750

DETROIT

2 TISHREI 5754/SEPTEMBER 17, 1993

Inside

ETROI

Apples And Honey

Rain didn't dampen the
holiday prelude.

Page 22

Numb To The Need?

Soviet Jews are still
coming and still need
Detroit help.

Page 50

Earnest Message

This author exchanged
business for kids.

Page 103

Contents on page 3

Day Of Independence,
Day Of Infamy

Israelis express little optimism
for the peace treaty.

ELIZABETH APPLEBAUM ASSISTANT EDITOR

W

hen Hersh Akiva (Harry)
Schaefer left Detroit for
Israel seven years ago, he
never imagined he would
witness what he saw this week.
Thousands of Palestinians, their
hands thrust in the air in "victory"
signs, their once-illegal "flag of
Palestine" waving in the sky, rallied
throughout the Jerusalem area.
As the bus on which Mr. Schaefer
was riding passed by, "they jeered
us," he said. "To them, it's like inde-
pendence day. For us, it's a day of
infamy."
While Americans celebrated the
signing this week of the peace accord,
which gives Palestinians control of
the Gaza Strip and Jericho, former
Detroiters now living in Israel greeted
the news with great apprehension.
"I am not at all optimistic," said

INDEPENDENCE page 8

History is made as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signs the peace treaty while President Clinton, PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat and U.S. Secretary of State
Warren Christopher look on.

`A Brave Gamble'

White House cermonial handshakes aside, the Israel-PLO accord was less a peace treaty
than a combination of Rabin's pragmatism and faith.

IRA RIFKIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

n a warm Monday in
Washington, a cere-
mony laden with
irony and emotion —
one almost beyond
imagi-
nation
just two
short
weeks
ago — took place on the
White House South
Lawn, setting Israel
upon a risky course,
but one that may —just
may — finally bring peace 45 years
after the Jewish state was born in a
hail of Arab gunfire.
September 13, 1993: A day of
instant history, the lingering snap-
shot of which was an uncomfortable,
ritualized handshake between two
men who have spent their lives as

the bitterest of enemies.
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's prime min-
ister: the former general who led the
conquest of the territories during the
Six-Day War and who once pro-
claimed that the way to
break the intifada was
to break the bones of
Palestinian stone-throw-
ers.
Yassir Arafat, chair-
man of the Palestine
Liberation Organiza-
tion: architect of bloody
massacres in Ma'alot;
and Rome, Istanbul and Metulla; the
personification of everything that
Israelis fear, and hate, about the
Arab world that surrounds them and
has sought to drive them into the
sea.
Yet there they stood, on a podium
facing more than 3,000 invited

Special local
and national
coverage
begins on page 6.

guests and with President Bill
Clinton — a man with life experi-
ences vastly different from those of
these two men of the Middle East —
beaming encouragingly, as a
Declaration of Principles between
Israel and the PLO was signed. It is
a document — "a brave gamble," as
the president put it — that Israelis
hope will bring them physical securi-
ty, and Palestinians hope will give
them a state of their own and pull
them out of their economic depriva-
tion.
It was a day requiring the suspen-
sion of skepticism and more than a
dollop of faith, a day on which hope
triumphed over fear, at least for the
time being — a pinch-me kind of a
day when reality seemed to stand on
its head.
And it was a day on which Prime

GAMBLE gage 6