FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
On June 8, 1951, The Jerusalem Post reported that prime minister David Ben-Gurion and his wife returned to Israel from their historic US journey by El Al Skymaster.
They were met at Lydda Airport by acting prime minister Moshe Sharett, other cabinet ministers and Knesset members, and drove in president Chaim Weizmann’s open car to Tel Aviv, where a huge reception was arranged by the municipal council. Receptions were held on the way at Bnei Brak and Ramat Gan, and people came from camps, farms, and factories and stood along the road to cheer the prime minister as he passed by.
Jordan accepted responsibility for the deliberate “killing of an Israeli civilian and wounding of two others by an Arab Legion unit, when the victims were in a house whose occupation by them had been condoned by the Jordan authorities.” The admission was made at the meeting of the UN Mixed Israeli-Jordanian Armistice Commission. The commission voted unanimously that firing on the three Israelis, while they were standing on the balcony of their house in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, on June 28, 1950, was a breach of Article 3, paragraph 3, of the general armistice agreement. On another Israeli complaint Jordan promised to turn over to Israel for trial a Jordanian citizen accused of murder committed in Israel.
Seven Nazi war criminals were hanged in Landsberg Prison, in the US-occupied zone of Germany, between midnight and 2:30 a.m. for the mass murder of at least 200,000 people in Germany and Eastern Europe.
50 YEARS AGO
On June 8, 1966, The Jerusalem Post reported that cabinet ministers Pinhas Sapir, Haim Zadok, Yigal Allon and Moshe Carmel announced that unless work in Haifa Port returned to normal, it would be shut down. Haifa’s 1,600 stevedores had been “going slow” for six weeks to back up their demands for wage increases.
Labor minister Yigal Allon confronted the Knesset with facts and figures to support his contention that the country was not faced with mass unemployment, but with limited unemployment in specific communities, mostly in development towns.
In Leopoldville, Congo, prime minister Levi Eshkol inspected Israel-trained Congolese paratroopers and saw 12 of their women recruits make a demonstration jump at an army training camp. At a dinner in his honor, Eshkol said that Israel and African people shared the same ideal of freedom.
In Vienna, the Austrian cabinet decided to grant 3.5 million schillings (IL 420,000), for building a school for foreign students on the shore of Lake Kinneret. Both Austrians and Israelis were to supervise the financing and construction of the school. The Austrian government press service announced that the school was compensation for the property of the Hehalutz Jewish youth organization lost during the Nazi occupation.
10 YEARS AGO
On June 8, 2006, The Jerusalem Post reported that thousands of Hamas militiamen were expected to be recruited into the Palestinian Authority security forces under an agreement that was reached between Hamas and Fatah activists in Gaza City.
Washington shouldn’t rule out the use of military force against Iran, former US senator John Edwards told the Post while on his visit here. He also backed prime minister Ehud Olmert’s unilateral realignment plan.
Yoel Tzur was not surprised to be awakened long after midnight by a call from the IDF, informing him of the capture of two terrorists who killed his wife, Etta, 42, and his son Ephraim, 12, a decade earlier. “I was waiting for this phone call. I knew that security sources were close to finding them and kept me informed of their work,” Tzur told the Post.
– Alexander Zvielli