Reporter’s Notebook : Jews to Arafat: Help Shut Sex Shop

This is a story about Yasser Arafat, a sex shop and Orthodox Jews, among other things.

It began a month or so ago when a shop called Sex Style, offering pornographic films and other erotic wares, opened in a shopping complex in West Jerusalem.

Such shops are not uncommon in more secular cities--in Tel Aviv, for example--but Jerusalem is different. There were riots here last fall when a movie house began showing old films on Friday nights. Some regarded it as a desecration of the Jewish Sabbath.

To avoid a similar eruption, the sex shop owners blackened the windows so that passers-by would not be offended. Even the name was abbreviated, to the Hebrew equivalent of “S-- Style.”

Just in case, however, the owners had the shop fireproofed.

The religious were not placated. An extreme Orthodox group known as the Neturei Karta, which means “Guardians of the City” in Hebrew, sent a letter to Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, seeking his help in getting the shop closed.

The PLO and Orthodox Jews may seem unlikely allies, but the Neturei Karta people reject the concept of a Jewish state and have long advocated the internationalization of Jerusalem.

Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, a spokesman for the group, pointed out that a representative of the Arab League at the United Nations intervened in a recent dispute to prevent the Israeli government from closing an Orthodox slaughterhouse in the Mea Shearim section of Jerusalem.

Writing to the PLO executive committee in Tunis, Hirsch appealed for PLO intervention at the United Nations to “help maintain the sanctity and holiness of Jerusalem, the spiritual citadel of the world.”

There has been no response from Arafat.

After several months of stone throwing, rioting, burning and other disturbances in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the word intifada , or uprising, has become a permanent part of the lexicon of the Middle East.

It is an Arabic word, but it is now used freely by Hebrew-speaking army officers and English-language newscasters on official Israel Radio. They no longer bother to translate it.

The word intifada derives from the Arabic nafada , which means to “shake off.”

“Soothing words these must have been for those in Israel caught in the throes of a lexical crisis,” George Giacaman, an associate professor of philosophy at the WestBank’s Bir Zeit University, observed recently in the Jerusalem Post. “In place of an assertive word that intimidates, they found themselves confronted by a bland and almost tame metaphor. In its sense of complacency, the word hardly does justice to the facts on the ground.”

Perhaps, but Israel’s official radio has shown a certain ambivalence toward the word. Intifada is used freely in its Hebrew- and English-language news programs but almost never in its Arabic-language programs, whose announcers prefer the equivalent of “disturbances.”

The months of disturbances have brought tragedy on both sides. Infants have been blinded by rubber bullets ricocheting off the walls of homes in the crowded Palestinian refugee camps; Jewish farmers have suffered large losses in a rash of fires set not only in the occupied territories but in Israel itself.

But few incidents have elicited as much comment as one involving Shmuel Cohen, 27, a building contractor from Jerusalem. According to an article in the newspaper Hadashot, Cohen was waiting for a car near the Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh when he was attacked and beaten by settlers who mistakenly believed him to be an Arab.

“I was hit with the butt of a gun, and when I collapsed, one of them struck me on the back with a board while they kicked and hit me,” Cohen told the newspaper.

Cohen quoted one of the settlers as telling his companion: “He’s an Arab. Kill him.”

Cohen’s partner, who is also Jewish, finally intervened to save him. Later, when Cohen returned with the police, Cohen’s assailants offered an apology.

“Brother, I’m sorry,” Cohen quoted one as saying, “I didn’t know you were a Jew.”

Cohen told the newspaper that he was politically conservative, a member of the right-wing Tehiya party.

“But after an experience like that, a person’s political opinions can change,” Cohen said. “Let’s say I’m an Arab. Does that mean they have a right to kill me?”

A police spokesman told the newspaper that no arrests had been made.

“There was a misunderstanding,” the spokesman was quoted as saying, “and they beat up a person they thought was an Arab. . . . Like everywhere in the country, we only make arrests when we have to.”

Wallace, The Times’ Cyprus bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Israel.