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March 14, 2003/Adar2 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 29
Israelis play surreal waiting game
MATTHEW GUTMAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
TEL AVIV - On a recent episode of a popular Israeli TV show, two comedians dressed as soldiers wearing gas masks in sealed rooms cheered when an Israeli official announced that war with Iraq had been postponed.
Jubilantly, the soldiers stripped from the windows the tape and plastic sheeting used to seal rooms, and threw off their gas masks.
Seconds later, the official's voice returned, saying that, actually, war was imminent. Feverishly, the comedians threw up new tape and plastic to seal the room; the cycle was repeated several times.
The skit seemed to capture the emotional uncertainty Israelis have been living with for months.
In Jaffa, the new home of Israel's largest battery of Patriot anti-missile missiles, residents' reactions to the possibility of war seemed overly calm.
With war looming ever closer, Shaul Rokach of Jaffa's Buy Fish - Don't Worry wholesale fish store is one of only about 10 percent of Israelis who say they will not seal a room and have not prepared gas masks.
"Listen, at the end of the day we have enough problems with the Palestinians and suicide bombings," he said. "Anyway, I don't think we'll see any Scuds."
Symbolizing the surreal nature of these days of waiting, the Patriot battery in Jaffa's Ajame neighborhood has become a somewhat macabre tourist attraction.
On March 8, hundreds of Israelis approached the barbed wire surrounding the little base that has sprung up in this largely Arab community, trying to catch a better glimpse of the missiles and the American soldiers manning them.
Besides tourism and security, the Patriot missiles have boosted the neighborhood's flagging restaurant business. Munching on a cucumber, Atina Salame, 56, owner of the renowned Atina et Raouf fish restaurant, poked at a reporter's notebook.
"Write this down: These missiles are the best thing that has happened to us here," she said. "We served 200 meals last Saturday, more than we have since the outbreak of the intifada" more than two years ago.
Until last weekend, Jaffa's once-bustling restaurants had been desolate.
"Either they're afraid or they want to punish the Arabs after every terror attack," Salame said of Jewish customers who had stopped coming to the mixed Jewish-Arab city. Business is down by at least half from its pre-intifada peak, Salame estimated.
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