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- Fine Jewelry • Gemologists DUQUET JEWELERS 2153 Eighteen Mile Road Sterling Heights, Michigan 48087 739-7144 31620 Grand River Avenue Farmington, Michigan 48024 474-4061 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. z r