16 Friday, December 23, 1983
Mack Pitt
and his
Orchestra.
plus
Disco
Music just for you!
358-3642
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Political Backing
JERUSALEM (ZINS) —
Moral Majority leader Jerry
Falwell told a press confer-
ence during a recent visit to
Jerusalem that in five years
"it will be impossible for an
official to be elected to pub-
lic office in the U.S. if he
doesn't support Israel."
MAZEL TOV ROBERT
on your graduation from Wayne State.
We're very proud of you.
Love,
Laurie & Josh
Hostilities at Suez Canal Fade from Memory
By JUDITH KOHN
CAIRO (JTA) — Nearly a
decade has passed since the
cities of Egypt's Suez Canal
zone saw fighting, but re-
minders of the six years of
hostilities that once turned
them into virtual ghost
towns are still apparent.
Half-demolished build-
ings peering through the
rows of beach-white villas
that now line the waterway
in Suez, tax the imagination
with suggestions of a time
when this remote area was a
Marking
the
battle zone and the banks of battlefront today are the
its placid waters a mass of scattered remains of the
minefields.
Barley. Line — a mam-
Just a swim's distance moth array of Israeli for-
across the canal are yet tifications that lined the
more poignant reminders of east bank of the canal
those years, and a collective from the Mediterranean
monument to what has be- Sea in the north, down to
come one of the greatest the canal's outlet at the
sources of national pride in Gulf of Suez.
contemporary Egypt — the
It was at a spot on this
surprise attack against Is- site, where some of the old
raeli forces on Yom Kippur bunkers are still relatively
in October 1973.
intact, that a group of stu-
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dents from Cairo Univer-
sity's Commerce College re-
cently paused after taking a
detour on a one-day or-
ganized excursion to Suez.
The driver had swung off
the main road, some 17
miles north of the canal
town, into a tunnel built by
the late President Anwar
Sadat as a symbolic linkage
between the Egyptian
mainland and the territory
restored to it by Israel in ac-
cordance with the peace
treaty of 1979.
Climbing down from the
bus, some five miles inland
from the tunnel's exit, the
students found themselves
opposite a low but imposing
fortress with a large gun
barrel peering out the
entrance. It carried the
weight of thick concrete
blocks and metal slabs that
had fallen from the roof.
Layers of rock-filled
net sacks covered what
remained of the bunker,
and a maze of trenches
leading to and around a
line of similar bunkers
appeared from a distance
to be part of a neat
geometrical design that
bordered the surface of
the desert.
The fortifications —
erected by the Israelis in re-
sponse to persistent shel-
ling and commando raids by
Egypt following the June
1967 Six-Day War and the
resulting occupation of the .
Sinai — were, together with
the soldiers who manned
them, the prime target of
the late President Gamal
Abdel Nasser's War of At-
trition, launched in March
1969. Some half a million
residents were evacuated
from the canal towns of Port
Said, Ismailia and Suez in
preparation for the expected
reprisals.
By May, Nasser claimed
he had destroyed 60 percent
of the Bakley Line. Casual-
ties were heavy and the for-
tifications themselves did
indeed take a beating. But
the massive artillery bom-
bardment of the Ik-aeli posi-
tions across the waterway,
and the repeated Egyptian
raids into the east bank,
succeeded more conspicu-
ously in bringing the canal
zone cities, as well as
targets deep within Egyp-
tian territory, some of the
same and stronger.
By August 1970, when a
U.S.-sponsored ceasefire
temporarily ended the
fighting, Israel had demon-
strated its continued mili-
tary superiority by hitting
strategic targets putatively
protected by Soviet
ground-to-air missiles, and
the fortifications across the
canal remained more or less
intact.
The expulsion of Soviet
military personnel by
President Sadat made
the chances of an Egyp-
tian attack appear yet
slimmer.
Consequently, Egypt
stunned the world, not least
of all the Israel Defense
Force, when, together with
the Syrians on the Golan
Heights, it launched the
Yom Kippur War.
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