In all likelihood, there was one major event — a moving and august occasion, according to Muslims who were there — that you did not see on television or hear about on National Public Radio or read about in The New York Times. On laylat al-qadr (the night of fate, linked to the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven), one of the holiest days in the Muslim calendar, more than 200,000 people gathered — peacefully — to pray on the Temple Mount (or, as they refer to it, the Holy Sanctuary, Haram al-Sharif). The event passed without incident. Yes, some of the Muslim leaders in Jerusalem had been forewarned not to abuse their minbar (pulpit) for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement; yes, police were there in force to keep public order. But, as any law enforcement professional will tell you, no measure of police control would have been enough had this huge crowd wanted to turn this into a test of wills over Jerusalem. They did not. In the midst of an ongoing firestorm of violence, the eye of the storm — the very place for which Arafat had launched this war —remained calm.

This strange and unreported case of "the dog that did not bark in the night," as Sherlock Holmes would have put it, indeed provides us, amidst the sense of crisis brought upon us by the new terrorist offensive in Istanbul, with an opportunity to take a fresh look at what is going on. Surprisingly, some of the lessons depart quite sharply from the common wisdom about the Middle East and Israel. They do not sit well with the dire predictions offered by some former leaders, such as the four former Shin Bet (General Security) chiefs Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Karmi Gilon and Ami Ayalon, who warned us that we are at the edge of the abyss. Increasingly, the realities depicted by intellectual critics and opposition politicians, from Amos Elon to Tony Judt (for those who have been following the exchanges in the New York Review of Books) look more like a European cartoonist’s vision of Israel than the real thing on the ground.

What can we learn from laylat al-qadr?

• About "them": We can learn once again that Muslims, even Palestinian Muslims, are not monolithic in their attitudes, irrevocably motivated by frustration, rage and hate. This week, there were outpourings of sympathy from Muslims in Turkey toward the local Jewish community, and even toward Israel and the bilateral relationship — expressed all the way up to Prime Minister Recep Tayep Erdogan, the leader of what he defines as a Muslim-Democratic party, styled after the Christian Democrats of Europe. Reflecting the anger in Turkey after the synagogue attacks and the wave of anti-British bombings, there are growing voices, even in the Arab world (as I learned from listening to the BBC in Arabic, which is slowly turning away from its attitude of respect toward the radical Islamists), who are calling for a more enlightened interpretation of their own religion than the one represented by the homicidal cult of death — a cult borrowed, as Paul Berman has shown in Terror and Liberalism, from the worst Western sources, not from the true traditions of the people who gathered in Jerusalem to pray in peace.

   

• About "us": We would do well to reflect on the fact that in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem, three years into a cruel war of attrition, such an event is still so possible, so much an integral part of normal life, as to merit little or no attention — whereas a single Jew blowing a shofar at the Western Wall, even during British rule (let alone during the Jordanian occupation) would have caused a violent reaction. Israel must be doing something right. It is perhaps appropriate to take this a step further. If such a peaceful prayer gathering can happen, perhaps we are not entirely the caricature of the mindless, oppressive occupier that we see in the Western press (and all too often, in our own). We certainly have our many failures, moral as well as practical, but it does seem that the majority of Palestinians in Jerusalem do not necessarily wish to be governed by Yasir Arafat and his likes.

Finally, about our options: Perhaps the proper lesson is that the situation does not necessarily call for the desperate measures now being advocated by right and left alike. Yes, we are not yet out of the woods; the head of the Shin Bet has warned the Israeli Cabinet not to read too much into the relative lull in suicide attacks, which he believes may simply reflect successful prevention, not a change of mind by the Palestinian side. Nevertheless, there are shifts in the general balance — soon to be reflected in a new round of negotiations with Ahmed Qureia (Abu Alaa) and his government, which might produce new realities. And if they do not, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now increasingly committed to unilateral acts of separation that would offer a future in which we do not have to contemplate either a unified "Land of Israel," ultimately becoming an unequal bi-national state orthe partition of Jerusalem, denying us (unjustifiably) our Jewish birthright—one which we have been able to guard against until now without denying the Muslims their own rights. Much territory lies between the two extremes and, unlike the politicized caricatures of "choice" that some Israelis (and many Europeans, as well as a few Americans) are trying to force upon us, most Israelis would cast their lot with the center — that is to say, with an outcome that gives the Palestinians their state, but cannot be read as reflecting a victory (and a way station for even more sweeping victories, until we are all gone) for the vast and ugly forces that have mobilized against us since September 2000.