Posted on 08/25/2003 10:20:30 AM PDT by knighthawk
Last Saturday evening, along with U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky and a Chicago family, I sat at dinner with Dr. David Zangen and his wife in a busy Jerusalem restaurant. A pediatrician affiliated with the Hadassah Hospital there, Zangen took several calls from the parents of patients with childhood diabetes, counseling them on how to handle ongoing difficulties.
Back in Chicago three days later, I thought of Zangen when news came of a devastating terrorist bombing on a Jerusalem bus in which 20 people had been killed and 100 wounded--many of them children. Zangen, I imagined, based on his descriptions of his life these past three years, was no doubt treating many of the wounded, victims of a mass murderer driven by ideology and hate.
The Israel we had visited for a week was different from what it had been at any other point over the past three years. The hotels were filled with tourists. The streets were filled with Israelis going about their ordinary business in the daytime, and in the evenings out to have a good time. They were all able to enjoy beautiful summer days and nights, ironically some 20 degrees cooler than the blistering conditions of the European cities from which many of the visitors had come.
The Israelis were thrilled by this taste of things as they once were and could again become. But they were also skeptical that the ''hudna'' that the Palestinian groups had declared could really last. The very term, after all, refers not to a cease-fire intended to precede a peaceful, permanent resolution of conflict, but rather to a pause in hostilities meant ultimately to be broken and historically used to enhance military capabilities.
Through the first half of the 90-day ''hudna,'' the midpoint of which came during our stay, the Palestinian Authority's prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, and head of security, Mohammad Dahlan, had done nothing at all to weaken the powers of radical Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose declared purpose is to destroy Israel and whose violent methods had been aimed at making life for Israeli civilians a living hell. Supported by funds from Saudi Arabia, Iran and other global sources, those groups were rebuilding their infrastructure, damaged by Israeli defensive measures; enhancing their armaments; using tunnels between the southern Gaza Strip and Egypt to smuggle in arms, and developing and testing rockets in the northern Gaza Strip.
Not only do these groups have no interest in allowing President Bush's road map to run its course, with a Palestinian state headed by a responsible, peace-abiding government living side by side with the Jewish state of Israel, but that vision is their nightmare. It was only a matter of time until they would once again act to return the sirens and the suffering to the streets of Israel's cities in an attempt to keep the conflict going.
And so on Tuesday evening, a preacher from Hebron with a perverse dream of martyrdom, a man with children of his own and a pregnant wife, strapped explosives around his waist, disguised himself as an observant Jew, entered Jerusalem, boarded a bus packed with families riding home from Judaism's holiest site, and blew himself up to kill as many Israelis as possible.
The contrast between this lover of death, whose gun-toting image has now been broadcast around the globe, and the life-bringing physician with whom I had dined in that same city three days earlier, could not be more stark. A final irony is that the doctor's ordinary patient load is made up of at least as many Palestinian children as Jewish ones. Such coexistence is a reality that Tuesday's killer could not tolerate, one that he and his ilk would do anything they could to prevent from defining the future.
Michael Kotzin is executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund-Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
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