An Israeli Jew is touring the United States, Canada and Mexico with a message he believes is largely lost on those countries and his countrymen:

"Palestinians are regular people just like us and they deserve the same, the same, the same."

Without international pressure to enforce that equal status, Teddy Katz says, "Palestinians and Israelis will stay in this tunnel where we are only able to fight and kill each other."

The 62-year-old spokesman for the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom stopped in Indianapolis last week to deliver an historical critique as well as a denunciation of the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush.

He's a figure of controversy.

Military veterans hit him with a libel suit after he wrote a paper for master's degree studies at the University of Haifa in the late 1990s, accusing the Israeli army of massacring more than 200 residents of the Palestinian village of Tantura during the formative days of the Jewish state in 1948.

Katz retracted that assertion to settle the lawsuit but has been trying ever since to rescind the decision. He stands by his information, drawn from scores of interviews with Palestinian and Jewish witnesses. He and his supporters maintain he was overwhelmed by legal fees and by enormous political pressure from a nation in denial.

Official history agrees with Katz that Palestinians died at Tantura; but it says they were far fewer in number and were, along with Israelis, battle casualties. Even this concession hits a sore point, says Katz, who is among the "new historians" in Israel who have drawn heat for what they see as their de-romanticization of the nation's origins.

At Tantura (now a splendid seaside resort), at Deir Yassin (site of an undisputed massacre led by future Prime Minister Menachem Begin) and at hundreds of other now-vanished villages, people were already there when other people came from Europe and established a state, and those resident people were displaced.

"We have given the world an incorrect picture from the beginning," Katz said. "The Jews left 2,000 years ago and left a note saying, 'We'll be right back.' The Palestinians came in the 7th century and didn't see the note. In the 19th century, the European Jews came and the Palestinians welcomed them."

Then came the 1940s exodus, the partitioning and the serial wars. The essential problem, as Katz sees it, is that military domination and subordination have been seen by Israelis and Americans as the natural state of Palestinians, and thus only Palestinian violence is consistently seen as an obstacle to peace.

"Palestinians have given up 78 percent of their land, and Sharon says he will give them 42 percent of the remaining 22 percent under the backing of the noble and holy George W. Bush. No living Palestinian would be willing to accept such an arrangement, and I can't blame them."

The father of three children, one of whom was killed in a truck accident while in the Israeli army, Katz lives in Magal kibbutz west of the Green Line, surrounded by Palestinians. "Not one, not one, wants war," he declared. "They are exactly like us, the holy Jews. This is an opportunity to accept that, OK, we are all born equal. But I'm very much afraid that nothing will change unless there is help from people on the outside. Distance gives one proportion with which to see."

From the distance of a sad half-century, he insists, "I'm very optimistic. Pessimism comes along; you don't order it."

Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or at .