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STEVEN KAPLAN

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Blowing Winds

Israelis struggle with what will happen next as they
walk down the street or buy an apartment.

LARRY DERFNER ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT

semi

An Israeli soldier patrols the Old City.

I

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t was hard to notice any anx-
iety or war jitters among the
crowds strolling past the ani-
mals at Ramat Gan's Safari
Park zoo. But somewhere un-
derneath the surface, it was
there.
"Everybody's just waiting for
something to happen. Some
Palestinian is planning to blow
up a bus or something, and then
who knows what's going to hap-
pen after that?" said Itai
Amouyal, a 34-year-old building
contractor from Lod, sitting on
the grass with his wife and in-
fant son.
Asked if she was afraid that
something like war might break
out in the coming months, Mill
Amouyal, 35, a hospital clerk,
said, "I'm afraid war might break
out in the next two weeks. I was
in Tel Aviv over Sukkot and I
went into a shopping mall, and
then I said to myself, 'Are you
crazy? Are you waiting for some-
body to blow you up?' So I left and
went to hang out by the beach."
Since the post-Yom Kippur
gunbattles in the territories, and
the rapid deterioration in Israeli-
Arab relations that followed, the
mood here has grown uneasy.
The news tells people that the
military is on high-alert for ter-
ror attacks. Syria's Hafez Assad
makes warlike noises; Yassir
Arafat warns of an end to the
peace process, and Egypt's Hos-
ni Mubarak and even Jordan's
King Hussein join the chorus.
The Arab world shakes its fist
at Israel, while the hawkish Ne-
tanyahu government seems at a
loss for how to deliver on its
promise of "secure peace." Israel
and its neighbors appear almost
on a collision course,

`The feeling among both halves
of the population — certainly on
the left, but also on the right — is
that the political situation has
changed so suddenly, so dramat-
ically, that the chance of a slide
into war is not theoretical, but
real," said Hebrew University Pro-
fessor Moshe Lissak, one of Is-
rael's most prominent sociologists.
A recent poll in the Ma'ariv dai-
ly newspaper found that 79.5 per-
cent of Israelis wanted the peace
process to continue — an extra-
ordinarily high figure, pointing to
the growing realization of what
an end to the peace process could
mean.
Still, it cannot be said that Is-
raelis are gripped by a gut fear of
terror, or of an eruption of fight-
ing with one or more of the Arab
countries. People have not gone
into a prewar mode of behavior.
"If there was a fear of missiles
falling we would see an increase
in sales immediately, but we
haven't seen any change at all,"
said a clerk at Tel Aviv's Nation-
al Safety Center, which special-
izes in gas masks and home
insulation against gas or chemi-
cal attacks.
The fear, however, is in the
back of the mind. For instance,
the Dan bus company, which ser-
vices the Greater Tel Aviv area,
reports that business went down
by about 10 percent over the High
Holidays, following the violence
sparked by the opening of the
Hasmonean tunnel.
"It wasn't just that people were
afraid of bus bombings, it was also
a psychological phenomenon —
they just didn't feel like going
places, they tended to close in on
themselves," said Dan spokesman
Itzak Kagan.

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