Dear TIME-Reader:

NEAR the home of TIME Correspondent Monica Dehn in Jerusalem are two vacant lots that became the sites for major rallies during the election campaign in Israel. For a correspondent covering the campaign, this was a great convenience; but for the mother of two small children (Monica is the wife of London Timesman David Roy Elston), it was a towering nuisance. Before rallies, campaign managers spent half the nights tuning up loudspeakers, one to outblast the other. One midnight some 50 babies of the neighborhood could be heard bawling as loudspeakers blared over and over: "One, two, three . . . One two three . . ."

Our attractive blonde correspondent managed to keep her children calm and file her election dispatches for FOREIGN NEWS' Ritual Day. Monica is not one to let motherhood interfere for long with journalism. Twice she has sent us cryptic cables to the effect that she would be out of touch briefly. Each time we received from her, in about ten days, excellent story suggestions with the notations that she had taken time out for childbearing.

British-born Monica Dehn, now 35, studied journalism at London University and worked in the British Broadcasting Corp.'s Balkan department before she went out to Jerusalem for a wartime assignment with a Foreign Office radio station beamed at the Balkans. When the British mandate ended in Israel, she stayed on because of her "terrific curiosity about the new state."

Now she helps TIME search out the thread of reality from the snarl of events in the Near East, an area of special interest to me since my wartime years there with the Office of War Information. Monica's beat is Israel alone. The nearby countries, including the Arab states, are covered by our Beirut Bureau, headed by Keith "Israel," Monica writes, "is a small country where 5,000 people buy TIME and a far greater number read it. This means that almost everyone I meet, from taxi driver to government official, knows exactly what has appeared in the magazine, has most decided views on it and no hesitation at all about passing them on to me. Israelis are extremely sensitive about what appears in the foreign press. This applies more to TIME than perhaps any other jour nal, not only because they themselves see it but because they know it is widely read in the U.S. -- and in the Arab states as well. So, I often feel that I am writing with a whole nation peering over my shoulder."

After our recent story of the bitterly emotional Kastner case (TIME, July 11), Israelis praised its fairness. Said a Jerusalem journalist: "None of us could have written the story like that. We are too committed."

Full of respect for this impartial British woman, the Israelis know that she will report the bad as well as the good news of their country. Says Monica with firmness: "As long as I am here I will continue reporting both."

Cordially yours,

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