RANSVESTIA

a whole modern country had been constructed in the past 25 years forced into a war on a religious holiday. On the other hand Syria, and Egypt, where we had been, were dirty, full of beggars-and Syria and Lebanon full of the Palestine refugee camps - and I thought of what those countries would have looked like if the monies spent on armaments and the efforts spent on anti-Israeli actions had been put into improving the country and the people in them. It came to me that the higher-ups in the Arab coun- tries didn't really want the Palestine question settled - they had a vested interest in keeping it alive as 1) it gave them continuing excuses for anti- Israeli acts and policies, and 2) it was the only issue on which they could all agree. (Even the subsequent oil embargo was neither unanimous nor equally effective in all Arab countries.)

On our way back to Haifa we visited the Crusader City of Accra which was a fantastic place. All your childhood imaginings about big castles and dungeons etc. There were endless rooms underground-big ones-which had only been excavated in the previous couple of years. On the roads there were a lot of women army MPs directing traffic, convoys moving up to the front and many other evidences of a war in progress and this was only Monday the 8th. We visited the beautiful gardens of the Ba'hai temple on the slopes of Mt. Carmel and found ourselves pinned down there for about a half hour with an air raid alert. We were in the open but they didn't want cars wandering around the streets in case something happened. We were only a couple of miles from the big Haifa oil refinery – a prime target for Syrian aircraft if they chose to make an attack into Israel.

Tuesday we drove on down the coast to Tel Aviv. It is a really growing city with many building projects underway, but these were all stopped and partly built buildings standing silent with the construction cranes on top of them with their slack cables blowing in the wind. Many shops were closed and many were boarded up or with strips of tape criss- crossing the windows. Traffic was very light even at the rush hour. Of course most of the shop owners had been called up to their units leaving only the women and old men to carry on the business of the country. Of course there was a blackout at sundown and what cars drove at night had blue lights. Although we stayed in the new Tel Aviv Hilton it was a mea- sure of the pressure the country has lived under for years that all rooms were already provided with blackout curtains-they didn't have to be put up for the occasion. There were a lot of sonic booms all the time as jets came and went toward the Syrian and Sinai fronts. There was no panic anywhere, the hotel service was good tho slow due to short handedness

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