Two men wait through the night in British-controlled Palestine for dawn--and for death. One is a captured English officer. The other is Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter whose assignment is to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain's execution of a Jewish prisoner. Elisha's past is the nightmare memory of Nazi death camps. He is the only surviving member of his family. His future is a cherished dream of life in the promised homeland. But at daybreak his present will become the tortured reality of a principled man ordered to commit cold-blooded murder. Resonant with feeling, ''Dawn'' is an unforgettable journey into the human heart--and an eloquent statement about the moral basis of the new Israel.''An illuminating document . . . the plight of traditional Jewish morality confronted with the modern world of power politics and of murder.''--Maxwell Geismar