A cool breeze came in from the sea, knocking over salt shakers at the Zorik Café. It was a beautiful day in Israel, clear skies, brilliant light, and the volleyball players were out. Young couples in low-slung jeans sipped smoothies and ate poached eggs.

Things are calm in Tel Aviv. Menace is beyond the horizon. Nobody thinks twice about boarding a bus, hanging out. It was pleasant to sit and people watch, see the smiles and bear hugs. New York’s West Village of a balmy Sunday.

In walked a stocky guy in jeans and an open-neck shirt, olive-green eyes, a ready smile and a mop of dark hair flecked with gray. He was Col. Avi Gil of the Israel Defense Forces, and here’s what he told me:

“When I was in the Special Forces a few years back, I could not tell my wife everything and one day I was in Nablus and there was an incident. I was a company commander and the operation went on from 5:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. and the soldier just to the left of me was injured and also another soldier beside me. Later in the day I went to see them in hospital in Petah Tikva and then I came home to Tel Aviv to get civilian clothes for my cousin’s wedding and I’d almost died that day and I said nothing. I don’t know what’s better, Afghanistan for seven months or living like that. When you live in your homeland and that homeland is small, that is the situation.”

Gil smiled. Life in Israel is many-layered, tranquility and anxiety always tussling for the upper hand, like argumentative siblings. What, I thought, was that Orwell line about sleeping safe at night because rough men stand ready? I couldn’t summon it and, besides, Gil wanted to show me something.

The yellow pages, yes, the yellow pages from the West Bank town of Kalkilya were in his hand, and he found them interesting because, in recent years, they had tripled in thickness, an indication of the expansion of business and decline in violence.

After his Special Forces stint, Gil had gone on a two-year assignment to Washington (liaising with the U.S. Marine Corps), and had only returned to the West Bank in November 2009 as a senior officer. He’d found the transformation, as measured on his yellow-pages gauge, striking.

“It’s in our interest to maintain the peaceful trend in the West Bank and I’m willing to take some chances,” Gil said. “It’s fragile, but the fact is nobody wants to fight.”

What sort of chances? Well, Gil meets regularly with his Palestinian Authority counterparts — “Today, I trust them,” he said, underscoring the “today” — and he provides intelligence on militants. He’s ceding ground. In December he went into Tulkarm 19 times, but only twice last month.

Roadblocks are coming down — to 14 from 42. Gil admires the state-building of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, although he thinks Fayyad is “walking on the edge” because his pledge of nonviolence has not stopped stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails.

“When I go into Kalkilya,” Gil told me, “I’ve stopped using body armor, but I do take my rifle.”

That, I think, is not a bad image of Israel today, prepared to relax slightly but mistrustful; feeling burned and misunderstood; seeing the outside world as hostile (including President Barack Obama); unconvinced of the possibility of peace but not prepared to dismiss it entirely; wanting at some level to think Fayyad can forge a reliable Palestine but also persuaded that Arabs are still bent on its destruction; led by a right-religious-Russian-settler coalition that reflects lasting rightward shifts in its society; enjoying the quiet but disturbed by what’s over the horizon, not least Iran. An Israel that’s shed its body armor for now but still carries a rifle.

This is not an Israel that is ready to hurry to peace, not an Israel on Obama’s timetable, or the Quartet’s, or Fayyad’s.

“Let’s walk slowly to arrive as fast as we can,” Gil said. That’s about the Israeli mood. So tensions will flare anew as the world pushes for Palestinian statehood by the end of 2011 or early 2012, and Israel applies the brakes.

Psychological barriers to peace remain huge. On the road into the West Bank capital of Ramallah, now as relaxed as Tel Aviv, a big sign says: “No entry for Israelis. Entry forbidden by Israeli law.” That’s a reflection of the violent world Gil knew a few years back, not of his yellow pages.

In one of his poems, Mahmoud Darwish, the late Palestinian poet, wrote, “Me or him/ That’s how war starts. But it ends in an awkward silence/ Me and him.” We are still waiting for the Holy Land’s “me” and “him” to see each other in the mirror.

What next, I asked Gil. “I have to be ready for three things: Maintain the current posture, leave, or go in.” Which would he prefer? By way of answer, he looked to the blue sky, the kids playing and the whole cool scene.