(Philadelphia Inquirer) Michael Matza - According to Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, "Two-thirds of Jerusalem kids in high school personally know someone who was injured or killed, which is tremendous exposure to this violence." Yet Israeli commentator Yossi Klein Halevi sees the past year as a time when "Israel learned that it is a lot more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. We have a capacity to put up with a level of suffering, of pressure, that no Western society can match." Halevi said the turning point was the Palestinian bombing of a Passover seder in Netanya in which 29 people died and 140 were wounded. "The message that every Israeli got from that attack is that we are not free in this land, and if we don't start fighting back, and don't stop our defeatist questions about how will we win against terrorism - all the questions which really crippled us for the first year of the war - then we are simply going to lose."
2002-12-31 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive