The following letter to the editor appeared in Ha'aretz on July 17 02.
Sir. Like the rest of my generation who had gone through the period of the British Mandate, I well remember the time of "The Big Curfew" when the British army imposed a week-long curfew of Tel-Aviv, after [Menachem Begin's] Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, causing the death of more than a hundred persons. I well remember the difficulties and frustration when the home became a prison, and what a relief it was when the curfew was removed after a week and life could go back to normal.
"The Big Curfew" is how we called it. Nowadays, Palestinians living under Israeli rule would would called it "The small curfew" or "The Lightweight Curfew". Inhabitants of Ramallah or Nablus would have been well content to settle for a curfew of one week only. Did our leaders think of the implications of an endless curfew, of the frustrations accumulating among the population and the increasing hatred? Is it their intention that due to the curfew, the Palestinian economy will totally collapse, all businesses will go bankrupt? Is the intention to create a situation in which, even when the curfew is lifted for a few hours, the people will have no more money with which to buy food? Is this the solution to the suicide bombings, or are we simply creating a powder keg which will blow up in our faces?
Hava Cohen, Tel-Aviv
P.S.Accidentally or not, the Haaretz column devoted to "quotations from old issuess" of the paper published an item from Ha'aretz of July 16, 1947 - a description of the curfew imposed on that date by the British on the Jewsih toen of Netanyah: "House to house searches and improvised prison enclosures at Netanyah (by Haaretz correspondent Haviv Kromholz). Empty streets, closed shutters, soldiers lying on the streets with their rifles aimed at the houses, arrested young people sitting down dejectedly on the ground in the July heat - that is how the capital of the Sharon Region looks on the first day of the military siege. The usually-bustling city was completely silent. Netanhya today is a tangle of barbed wire fences, with the only traffic being convoys of military armoured cars and tanks, and concentrations of thousands of soldiers."
