FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
On January 31, 1952, The Jerusalem Post reported that according to a senior Jordanian official two Gadna [premilitary youth] hikers, who were sought for two days by military planes and personnel after their disappearance near Modi’in, were safe in Jordanian-occupied Ramallah. Israel asked for their immediate return.
The discovery by Beduin, of two caves near the northern exit of the Dead Sea containing a large number of leather and papyrus scrolls written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic was announced in A Diffa, the Jordan-occupied Jerusalem Old City daily, by G.W.I. Harding, director of the Department of Antiquities in Jordan.
In New York, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, announced that he expected that tripartite discussions between three delegations representing Israel, the Conference of Jewish Organizations, and the Bonn government, would begin in a neutral country in March 1952. The Germans agreed to meet in Belgium, Holland or Switzerland. Goldmann expected that the talks might last for several months.
In London, foreign secretary Anthony Eden said he did not propose to take any action at the moment to enable Haifa-bound tankers to pass through the Suez Canal.
50 YEARS AGO
On January 31, 1967, The Jerusalem Post reported that foreign minister Abba Eban noted in a meeting with UNTSO chief of staff Gen. Odd Bull that Israel’s participation in the special UN Israel-Syrian Mixed Armistice Commission meeting was based on the explicit understanding that the meeting would not diverge from the agenda proposed by UN secretary-general U Thant and agreed to by both governments.
The Post’s editorial stated that the UN Mixed Armistice Commission’s sessions were never very satisfactory, particularly with Syria. This was not surprising since MAC sessions were designed almost 20 years earlier for the brief transition period expected to elapse before peace treaties could be signed between Israel and the neighboring Arab states. However, the Syrian delegates had shown that they did not intend these meetings to work out practical arrangements to avoid conflicts over cultivation rights. Israel therefore had no choice but to retaliate in force against any infiltration and mining attacks on its own sovereign soil.
25 YEARS AGO
On January 31, 1992, The Jerusalem Post reported that foreign minister David Levy had condemned as “almost a slap in the face” France’s decision to admit radical Palestinian leader George Habash for medical treatment following a stroke. The move had sparked a political furor in Paris, where president François Mitterrand, fending off all accusations that his government was going out of its way to help a notorious terrorist, insisted that Habash’s stay in France should be “extremely brief.”
Prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said that the US loan guarantees would not be used for building settlements. “The funds we shall obtain through the loans would be devoted only, and entirely, to the purpose of absorbing the new immigrants,” he said.
Levy said that there was every reason to be satisfied at the outcome of the multilateral conference in Moscow. “We put our message across,” he said.
New Knesset elections were apparently set for June 23, 1992.