Seventeen families, including six infants and an 85-year old grandmother, will be given a temporary home in a lush and peaceful area north of Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast. They will receive money, Hebrew lessons, a roof and hot meals for six months, with the option to stay longer if they wish to.

The special flight -- Israir 100 -- was scheduled on the eve of Holocaust memorial day, for obvious symbolic reasons. Israelis are saying: We remember the plight of our people, forced out of their homes, pushed into ghettos, stripped of their jobs, dignity and life. No matter that the Kosovars are Muslim. A tremendously successful fund-raising concert given by leading Israeli pop singers in Tel Aviv last week was dubbed "We of All People Cannot Remain Silent."

Miss Israel is here because, well, that's not clear. Maybe she wants to do the Princess Di thing: use her celebrity to raise the profile of a humanitarian cause. And vice-versa. She isn't that well-known, although her election in March made quite a splash in Israel and abroad: Rana Raslan, 22, born in the coastal city of Haifa, is the first Arab Miss Israel in the beauty contest's history.

Right-wing Israelis were outraged. Can't she be the beauty queen of some other country, they asked, listing the Arab states that surround the Jewish homeland. She stood her ground nicely. I'm an Israeli too, she said. There are 1 million Arabs in Israel proper -- Arabs who stayed in their villages when Israel won its war of independence in 1948 and established a Jewish state in Palestine. Recently Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, wondered why the country didn't offer the Palestinians who fled or were expelled by Jews in 1948 the sympathy it gives the Kosovars. "Has anyone ever thought of holding a telethon for the benefit of refugees in Gaza or the West Bank?" he asked. "The closer the despair comes to our house, the more it is our fault and the less willing we are to help out."

But that is a different story. The pictures of Kosovar refugees on TV give Holocaust survivors nightmares. Today they are going to act.

Miss Israel is doing her share. She has a big box of chocolate Kinder eggs between her legs -- something to give children in the refugee camp. "The message is peace, peace, peace," the beauty queen says through her agent. She's taking English lessons in preparation for the Miss Universe contest in May, but she's not fluent yet.

On the flight to Skopje, Macedonia, the first 10 rows of the plane are taken up by medical aid neatly packed in cardboard boxes, slapped with a big photogenic sticker: "From Israel with sympathy." The back of the Boeing 737 is a business class of sorts where organizers, government ministers and reporters move from seat to seat, exchanging information and sound bites.

At dawn, when the light through the windows turns pink, we see snow-covered mountains through the clouds, misty hills, well-marked fields and red roofs. There are NATO helicopters on the runway. When we touch ground in Skopje, it is about 7 a.m., local time. We board a bus quickly, taking refuge from the morning chill. We are told to hand over our passports to Macedonian authorities and are let out of the airport complex with a police convoy.

The view from the bus is a mixture of rural beauty, Communist-era apartment blocks and Balkan idiosyncrasies. There are fruit trees in full blossom on both sides of the road, distant mountains, and the minarets of mosques next to Orthodox Christian steeples. During the 40-minute bus ride that takes us north to the Brazde refugee camp, near the Kosovo border, we are lectured on the history of the Jewish community in the area. There have been Jews here for the past 26 centuries ... A large number arrived with Alexander the Great ... In March 1943 about 7,000 Jews were rounded up in a tobacco factory and sent to Treblinka. Nobody survived. Today there are 186 Jews left in Macedonia, mostly in Skopje.

When we finally get to Brazde, 111 refugees are already waiting in buses near the impressive field hospital run by the Israeli army. You might say that they're all packed and ready to go, except they have no belongings, save the jackets they had on their backs when they were forced out of their houses by the Serbs, and the children's knapsacks, packed with bits of food or diapers, given to them in the camp. They're not entirely thrilled about the trip. Their home is Kosovo; they know little about Israel; they just want to leave a refugee camp that, despite the neat rows of tents put up by NATO, the free food and medical care, is a fenced-off universe of concentrated misery. There are 20,000 tents pitched in the mud here at Brazde.

From the corner of my eye, I catch Miss Israel practicing her English with NATO soldiers.

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