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Commentary: Israeli Students Beginning Their Mandatory Military Service After High School
Morning Edition: June 25, 2002
 Youth Radio
BOB EDWARDS, host:
Periodically, MORNING EDITION hears from two young commentators in the Middle East through Youth Radio. Today's updates from Palestinian Ala Uwainah and Israeli Liat Margalit were recorded prior to President Bush's speech. Ala Uwainah lives in Bethlehem, and spent most of April and May inside his house, while Israeli's army occupied the town. Liat Margalit lives in Jerusalem, and graduates from high school this month, and she will start her mandatory army service after her final exams.
LIAT MARGALIT:
Like everyone else our age, graduating from high school, we talk about how everyone will go their separate ways. We don't know when we're going to see each other. We're all going to the army soon, and the emotions are mixed. Some of my friends are going to be on the front lines, a few by their own choice, and a few because they have to. A good friend of mine will enter a top army unit in a few months. It's a big accomplishment, but even he has mixed feelings about the job. He doesn't want Israel to be in the occupied territories, but he knows he has no choice.
I'm not an awfully emotional person, but I keep thinking about him a few months from now in his uniform, and it makes me want to cry. With bomb threats every day, we think about the worst, but everybody's afraid to talk about it. One thing is sure, we all know how absurd this war is. But it seems like Israel has no one to turn to. My friends and I really do want peace. We want our neighbors to co-exist with us. This statement may sound empty, but it's genuine.
EDWARDS: Seventeen-year-old Liat Margalit in Jerusalem.
In Bethlehem, 20-year-old Ala Uwainah says the escalating violence directly affects his daily life, marked by the constantly changing military presence in his town.
ALA UWAINAH:
Each time the troops leave Bethlehem, I wake up early the next morning at 5 AM, listening to the silence. No tanks, no armored personnel carriers and no loudspeakers saying in broken Arabic, `Stay in. You're under curfew until further notice.' And then, when I'm trapped in my house, I have the anguish of watching my mom. During the longest curfew, when my brother was stuck in Ramallah for over a month, my mother turned the phone into a shrine of maternity. With all the sobs and sighs, her red eyes embroidered with veins, she spoke with him every day.
Whether I'm free or a prisoner, the thousands of tiny worries accumulate until they make a mountain that's just sitting there in your way. I don't listen to the news anymore; I don't need to. Whenever something serious happens, like a suicide bombing, it manifests itself in my life. It comes to me in the form of closed road, a curfew or a tank rolling down the street. It's been like that for months, but now it's worse than ever. The shreds of Palestinian self-rule and mobility that were there are now being bulldozed away.
EDWARDS: Twenty-year-old Ala Uwainah in Bethlehem, and 17-year-old Liat Margalit in Jerusalem.
The series Youth Voices from the Middle East originates at Youth Radio, which is a student radio training organization based in Berkeley, California.
The time is 29 minutes past the hour.
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