LIFE IN ISRAEL

Ultimate Eyewear
And Contact Lenses

Dr. H. Roland • Dr. M. Gottesman • Dr. M. Weishaus

Applegate Square

Northwestern Hwy. at Inkster Rd.

Call 358-2920

Fort Apache, Jerusalem

HELEN DAVIS

Israel Correspondent

Rabbi Elimelech & Ruthie Goldberg

will be presenting slides

of their recent trip

Teaching Torah
in the
Soviet Union

Saturday Evening, March 5
8:30 p.m.

Young Israel of Southfield
27705 Lahser

There Will Be No Charge

M

y neighbor decided
to immigrate to Is-
rael 18 years ago
while huddling protectively
over her infant daughter in
the corridor of the Amman
Intercontinental Hotel as
Jordanians and Palestinians
battled it out in the streets
below.
The previous day she had
been on a Swiss Air flight
from Zurich to her home in
New York when the plane was
hijacked by the Popular
Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP).
Along with two other air-
craft hijacked that day, the
pilot was forced to fly to
Dawson's Field in Jordan,
where the three planes, their
passengers evacuated, were
blown up in a massive media
extravaganza.
"The baby was sick, there
were bullet holes all over the
bedroom walls and I was ter-
rified they would find out I
was Jewish," she recalls.
"Israel was so near, and yet
so far. I lay in that corridor
and vowed that if we got out
alive, I would come to live in
Israel."
She kept her vow. lbday, a
young widow with six child-
ren, she lives in a suburb on
the northern rim of Jeru-
salem.
Traveling into the city with
her three youngest children
by bus last week, the Pales-
tinian struggle caught up
with her again as rocks
crashed through the windows.
They missed her 11-year-old
daughter by inches, but scat-
tered shards of glass over her
seven-year-old twins.
The family continues to
take that bus every day, even
though it is stoned repeated-
ly and a number of passen-
gers have been injured. "This
is our city and our country,"
she says defiantly. "We are
not going to be chased away
by stones!'
Not surprisingly, perhaps,
she is unimpressed by the
idea of reaching a territorial
compromise with the Arabs:
"I met George Habash in
Amman," she says, referring
to the leader of the radical
PFLP, "and he told.me he was
fighting to get back the land
stolen by the Zionists.
Nothing has changed since
then.
"The Arabs don't want just
the West Bank and Gaza —
they want everything. They
still want to drive the Jews in-
to the sea.
"Someone described the

.

THE CULTURAL COMMISSION

OF

CONGREGATION B'NAI DAVID

cordially invites you to hear

M. J. ROSENDERG

Former Editor of
AIPAC's
NEAR EAST REPORT

on

"The U.S. and Israel:
The View from Capitol Hill"

Sunday, March 6, 1988, 11 A.M.

CONGREGATION 13141AI DAVID

24350 Southfield Rd. I Southfield

557-8210

Question and Answer Period
The Community Is Invited
No Charge

Reliaious News Se rvice

THE LIGHT BEHIND
THE IRON DOOR

The Old City: Life in the city today is a mixture of violence and everyday
pursuits.

demonstrations in the ter-
ritories as a war that Israel
must win. I agree complete-

„

Neighborhood's
Changed

The neighborhood I share
with 20,000 other Israelis
borders on Shuafat, a middle-
class Arab suburb where the
unfinished summer palace of
Jordan's King Hussein —
now a modest, modern ruin —
sits on a hill bearing mute
testimony to the last oc-
cupier.
I sometimes shopped in
Shuafat, where the merchants
are polite and punctilious in
an old-fashioned kind of way
— a change from the brusque,
take-it-or-leave-it style of the
local Jewish shopkeepers.
But I do not go shopping in
Shuafat anymore. The stores
have been silent and shut-
tered for weeks in a commer-
cial strike called by the PLO,
the Islamic Jihad, the
youngsters who now rule the
streets.
I can only guess at the feel-
ings of the merchants over
this compulsory demonstra-
tion of solidarity. One strik-
ing shopkeeper pointed out
that if he defies the Israelis he
could be jailed; if he defies his
own people he could be killed.
Obedience is total.
It took 20 minutes to curb
the counter-revolutionary zeal
of one Arab shopkeeper who
defied the strike call. Just 15
minutes after opening his
doors for business, a PLO
radio station operating from
Syria was broadcasting his
name and address — and the
names of every member of his
family. Five minutes later, his
shutters were down again.

Playing John Wayne

The Number 25 bus that
runs from my neighborhood,

via Shuafat, into the city
every 20 minutes has become
a sort of Wild West dash
through "Indian territory!"
The bus has become a
favorite target for the young
hit-and-run Palestinian
demonstrators, and any first-
grade Jewish child who
makes that daily run to
school can tell you exactly
where to duck — just as the
bus careers past the mosque
and the nearby refugee camp.
My volatile, polyglot
neighbors have reacted to this
daily threat in a curious,
unexpected way. I kept my
children home from school for

ILs long as the
occupied
territories were
quiet, it was fine
with me. But
now?"

one day after the first attack,
but I don't know of another
parent who did the same.
Taking that bus has
become a matter of perverse
pride. The real heroes are the
bus drivers, a normally rough
and surly bunch who have
been dramatically trans-
formed into John Waynes
navigating their vulnerable
stage coaches to the Central
Bus Station.
They have become the un-
likely symbols of a kind of
determination, and if they
order their passengers to lie
down in the aisles to avoid the
stones and glass, they are
obeyed quietly and without
question.
Curiouser still is to sit in
the Number 25 and watch
while it stops to pick up Arab
passengers in Shuafat. The
Arabs and the Jews don't
look at each other, but each is