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Days of Important Decisions
What happens on Capitol Hill can hit the Detroit
Jewish community like an aftershock.
So with Congress attempting to balance the
federal budget and states slashing spending, the
Jewish Federation is expecting a 35 percent or
$4 million loss of government subsidies to Jew-
ish Family Service, Jewish Federation Apart-
ments, Jewish Vocational Services and Jewish
Home for Aged.
Those cats will be directly felt "on the ground."
Your parents, your friends, your neighbors could
unfortunately feel the effects. Programs such as
Meals on Wheels and the administering of food
stamps could be cut to the people who need these
programs the most.
Cuts in immigration aid could hurt the JFS
Resettlement program severely.
There is a $270 billion proposal to cut Medicare
benefits over the next seven years. The Jewish
Home for Aged receives $82 per day in Medicaid
reimbursements for eligible residents. But the
actual cost is $119 per day, the difference made
up through the Allied Jewish Campaign. With
reimbursement cuts on the table, Campaign
would have to come up with more funds for its
elderly residents.
From March 24-26, Federation will conduct
its annual Days of Decision campaign. It is an
opportunity for the community to come forward
and provide needed funds to cushion these "af-
tershocks." This is not about donating money to
provide support jobs, or to fund a vague catego-
ry of administrative costs. This is about food on
the table, heat in our homes, integrity in our lives.
Instead, Days of Decision gives Federation mon-
ey to keep its agencies' services on an even keel.
There are so many uncertainties we face in
life. We as Jews have always known that if there
is a certainty, it's that social service help through
our Federation has always been made available.
And even with federal cutbacks, we need to make
sure that continues to be the case.
Only A Short-Term Solution
Israel is doing it again. And the results could be
devastating to an economy that is expected to re-
main in a hyper-growth phase for several more
years. As part of its war against radicals opposed
to the peace process, Israel is weaning itself from
dependency on Palestinian Arab labor.
This week, the Israeli government announced
that up to 16,000 new foreign workers from Thai-
land and Romania would fill jobs recently held by
Arabs. They will join 70,000 other foreign work-
ers already in Israel. And, at the risk of sounding
protectionist, they will lay the groundwork for an
underclass that could create slums and strain Is-
rael's health and social services infrastructure.
Shortly after the Jewish state conquered the
West Bank and Gaza Strip during the 1967 Six-
Day War, Israel's construction industry turned
to Arab labor, as cheap as it was abundant. These
day laborers build everything from Jewish res-
idences near Hebron to hospitals in Tel Aviv,
where victims of the recent attacks now lie.
In the hopes of stopping more suicide attack-
ers from entering the country, Israel has virtu-
ally welded shut entry points for these workers
at the pre-1967 border. And Israel industry is
hurting. So, the government last week respond-
ed by announcing an "air train" to bring in more
workers from overseas.
ci)
We urge Israel to drop this short-term solu-
w ton. Israel's unemployment situation is not dra-
NO BODY " CAN
DEFEAT US!
matic. Rather, this policy will create massive
headaches. Israel should rediscover avodah ivrit,
or Hebrew labor. The phrase, a slogan of the pre-
state Zionists and the country's early years,
meant Jewish hands — in the fields and the of-
fices — getting dirty in building the new Jewish
commonwealth.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Russian im-
migrants and others seek work in Israel. Many
of them are university-trained professionals, but
many could provide much-needed basic labor for
their first year or two in the country.
There also could be a system of national con-
scription into the manual labor force. In recent
years, Israel has had an abundance of army re-
cruits. As such, she has lowered the duration of
annual reserve duty, the mandatory year in
which that service ends and the army training
time for new immigrants over a certain age.
New immigrants could work side-by-side with
native Israelis on projects such as hospitals,
schools, government office buildings and neigh-
borhoods.
While no cure all, this could take the country
a step closer to restoring its fractured national
sense of purpose and unity. Israel's policy of re-
lying on Arab labor was a bad one. There's no
need to replace that faulty system with another
that will only deliver its own set of compounding
problems.
OF COURSE 1140.
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Comment
Left And Right?
Bombs Narrow Gaps
AMOS OZ SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
Even in the
midst of rage
and agony, we
shouldn't provide
Hamas with the
kind of triumph
it desires most:
to sow seeds of
despair and in-
ternal hatred
among us and to
manipul2te Israeli society into re-
suming a hysterical internal rift
among us.
The truth is that the pragmat-
ic left wing and the pragmatic
right wing in Israel are closer
these days to a national consen-
sus than they have ever been since
the Six-Day War of 1967. The
doves are talking now about a firm
disengagement between the Is-
raeli people and the Palestinian
people, and the reasonable hawks
are talking about security consid-
erations and about Israel's legiti-
mate right of self-defense.
Save for the fanatical fringes,
no one in the political right wing
in Israel these days is advocating
building more settlements on the
West Bank, or moving back into
Gaza. Not one of them is now wav-
ing the flag of self-righteous ide-
ology of "Greater Israel"; not one
of them is now suggesting that the
Palestinians should live happily
under an Israeli government.
It is all too easy, even tempting,
to waste our time now on a use-
less "we told you so" kind of argu-
ment.
But Israel seems to find itself
in the front line of what threatens
to become a global clash between
Islamic fundamentalism and the
rest of humanity. Perhaps the
hawks and the doves in Israel
could now try to establish a basic
consensus between them along the
following lines: no Israeli domi-
.
Jerusalem-born Amos Oz is the
author of myriad articles and -
books. He is a veteran of the Six-
Day and Yom Kippur wars, and
has been a leading figure in the
Israeli Peace Now movement
since 1977. © Amos Oz 1996.
nation over the Palestinians; no
despairing of the peace efforts; a
total war against Israel's enemies,
who are also the enemies of most
of the Arab nations and the ma-
jority of the Palestinians and, in-
deed, of all humanity.
A total war meaning, of course,
both self-defensive and offensive.
Is it possible to bring the vast
majority of Israelis to act togeth-
er along these lines?
If it is — let's do it soon. El
Letters
Wisdom
Of Process
When the suicide bombings began
a little more than a year ago,
Chairman Arafat said in a speech,
"We are all suicide bombers." And,
indeed, 250,000 people attended
the funeral ofYahya Ayyash, 'The
Engineer."
In recent testimony before the
Knesset, both General Yaakov
AmiDror, head of the intelligence
branch of Israel's Secret Service,
and General Yaalon, of military
intelligence, testified that Mr.
Arafat has made no effort to dis-
mantle the infrastructures of the
various terrorist organizations of
both the left and the right, such as
Islamic-Jihad and Hamas on the
right, and PFLP and the DPPLP
on the left.
When the first of the recent bus
bombings took place on Feb. 25,
Linda Gradstein ofNational Pub-
lic Radio, who is a strong propo-
nent of the peace process, had an
interesting comment. She said that
Chairman Arafat was enraged be-
cause Hamas had promised to de-
lay all terrorist actions "until after
the Israeli elections."
Does this tell you something
about the wisdom of the "peace
process" that the Israeli govern-
ment is following?
Herschel L. Schlussel,
M.D.
Southfield