JERUSALEM
speeches
SEE RELATED:
proclamations
President Bush
Old City
Western Wall
1967 Six-Day War
famous picture
streets of Ramallah I saw earlier today
fierce letter to the editor
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Micha Makovsky, 47, an agricultural instructor who lives in a kibbutz in Stotyan, near Caesaria, was more blunt.\
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“Bush comes. Bush goes. Clinton comes. Clinton goes. Still we will fight,” said Mr. Makovsky. \
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He was waiting for one of his twin sons to be inducted into the paratroopers. His eldest daughter and other twin son are also in the Israeli army.\
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“Yes, we want peace. I don’t want my kids to go to the army. I don’t sleep at night,” Mr. Makosvsky said.\
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But then he pointed to his 6-year old daughter, who stood nearby.\
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“See this girl?” he said. “She will go to the army, too.”\
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Earlier I had walked through a number of shops in the Christian quarter of the Old City, and I stopped to talk to Adnan Dakak, 45, a Palestinian shopkeeper.\
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Mr. Dakak said that “it seems [Mr. Bush] doesn’t know what the problem is.”\
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“Not knowing that Abbas doesn’t control Gaza is strange,” said Mr. Dakak, referring to Mr. Bush’s demands that Mr. Abbas stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip.\
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Mr. Dakak is an electrical engineer by trade but is now running the family business because there is no work for him as a Palestinian in Jerusalem.\
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“I am a second-class citizen, so I don’t get equal rights,” he said. “But I have to stay here. It’s my homeland. Even if I don’t get to practice in my field, I want to stay.”\
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Later, leaving the Western Wall, I ran into a newly married Israeli couple, Yitzy Schmidt, 24, and Tzipora Schmidt, 20.\
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Yitzy is a U.S. citizen who grew up in New York, and Tzipora is South African native. The two were introduced by a relative and met in Jerusalem only three months ago, they said.\
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The young couple were as adamant as Mr. Dakak that Jerusalem belonged to the Jewish people. \
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Jerusalem is “where we serve God,” said Mrs. Schmidt. “We know that it’s ours in the Bible, and we won it in a war.”\
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Telling Israel to give Jerusalem or any of their land to Palestine is “like telling the Americans to give back land that they took from the Indians, or the English,” said Mr. Schmidt said. \
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As I walked through the Armenian quarter on my way to the Jaffa Gate, I saw a T-shirt for sale that displayed an Israeli jet and said, “America, don’t worry, Israel is behind you.”\
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Below, you can see the Western Wall as the sun was setting today, with the Dome of the Rock right on the other side.\
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— Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times
