40

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

Friday; May 16, 1986

Dial Down
with a
DOWN
QUILT

GIFTS DEVELOP PERSONALITIES OF
THEIR OWN WHEN HAND-DECORATED
BY THE ARTISTS AT

"F AC TORN TO YOU

• CUSTOM MADE
DOWN COMFORTERS

SAVINGS"

• CUSTOM SPREADS, PILLOW SHAMS,
DUST RUFFLES FROM YOUR FABRIC

• CUSTOM QUILTING OF FABRICS
• QUILTS & PILLOWS
(REMADE & RENOVATED)
• QUILT COVERS • FLANNEL SHEETS
• DOWN & DOWN FEATHERED PILLOWS
• LAMB'S WOOL MATTRESS PADS

TRAURIG'S

o rnkv o\a'

SUGAR TREE

LIFE IN ISRAEL

Since 1919

QUILT & PILLOW SHOP

ORCHARD LAKE ROAD, NORTH OF MAPLE • 851-1022

I 20% off INVITATIONS

I

A11Qtalts made on prernisH

M—F 9 30-5 00

SAT. 10:00-3:00

547-2660

22050 WOODWARD. FERNDALE

C o li 8c u m

collection

by

RAYMOND WEIL

GENEVE

C011eCt i011

Triumph In Dignity And Styling
Stunning Swiss Handcrafted
Masterpiece 18K Gold Electroplated
Expansion Clasp • Water Resistant

26400 W. 12 Mile Rood
Franklin Savings Center
Southfield, MI 48034

Seiko Time Corp., 1986

Good Country

Continued from preceding page

to reestablish their family
homes. And Israel began put-
ting up border villages along
the Jordan River. But none of
this gave any great cause for
concern. After all, any peace
agreement with Jordan
would mean territorial com-
promise, and the Jordanians,
it was generally believed,
would be willing to show flex-
ibility on the question of
Hebron, the Jordan Valley
and, of course, Jerusalem,
which was annexed to Israel
only a couple of weeks after
the Six Day War.
The 1973 war, which
changed so much in Israel,
permanently altered the
Israeli attitude toward the
Arabs in general--and the
Palestinians of the West
Bank in particular. Suddenly
the Arab world was no longer
a collection of laughable tin-
pot dictators and cowardly
soldiers who, according to
legend, were afraid of the
dark and kicked their boots
off to escape through the
sand at the merest approach
of the Israeli Army. More-
over, the Arabs now ap-
peared to be a formidable
political and economic power
by virtue of their dreaded "oil
weapon." For the first time,
Israel began to question
whether time was indeed on
its side.
The Yom Kippur War also
put the Palestinian issue at
the top of the Middle East
agenda. The 1974 Arab Sum-
mit meeting in Rabat de-
clared the PLO—a terrorist
organization with a charter
calling for Israel's destruc-
tion—to be the sole represen-
tative of the Palestinian peo-
ple. This meant that the
million Arabs of the West
Bank and Gaza, whom Israel
had hoped to impress with its
liberality and humane gen-
erosity, were now "sup-
porters" of an organization
dedicated to its destruction.
This assumption was con-
firmed by the 1976 municipal
elections in the West Bank.
Four years earlier, Israel had
proudly permitted the area's
residents to elect their own
mayors and city councils, as
an exercise in democracy; and
most of the winners had been
members of the old-line, pro-
Jordanian aristocracy. Now,
in 1976, the royalists were
defeated by a new generation
of pro-PLO candidates who
made no secret of their
allegiance. They opposed a
return of the West Bank to
Jordan, were ungrateful for
the prosperity that Israeli
occupation had brought to
the region acid unimpressed
by Israel's efforts to "win the
Nobel Prize." As Palestinian
nationalists they wanted a
state in the West 'Bank, a
state their leaders in Beirut
openly declared would be the
first step in the eventual
replacement of Israel by a

"democratic, secular Arab
Palestine."
The 1973 war also un-
leashed Gush Emunim, a
Jewish movement that was,
in many ways, a mirror image
of the new Palestinian leader-
ship. Like the Palestinians
the supporters of Gush
Emunim believed that the en-
tire area—from the Mediter-
ranean to the Jordan RiNier-
was a single, territorial and
political unit. They, too, op-
posed redividing it; instead,
they demanded that Israel
annex the West Bank and
Gaza.
The Gush Emunim activ-
ists were modern orthodox
men and women who had

In recent years
Israel has become
a far more open
society than it was
during its first
two decades.

grown up in the fifties and
early sixties on the periphery
of the Real Israel. During the
Era of High Certitude their
views hadn't counted, but in
the general breakdown of
confidence that followed the
war, they were able to exploit
the weakness and hesitation
of the Rabin government to
begin "estabishing facts" in
the West Bank. They set up
settlements without govern-
ment approval, dragging the
irresolute politicians of the
Labor party behind them.
One of Prime Minister-elect
Menachem Begin's first acts
was to visit one of the Gush
settlements, where he danced .
with the pioneers, holding a
Torah scroll aloft, and pro-
claimed that, under his
government, such settle-
ments would receive govern-
ment support. And during
the next seven years Begin
encouraged Jews to move to
the area. At Camp David he
agreed to autonomy for the
Arab residents, an agreement
that foreclosed, at least tem-
porarily, his ultimate goal of
formal annexation; but he
sought to create conditions
under which the West Bank
and Gaza could never fall
under Arab control.
It was this resolve, more
than any other single issue,
that split the Israeli public,
and continues to do so until
today. Supporters of the
Begin view come not only
from the zealots of Gush
Emunim—never a mass
movement—but from an in-
creasingly large proportion of
the general population. Some
have been convinced by ideo-
logy and logic. Begin argued
that since Zionism's original