San Diego, CA (special) -- Shimon Camiel considers Israel to be, like himself, very unpretentious.  In writing The Outhouse War and Other Kibbutz Stories, he wanted to show, in a humorous fashion, how ordinary Israelis go about their day-to-day lives.

"It is the unExodus book, and I don't have an ideological purpose; I am just writing things as they were," the genial Camiel said during an interview last week at his home in San Diego's Del Cerro section.

Even ordinary people can have some extraordinary adventures.  The "outhouse war" 
referred to in the book's title was a brief moment probably well forgotten by military historians. 

Camiel, who holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, was stationed with his Israeli military unit on the Golan Heights shortly after the Six Day War of 1967.  There were no latrines in place, so trucks laboriously hauled outhouses up the Heights for the soldiers. 

Binocular-wielding Syrian observers spotted the procession and promptly ordered an artillery barrage on the mysterious objects.

A ceasefire was ordered after United Nations observers explained to the Syrians what the objects were.  Apparently, the Syrians believed the outhouses to be portable missile silos.

Camiel's book is classified as fiction because he has changed the names of people and places.  He lived the two decades between the late 1950s and late 1970s at Kibbutz Naot Mordechai, and now divides his time between the kibbutz and his home in San Diego.  In  his book, he writes about life on a fictional kibbutz called Cfar Moshe.  Like Naot Mordechai, it is located in the thumb of Israel, near Kiryat Shemona. 

He changed everyone's names in order not to hurt anyone's feelings, and also because he  wanted to be able to create some composite characters, Camiel explained.   He wrote  most of the book during a recent extended visit to Naot Mordechai, where residents, he says, enjoy speculating on whom he had in mind when he wrote various passages.

Camiel's long-dead grandfather is a character in the book, appearing to him on the ship  that takes him across the Atlantic and Mediterranean to Israel.  Gradually, the Yiddish  zaide who was murdered during the Holocaust is transformed into an Israeli saba.   Through occasional dialogues with this grandfather, Camiel is able to explain his actions  and reactions in Israel.

The author quit UC Berkeley a few units shy of graduation to become a kibbutznik.  Very  deep into socialistic politics, Camiel wanted to put theory into practice by living in a communalistic society.   He happily exchanged his textbooks for agricultural implements,  working long hours in the orchards.  Over the ensuing two decades, he participated in the rhythms of Israeli kibbutz life, delighting in every-day routine.

If there is a message in his book, it is that "Israel is not a Disneyland, it is a place where real people live; they are as normal as people in Kansas, most of them, and probably as unexciting," Camiel said. 

Israel "will become like Bulgaria some day, I hope so, where God is not the president.  Despite what a lot of people think; God is not a general," he said.  "Many of us want it to be a normal country, and that is the way people are there. 

"Many of the books that people read about Israel are either political or about Entebbe, and stuff like that. I would like to temper that."  Though popular American fiction, like  Exodus, tends to portray Israelis as heroes,  "I would like to get across that most people are not like that," he added.

After a leg injury incapacitated Camiel for orchard work, he went to school to learn about public health-a career for which the kibbutz unfortunately had relatively little use. Camiel considered moving from the kibbutz to a city in Israel, but with six children between him and his  second wife, Joyce, there seemed no place where they could afford to live comfortably.

Returning to San Diego, where they had both grown up, proveed to be the solution.  There was a family business for Joyce to go into, while Camiel pursued his studies and eventually earned a doctorate in public health.

Today, Camiel does his best to re-create the feeling of egalitarianism that he so loved on the kibbutz.  There is a group of fellows who graduated from San Diego High School in  1954 with whom he enjoys regular get-togethers at the Parkway Plaza Shopping Center in El Cajon.  He said he avoids events where people are looking for status. Dinners at which people are honored, or dedications of buildings on which people's names appear,  are his anathemas.

There is something of a contradiction between the simple, rugged, life style which  Camiel says he prefers and the comfortable, attractive home in Del Cerro where he and Joyce live.  When I asked Camiel about the masks and other splendid examples of folk  art from around the world, he shrugged and said, "It's Joyce's collection."

Over the near term, and perhaps even longer because he is writing a book about his father, Camiel will be in an unegalitarian spotlight.   For example, he has two lectures scheduled to promote his book.  The first is at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 2, at Warwick's Books in La Jolla. The next is at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Aug. 7, at Temple Emanu-El in Del Cerro.