On Both Sides in the Mideast, Fear and Stress Are Building

JAMES BENNET NY Times 15mar02

JERUSALEM, March 14 — Dr. Beny Sapir, a veterinarian, kept seeing certain symptoms in dogs and cats who lived on Jerusalem's margins, where the days and nights are pierced by gunfire, explosions and sirens. They would shake or stop eating. Some stopped going outside, even hid under the furniture.

That was when Dr. Sapir began prescribing Valium for the animals. "The family is nervous, so the dog is nervous," he said. "There is a lot — a lot — of stress."

The psychic shakiness of some household pets does not amount to much in a conflict that has lasted more than 17 months and claimed more than 1,400 human lives. But it is a sign of how fear, and coping with it, have become stitched into daily life here.

For those who know what the sounds signify, the effects have been more damaging. In Ramallah, occupied by Israeli forces for three days, families have been sleeping in their basements, ordering their children not to go outside, stretching out groceries to last until the crossfire dies away. Israel said today that its forces would soon begin to withdraw from the city.

For his part, Dr. Sapir, a gentle man known to kiss injured dogs when they arrive at his clinic, joined a line with hundreds of other Jerusalemites early one morning this week. He was hoping to get a license to carry a gun.

On both sides, people are sick of the fear, and that is the chief resource for Anthony C. Zinni, the retired general and Bush administration envoy, who arrived today in hopes of arranging a cease-fire. But the anger that has come with that fear is General Zinni's foremost obstacle.

Along with those emotions, there is a growing desperation. This week, an Israeli woman won an unusual injunction from a Supreme Court judge. It instructed the state to preserve the sperm of her son, killed in a Palestinian attack, until the High Court renders a judgment on her yearning for grandchildren.

"All I ask is to be allowed to use modern technology to fulfill my basic desire to see offspring from my son," read her legal brief, a poignant indictment of the cruelty of the conflict.

This is a place where, after an Israeli bomb intended for Palestinian gunmen explodes outside a refugee camp, little boys run up to show a stranger pieces of other little boys. Where, after a Palestinian suicide bombing in a trendy Jerusalem nightspot, a piece of an Israeli lies by a street curb, just steps from the prime minister's residence.

In a square in Tel Aviv this week, a group of Israeli and Palestinian parents who lost children to political violence set out coffins, hoping to mark each death in the conflict. There was not enough space. They were able to set out only 380 coffins.

Yitzhak Frankenthal, the founder of the group, lost his oldest son, Arik, in 1994 when he was kidnapped and killed by the Islamic group Hamas. Mr. Frankenthal met this evening with three Palestinian parents from his group.

"One of them lost his child three weeks ago, one lost his child a month ago, and one lost his child seven months ago," he said. "And you know, the pain is the same pain. They have the same pain that I've got."

The pain is the same but it shows no sign of stopping the killing. Israel says it invaded Ramallah, like other Palestinian cities and refugee camps, in an effort to uncover weapons laboratories and arrest or kill militants.

Senior military officials called the mission their only alternative to stop Palestinian attacks.

The invasion took a heavy toll on noncombatants. At about 2:30 on Tuesday morning, Diana Buttu, a Canadian who works as a legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, heard tanks in the street outside her apartment.

Soldiers broke through the glass of the front door. They went door to door through the building, she said, spraying brown paint to block the keyholes so they could pass unobserved.

The soldiers made one of her neighbors, sobbing, knock on her door, Ms. Buttu said.

When she opened the door, screaming in English that she was an unarmed foreigner, she found five soldiers with guns trained on her, she said.

"We're not here to harm you," she recalled one of them saying, "but we are going to be in this building for the next 72 hours, and we don't think you should stay because it's not going to be very safe."

She said that the soldiers gave her and a roommate five minutes to gather their things and leave, into a night filled with gunfire. "The worst part," she said, "is that I know that they treated us better because we're foreigners."

The Israeli city of Ashdod is planning to distribute 100 guns to teachers in its schools, the newspaper Maariv reported today.

Dr. Sapir, the veterinarian, still loves a joke even if the punch line is dark and even if he has decided to carry a gun. He likes to say that only two businesses are booming here: "Vets, and shops that sell pistols."

He prescribes Valium in tiny doses for his animals and only as a last resort. "I try to explain to the people that the answer to the problem is first of all love," he said. "If your dog wants to stay home, don't push him out." But, he said, in extreme cases — he treats two to three daily now — the drug lets "the dog separate from the problem that he had and lets him begin a new life."

The drug worked for Yael Kalev's pinscher, Lila. "When there is shooting, our dog becomes hysterical," she said, "She cries and shakes over her whole body." The drug calms Lila down.

Mrs. Kalev said her children were used to the shooting. But "when it is F-16's," she said, referring to American-made warplanes used by Israel, "they wake up."

Ruti Rahav learned that by shutting the doors and windows and staying with her German shepherd, Mikey, she could shelter him from the frights of war. He, in turn, helped comfort her during a recent Israeli bombing raid on Bethlehem. "He got under the bed and I lay down on the floor and held him," she said.

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