THE JEWISH NEWS

YEAR
IN
REVIEW

GARY ROSENBLATT

Editor

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A YEAR OF
CELEBRATION.
Israel was gearing up for her 40th anniversary,
planning for an influx of tourists and a variety of
programs and events, concerts and fireworks.
But the fireworks came unexpectedly, and from
a different quarter, as Palestinian Arabs living on
the West Bank and Gaza erupted in what appeared
to be a spontaneous outpouring of anger, frustra-
tion and hatred.
Their target: the Israelis. Their army: young
boys and young men seemingly unafraid of the
powerful Israeli military. Their weapons: stones,
rocks, firebombs — and world sympathy for their
plight as refugees seeking a home of their own.
What began last December 9, in apparent
outrage over a traffic accident, has spilled over in-
to a full-scale uprising that, nine months and hun-
dreds of deaths later, still vents its fury. The violence
no longer attracts front-page headlines, but each
day there are demonstrations and deaths.
The world has come to learn a new word,
intifada, and it has dramatically changed the
Mideast equation, exploding the status quo and
returning the Arab-Jewish conflict to its most
primitive level. For this is not a war between armies
but between individuals, pitting Arab against Jew,
young men with rocks against others with sticks,
fighting over the same small piece of land that their
ancestors died over.
A war between cousins in 5748, the year of the
stones.

`Iron Fist' Policy

Israel responded to the violence with varying
degrees of military force, at times using clubs in

YEAR OF THE STONES: A year slated for celebration as Israel's
40th anniversary of statehood will instead be remembered as the
year of the intifada, or uprisings, which began in December on the
West Bank and Gaza and continued despite harsh military
Media Images
measures to quell them.

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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