Forces Of Disagreement

As Clinton pushes Arafat and Barak to settle,
each faces opposition at home.

Issue

peace bottle.

DAVID LANDAU

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Jerusalem
s Israeli and
Palestinian lead-
ers cut through
decades of sacred axioms
and slogans, striving to
reach an agreement at
Camp David, Israeli
society braced itself this
week for what could be
the toughest-ever chal-
lenge to its cohesion. At
the same time,
Palestinians groped with
the harsh reality of what
a compromise could
mean after decades of
violent anti-Israeli
rhetoric and action.
Protests by militant
Jewish settlers and
members of the funda-
mentalist Palestinian

A

Hamas movement
mounted as both the
Israeli army and the
troops of Palestinian
Authority President
Yasser Arafat's Fatah
group went on height-
ened alert.
Because of the U.S.-
imposed media black-
out, a pall of secrecy lay
heavy over the summit's
proceedings.
But despite all the
uncertainty and the tid-
bits of disinformation
peddled by both parties
to the talks, a cautious
belief that the summit
would not end in failure
seemed to be growing.
For the Israeli public,
tension climbed to near-
fever pitch as an entire
country found itself
obsessively seeking out

every whisper of news,
rumor or speculation.
On Tuesday morn-
ing, the country's
largest7 selling newspa-
per, Yediot Achronot,
proclaimed in a banner
headline that Barak was
returning home "empty-
handed." But as the day
wore on, that "scoop"
seemed to become
increasingly premature,
not to say mistaken.

Jewish Majority

For the hundreds of
thousands of citizens
who demonstrated
Sunday night in Tel
Aviv's Rabin Square
against Barak's peace pol-
icy, the tilt of the report-
ing from Washington

FORCES on page 14

Walking The Walk

Former Detroit-area residents view the peace process
differently, now that they live in Israel.

JUDITH SUDILOVSKY

Special to the Jewish News

Jerusalem
long with the
rest of Israel, for-
mer Detroit resi-
dents are waiting anx-
iously to see the out-
come of the Camp
David summit.
"This may be the
most crucial decision the
people of Israel have to
make in its history," said
Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer,
66, a Jerusalem resident
who four years ago filled
in as an interim associate
rabbi at Shaarey Zedek
in Southfield. "The
implications are not of

A

whether Gore or Bush
will be the next presi-
dent of the United States
of if there will be a1
percent or a 2 percent
tax increase. Those are
nonsense issues. This is a
life-or-death situation."
Further, he noted,
Detroit-area Jews, like
most Americans, don't
understand the com-
plexity and importance
of the issues for Israel
because the mass media
don't give the talks the
sort of saturation cover-
age they get in Israel.

Cultural Differences

A former Oak Park resi-
dent, Norman Platt,

who emigrated to Israel
because he feared the
high rate of assimilation
made it impossible to
sustain a truly successful
Jewish community in
the United States,
echoed Rabbi Tutnauer's
observation.
Although friends back
home may do their best
to keep up with'the
implications of issues in
Israel, he said, it is impos-
sible "to compare the
assessment of an Israeli
Jew to that of an
American Jew sitting back
in the States. Their frame
of reference is different.
"I think it - is very dif-
THE WALK on page 12

Jr1

7/21.

2000

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