Laura Blumenfeld/Washington Post In Holon, Israeli pediatrician Yuval checks on Tara Isstefou, a 4 1/2-month-old Arab girl whose life he saved when her heart stopped beating following cardiac surgery. “All that mattered was that she’s blue, and she has to be pink,” Yuval said.

HOLON, Israel -- The 2-year-old's flawed heart beat backward, pumping blue blood to his lips and inking rings around his eyes.

Ahmad edged across his hospital bed, toward his mother, Nasima Abu Hamed. Nasima, a Palestinian from Gaza, had brought Ahmad to Israel for an operation. She moved uneasily through hospital halls decked with Israeli flags--but the Jewish doctors could save her son.

A pediatrician named Yuval walked in wearing a white coat. Nasima smiled. Yuval high-fived Ahmad, who was wearing toddler-size army fatigues. Yuval said in Arabic, "How's he doing?"

Nasima shrugged and asked, "When is the surgery?"

Nasima was eager to return to Gaza. There was trouble at home, clashes with Israeli soldiers. Fear had kept her family up all night, the chop of hostile helicopters. Two years ago, a missile fired from a helicopter had killed two cousins. If Nasima ever met an Israeli pilot, "I would faint and die from fear."

Yuval patted Ahmad on the head. The surgery would be soon. Later, Nasima called Yuval "our savior of the children."

Yuval is a savior of children. He is also an attack helicopter pilot. It was Yuval in his Cobra--though Nasima didn't know it--hovering over her town as Israeli troops battled armed Palestinians. By day, Yuval works as a pediatrician. By night, he fires missiles for the air force.

One of Yuval's supervisors, physician Sion Houri, sees no contradiction between Yuval's two jobs. "There's reality A; there's reality B. It's not a dichotomy--it's us," Houri said. "It's our life as Israelis."

After decades of war, what might be madness in another society passes for normal in Israel. As negotiators meet this week in Annapolis, Md., to try to resolve the Middle East conflict, Israelis find ways to resolve the conflict in their own lives. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes declares: "There is...a time to kill, and a time to heal." Yuval is doing both, at the same time.

'It Sounds Like a Conflict'

Yuval walked through the door, home from work. His little girl toddled over.

"I missed you!" Yuval said, kissing his daughter as she peeled off his Velcro name patch and bit it. Yuval's mother-in-law, Nitzan, who was babysitting, said, "So, Yuval, are you a pilot or a doctor today?"

Yuval, a 40-year-old major in the air force, is prohibited by the military from giving his last name. He lives with his wife, two sons and a daughter on Palmachim air base, north of the Gaza Strip. The military has allowed Yuval to study medicine while he serves. When he isn't flying, Yuval treats children as a resident at a nearby civilian hospital.

"He's never home," his mother-in-law said. He's either on alert or on call. He's either dressed in a flight suit, carrying a ruler to calculate firing positions, or he's dressed in scrubs, carrying a measuring tape to gauge baby skulls.

"It sounds like a conflict, but he knows he's protecting us," Nitzan said. "You don't want to kill people, right, Yuval?"

Yuval didn't hear his mother-in-law because he was running his daughter's bath. Nitzan said, "Look, our situation is intolerable."

"Situation" is Israeli shorthand for the country's relationship with Arabs. It wasn't always intolerable, Yuval said. He grew up on a farm, where on Saturdays at 7:30 a.m., his father revved up the tractor. All day, Yuval picked oranges with Palestinians from Gaza. For lunch, Yuval brought bread and cheese; Palestinians boiled Arabic coffee. They became, Yuval thought, friends.

"Now it seems like ancient history," Yuval said, splashing his daughter's curls, so immersed in memories he didn't notice she had her socks on in the tub.

Yuval's oldest son was born in the 1990s, after the Oslo accords. He dreamed that his son wouldn't be drafted. Then, in 2000, the second Palestinian intifada erupted. Suicide bombers blew up Israeli discos and cafes. Israelis responded with force. Palestinians from Gaza were banned, including the men who labored with Yuval. Yuval flew targeted assassination missions, killing some 15 intifada members, he said. After a strike, Yuval said, he would emerge from his cockpit successful, yet feeling bad, his hair wet with sweat, his neck reddened with tension.

Some pilots quit. They criticized the military. Yuval called them "unforgivable." As he snapped pink pajamas on his daughter, Yuval said, "If you think you're more moral, stay in and fight the battle the way you think it should be fought."

Yuval's wife, Tamar, and their two sons came home. After dinner, the boys slid under Peter Rabbit sheets.

