1 BACKGROUND Loan Guarantees Continued from preceding page •GMAC LUXURY SMART LEASE 36 Months. First pymt. plus $475 ref. sec. dep., and plate or transfer due on delivery 4% state tax additional. 36,000 mile limitation. 15' per mile excess charge over limitation. Lessee has option to pur- chase at lease end for $17,263. To get total pymts. multiply pymt. by 36 months. Roadside —==service OGER RINKE SmARTLEAsE- DILLAC A General Motors Family Since 1917 7584800 1-696 at Van Dyke (4 minutes East of 1-75) "Your edge in natural nutrition" Is Proud to Announce Its 8th STORE LOCATION 2823 Coolidge (South of 12 Mile) Berkley 543-9595 FORMERLY BERKLEY HEALTH FOODS Now open Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sun. 12-5 COME IN AND SEE THE MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS! SAVE 25% ON YOUR ENTIRE PURCHASE with coupon . . . expires 2/15/92 one per person please excluding specially priced items, valid at Berkley location only JN L 34 FRIDAY, JANUARY 31, 1992 highly sensitive issue as well? Or what, on a rather more mundane level, constitutes a "building start"? Is it the breaking of ground (which can be verified by the satellites monitoring con- struction in the territories)? Or does the issuance of a building permit or the ap- proval of blueprints by a planning commission qual- ify as a "start," as various officials are now arguing? More confusing yet is the flood of conflicting claims on how just many dwellings are presently under construction in the territories. As a rule the Housing Ministry has kept mum on this matter, leaving the field open for an information war by non- government bodies. Just last week the Judea, Samaria, and Gaza Council (a settlers' organization) was trying to play down the number of building starts and spoke of 12,000 units under construction. At the same time, Peace Now claimed that 13,650 units are currently being built (and cited its astonishing finding that $2.5 billion had been invested in the set- tlements in 1991 alone). Now each side is reported to have changed its tack, with the right inflating the number of building starts and the left minimizing them. Government figures are no more illuminating. Last week one paper quoted a Fi- nance Ministry figure of 6,435 building starts in the territories during the first nine months of 1991. This week the Housing Ministry released word that work had begun on 16,000 units since April 1991. Yet there is still no reliable account of just how many dwellings are under construction today — to say nothing of how many building starts will be ex- ecuted before Israel gives Washington its answer. Meanwhile, reports from the field are that the activity of countless bulldozers is more feverish than ever. Ultimately, though, no amount of obfuscation will be able to cover the fact that what Israel faces is really a Hobson's choice. For if we are to take the Lifschitz document seriously — and not dismiss it, as some set- tlers recommend, as just hype cooked up to impress the Americans — then the days of serious settlement in the territories are numbered whether Israel avails itself of the guarantees or not. Put bluntly, the choice for Mr. Shamir's government is either to take up the Ameri- can offer, halt further set- tlement in the territories, and concentrate on creating jobs to absorb the immi- grants; or forgo the guar- antees and lead the country into such dire economic straits that it will lack the wherewithal for either new settlements or new immi- grants. On one front, events are already moving in the latter direction. According to a re- cent report, 300,000 immi- Without the loan guarantees, Israel faces a bleak economic future. grants were budgeted for in 1991, but only 100,000 arrived because, as one commentator explained, "they realize that the Israeli national effort is aimed in another direction, and what awaits them is a life of pov- erty and hardship." The more Israelis realize that they may be headed for the same, the more the champions of settlement at any cost will have to weigh their own prospects of polit- ical survival. This is, after all, an election year. Thus it would appear that what must be worked out between Jerusalem and Washington now is less a formula to rec- oncile opposing policies than a way to help Mr. Shamir both save Israel from hard- ship and save face. ❑ NEWS Lost Archives In Moscow Amsterdam (JTA) — The long-lost archives of Dutch Jewish institutions seized by the Nazis during their oc- cupation of Holland in World War II have been discovered in Moscow, where their return has been promised, it was reported here. Anatoly Prokopenko, deputy chairman of the Committee for Archives of the Russian Government, said he was prepared to return the entire archival collections to the Nether- lands. They now repose in the so- called "special archives" es- tablished in Moscow in 1945 to contain material retrieved from the Nazis. Originally stored in Berlin, it was mov- ed to Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1943 to escape Allied bombings.