur’s cellmates, and--by way of an answer--Langfur shows him a newspaper photograph of a distraught Jewish woman whose son has been murdered by terrorists.

“Philosophy,” says Langfur, “is what you can say to this woman instead of taking her picture.”

“Confessions” is not a comforting book, nor is it intended to be. But Langfur is not merely a “troubler.” Rather, he is a profoundly troubled man whose conscience prods him to act on his own moral doubts, a man whose sensibilities are formed by something ancient in the Jewish tradition.

Langfur and his book are likely to draw some fire, but he cannot be faulted for the sincerity and authenticity of his stance. Indeed, when he calls on the Jewish people to approach their adversaries with moral courage--” . . . to be a blessing to the families of the earth, a light to the nations . . .”--he harks back to the ancient wisdom of Leviticus:

“The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt.”