"Who's waiting for their 'kiss of protection'?" Yuval asked.

"Me!" Imry, their 5-year-old, said. The kiss banishes bad dreams.

"About witches," the boy explained. "Dragons and ghosts."

Yuval started to smile, but then Imry added, "And the warriors, who want me to die."

Kill Four Men, or Be a Failure

At 2:30 a.m., air force sirens woke Yuval. Tamar didn't stir as Yuval leapt from their warm sheets, they recalled in interviews about that night in October.

"Is it the mission we briefed for?" Yuval whispered into his phone.

"Something else," a voice said from headquarters. "You're going south."

The flight to Gaza took five minutes. Sometimes, when targeting a Palestinian, Yuval flew for hours without firing. Once, Yuval circled a building every day for a month--in his helicopter with the white, open-jawed snake painted on the side--waiting until civilians cleared. One day, a boy sat on the roof. Another day, the target's secretary walked into his office. Finally, the Palestinian was alone. One, two, three missiles killed him.

On this night over Gaza, though, there could be no delays. Yuval pictured an Israeli bedroom, exploding. He approached the launch zone tense and tenser, leaning toward the screen of his heat-sensitive targeting system. The rocket squad had crept into an orchard near a house. Yuval adjusted the contrast knobs, trying to coax four figures from the shadows, he recalled. Trees were gray. A house was white. The men were black hot.

"It's a terrible thought," Yuval said later, but it had occurred to him many times: The children of the Palestinians he had picked oranges with in his father's orchard were now launching rockets. "I'm sure I know some of them. You can't recognize them from the air."

All Yuval could see now were small, dark movements. Two figures behind a tree. A person crouching.

"This is it," Yuval recalled thinking. Yuval placed his cross in the middle of a thin, black figure. "I'm looking at someone whose role in life is to kill, and I have to stop him," he thought.

"Now, now, now." Yuval's adrenaline surged.

His thumb pressed the red button hard. Yuval held his breath, hoping that "nothing comes into the cross, like another person."

But instead of turning the Palestinian into a black-hot burst, the missile thudded into the sand. His ammunition had malfunctioned, a dud. "No!" Yuval recalled thinking. He fired again. "Good hit," said ground troops, spotting for him. But by then, the two remaining rocket squad members had crawled close to the house.

Yuval had to decide: fly away and spare the civilians or fire again and fulfill his mission?

"Not good," Yuval said to his wingman, as they turned back.

After he landed, he tiptoed into his house and lay next to his wife. It was 5:30 a.m. Tamar rolled over: "Did you fly?"

Yuval said bitterly, "No, I went out with my buddies."

He lay there, he later recalled, so wrung out that he felt like he'd lost 20 pounds. He thought: "I have to wake up in two hours and go to the hospital."

When All Seems Possible

The baby's heart stopped. She lay on her hospital bed--10 pounds at 4 1/2 months--her chest deathly still.

Yuval was working in the emergency room when a nurse called out, "We need you, quick!"

Two brooding days had passed since Yuval's mission to kill four men. Now it was up to Yuval to save an Arab life.

The Arab baby, Tara, had four heart defects. Tara had come to Israel through Save a Child's Heart, a program that sponsors surgery for children from poor areas. Doctors had inserted a shunt in Tara's heart. Eight stitches threaded down her chest. Tubes emerged from her ribs, from her clavicle, from her hand.

Through all the wires, Yuval could see that Tara was "innocent, untouched."

"When they come from Gaza at age 3 or 4, they have that look in their eyes," he later recalled. "That 'I know the dangers, don't get too close to me.'"

As Yuval bent over Tara, the monitors beeped alarms. Tara's lungs had filled with fluid.

"It was horrible to think this little girl was going to go," recalled the nurse, Svetlana Kakazanov.

"Adrenaline," Yuval ordered. He felt for the center of Tara's chest with his thumbs, and pumped.

It was sad for Yuval, because he often thought that the Gaza children had "a 90 percent chance of becoming terrorists. But mainly it's not their fault, it's 'the situation's' fault. And I'm not treating 'the situation.' I'm treating the child."

Yuval kept pumping the baby's heart. Five minutes passed. He stopped to listen for a beat, but every time he stopped, the blip of the monitor's green cardiac line went flat.

He pressed his stethoscope to Tara's ribs. The irregular blip of her heart steadied, and leveled, to 120 beats. He could hear the exquisite swish of her circulating blood.

Tara's chest was rising. He said, "We got her back."