FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
On June 9, 1966, The Jerusalem Post reported that the 33-member Haifa Port Workers’ Council voted by 19 to 14 to end the go-slow strike of the port’s 1,600 stevedores, now six weeks old. The proposals were drafted at a meeting between Histadrut leaders, transport minister Moshe Carmel and Haifa mayor Abba Khoushy. This followed the Treasury warning, issued two days earlier, that the port would be shut down unless the stevedores assumed normal work within a week.
Israel and Congo signed friendship and cultural agreements, and in a joint communiqué condemned the arms race in the Middle East and racial discrimination. The agreements and the communiqué were signed by visiting prime minister Levi Eshkol and Congolese premier Gen. Leonard Mulamba. Later Eshkol left for Tananarive, Malagasy Republic.
The attorney-general issued an indictment against district court judge Eliezer Malchi of Tel Aviv, charging him with taking a bribe in his capacity as a judge. The trial was expected to be held the following month.
The Syrians were holding 17 Israelis in their prisons, some of them since 1954, foreign minister Abba Eban told the Knesset. He was replying to a question by Mordechai Bibi (Alignment). Eban, however, added that the Syrians admitted to holding only two Israelis, who did not wish to return to Israel. An 18th prisoner, Avraham Daskal, had been held by the Syrians since 1952, and was reported by Amnesty International to have committed suicide in a Syrian jail in winter 1965.
The Post’s editorial supported the struggle for independence of Basutoland [today Lesotho].
25 YEARS AGO
On June 9, 1991, The Jerusalem Post reported that the Bush administration presented a calm front over prime minister Yitzhak Shamir’s refusal to give in to its entreaties to allow the UN to play even a symbolic role in a regional Middle East conference, and to let such conference reconvene periodically. But there was a feeling in Jerusalem that US president George Bush was not taking Shamir’s “no” as his final answer. Though Shamir’s six-page letter to Bush had been described as an outright rejection of Bush’s appeals for compromise, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater would not label it as an ironclad refusal.
In Washington, U.S. and Israeli officials signed the formal contract marking the agreement between the two countries for the funding of the Arrow and anti-missile system defense project.
The Jerusalem City Council met in a special session to discuss legislation that would legalize Shabbat entertainment in the capital, though it was not clear whether this legislation would come to a vote.
10 YEARS AGO
On June 9, 2006, The Jerusalem Post reported that Russia had sent messages to Israel though US intermediaries, voicing opposition to a possible military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel and Russia had good relations and a direct line of communication, the Russians chose to use the US to deliver this message of military restraint out of belief that Israel paid closer attention to messages from Washington.
In a direct communiqué to the finance minister of a country it refused to recognize, the Palestinian Authority’s Finance Ministry, headed by Hamas’s Omar Abdel Razek, had written to finance minister Avraham Hirchson demanding that Israel transfer to the PA’s coffers the hundreds of millions of dollars in custom revenues it had been withholding since Hamas’s victory in the January 2006 elections to the Palestine Legislative Council. The one-page letter was written on PA–headed paper in English and was formally addressed to Hirchson at his ministry in Jerusalem, Israel. The PA had said that it needed the money to meet the payroll for its approximately 160,000 civil servants, whom it had generally been unable to pay since the international community froze funding after Hamas came to power. – Alexander Zvielli