Profile : A Leftist Picks Fights in the Name of Peace : * David Zucker draws insults and attacks in his drive to keep the liberal flame alive amid Israeli conservatism.

By DANIEL WILLIAMS

July 23, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

TEL AVIV — Sometimes David Zucker seems to be the most disliked man in Israel.

His exposes of Israeli human rights violations have earned him the label of Arab-lover. He is called a traitor for digging out the plans for expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and publicizing them abroad. His fights for secular rights attract deep disapproval from religious figures who question his Jewishness.

But Zucker, a member of a small, leftist faction in Israel’s Parliament, continues to employ the limited tools of opposition politics to salvage the last vestiges of liberal values in increasingly conservative Israel.

“The idea is to make people feel uncomfortable,” he said in an interview last week. “There is no question: The substance of what I do creates deep animosity, even hatred.”

Zucker, known as Dedi to friends and foe alike, has managed to create furors over issues that many Israelis would prefer not to look at and that most newspapers shun. B’tselem, an independent human rights group he created, has delved into incidents of torture, criticized the destruction of Palestinian housing as a means of mass punishment and taken the army to task for its use of live ammunition in quelling the Palestinian uprising.

He has become a nemesis of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s housing minister who is aggressively building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as part of government efforts to hold onto the land. Zucker’s investigations, passed to foreign journalists, have reverberated in Washington and helped form the basis for the Bush Administration’s campaign to freeze the settlement program.

Sharon once collared Zucker in the halls of the Knesset, or Parliament, and joked that Zucker seemed to know what Sharon was doing before he himself did.

Zucker, 42, describes his work as “sticking to traditional values in a radical way.” He believes that Israelis are at heart favorable to human rights but are crippled by their self-image as victims.

“It is difficult to be accepted when people think at every moment their security is at stake,” he said, peering out from behind his round-rimmed glasses.

Operating outside the mainstream has its personal costs. Two years ago, after a Palestinian steered a public bus off a cliff and killed 16 passengers, enraged mourners stoned Zucker’s house in Jerusalem, screaming “Death to Zucker!”

Zucker later escaped what he called the “neurosis” of Jerusalem by moving to Tel Aviv, a city of diversions beyond the political and religious obsessions that dominate Jerusalem. (Zucker campaigned successfully for the right of movies and restaurants to open on Friday, the Sabbath eve, against religious groups who view such diversions as Sabbath desecrations.)

He tries to counter feelings of alienation from average Israelis by broadening his activities to issues beyond peace and human rights. He works on a parliamentary committee on sports, and takes the lead in legislation dealing with children’s issues and economic debate. “We are in a constant battle to remain legitimate,” Zucker admitted. “We can’t cut ourselves off from other interests of society.”

On the other hand, he rejects what he views as defensive criticism that he should not wash Israel’s laundry in front of foreign audiences. “We are not Albania. We are in front of the eyes of the world and should be,” he declared.

Zucker belongs to the Citizens Rights Movement, a party that holds five seats in the current Parliament. He joined the movement out of the Peace Now organization, which reached its peak effectiveness during protests against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

His path to Peace Now and then politics began with the shock of service during the Six-Day War in 1967. On the Egyptian front, the 19-year-old soldier first experienced combat and death.

After army service, he entered college and the radical atmosphere of student life that had been imported to Israel from the United States in the early 1970s. He let his hair grow to shoulder length (a contrast to his near-bald state now) and was taken by the anti-Establishment style of American emigres.

He read Zionist history avidly, both affirming his commitment to Israeli statehood and coming to grips with what he perceived as unjust byproducts that could prove to be its downfall.

Given Zucker’s upbringing in the port city of Haifa, it is somewhat paradoxical that he should take a conciliatory approach to Arabs. His construction worker-father was a hard-liner who followed a right-wing Zionist ideology that guides Israel’s current government. The younger Zucker rebelled.

Still, Zucker thinks he may have acquired a fighting spirit from his late father, a Polish immigrant who had to defend his conservative views in a neighborhood that was largely leftist.

“From my father’s point of view, I was a disaster. But from him also, I think, I got my willingness to be an outsider.”

Biography Name: David Zucker Title: Israeli Parliament member Age: 42 Personal: Before entering politics, Zucker earned a Ph.D. in history at Tel Aviv University. He went on to create the Peace Now movement and the human rights group B’tselem. Zucker is married and has three children, ages 14, 9 and 2. Quote: “The idea is to make people feel uncomfortable. . . . The substance of what I do creates deep animosity, even hatred.”