War On Terrorism

Yahrtzeit

Akiva students pray for terror victims.

DIANA LIEBERMAN
Copy Editor

T

he suicide bombers who struck a Jerusalem
pedestrian mall Saturday night targeted an
area popular with teens and young adults.
In the face of this attack on young people their
own age, and the deaths of bus passengers in Haifa,
students at Yeshivat Akiva prepared their own
response.
Seventh-12th graders resolved to read tehillim
(psalms) and prayers for seven days, taking turns in
the school's front hallways and continuing the vigil
at home.
"This violence seems so meaningless, so horrible,"
said Rabbi Eleazar Durden, assistant principal at the
Southfield school. "They felt the necessity to turn to
the prayers we have turned to so often in the past."
The effort was sparked by Rabbi Shlomo and Mrs.
Tali Sobel, teachers in Akiva's Kollel Mitzion program,
which brings young Orthodox Israelis who have corn-
pleted military service to the diaspora to teach, Rabbi
Durden said. ❑

Above: Rachel Kohn, 17,
of West Bloomfield, makes a poster
commemorating the victims.

Left: josh Faber, 15, of Southfield reads prayers.

11111

■1■ IN

RESOLVE from page 19

tions in the very heart of the areas
under the P.A.'s jurisdiction."
The wave of weekend terror attacks
gave Sharon the opportunity to make
his own moves, analysts agreed. The
U.S. government has indicated that
Israeli military action is permissible, as
long as Sharon doesn't destroy the
Palestinian Authority.
Yet many Israelis are drawing analogies
to the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan,
arguing that what is good policy for
Washington — targeting not just the
terrorists themselves, but also the
regimes that harbor them — is also valid
for Jerusalem.
"Sharon now has the license to pres-
sure Arafat, to hold him accountable for
terror," said Martin Kramer, a senior fel-
low at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel
Aviv University. "Sharon wasn't taken
seriously when he first said, 'You have
your Osama, we have ours.' But now he

12/7
2001

20

can Talibanize Arafat, showing that
Arafat has an industrial line for suicide
bombers unimpeded by the P.A."
In the course of a 12-hour period
from Saturday night through Sunday
afternoon, three Palestinian suicide
bombers killed at least 25 Israelis in
Jerusalem and in Haifa. Wednesday
morning, another suicide bomber killed
himself and injured 20 Israelis near the
King David Hotel.
"I have been reporting to you about
many terror incidents over the last year,
yet" these attacks "felt different," said
Ron Krumer, the director of external
affairs for the Hadassah Medical
Organization, whose two hospitals in
Jerusalem dealt with many of the
wounded. "I can't explain it."
The attacks were considered particu-
larly grisly both for their method — in
Jerusalem, bombers were stationed at
both ends of the Ben Yehuda pedestrian
mall, and a nearby car bomb was timed

to hit emergency workers rushing to the
scene — and their force.
Most of the injured were teen-agers,
and the bombs were filled with nails.
"When you operate on one after
another, you have to steel yourself
against a terrible pessimism," said
Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical
Center trauma surgeon Alon Pikarsky.
Sharon was in the United States at the
time, preparing for a meeting with
President Bush on the latest American
peace initiative.
When he got news of the terror
attacks, Sharon moved up his meeting
with Bush by a day and headed home
early, backed by tacit support from the
U.S. regarding any future military action.
"The U.S. created a diplomatic sup-
port network, but with the understand-
ing that Israel is going to do what it
needs to do," said Gerald Steinberg, who
heads the Interdisciplinary Program on
Conflict Management and Negotiation

at Bar-Ilan University.
Steinberg described the public mood
in Israel as "stoic, determined, angry.
They want to see some sort of resolution,
not just continuously going through
what seems to be an infinite cycle."
So is Israel now at war with the
Palestinians?
No, Kramer said. "We're one stage
beyond where we were before the
weekend," he said, yet still short of an
all-out war.
According to Steinberg, Israel might be
at the beginning of a prolonged military
action that could include house-to-house
searches in Palestinian territory and more
extensive responses than to previous
waves of Palestinian terror. Something,
Israelis say, has to give after 14 months
of a Palestinian terror offensive.
"It's time this government took
action," said Avi Hareven, a taxi driv-
er. "We've become sitting ducks." 0