FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
On February 12, 1952, The Jerusalem Post reported that Dr. Giora. Josephtal, coordinator of the Jewish Agency’s Absorption Department, led the Israeli delegation which left from Lydda Airport to join the Paris talks, together with 13 other Jewish organizations on reparations from Germany.
In Washington, Henry Gaston, co-chairman of the US Export-Import Bank, testified before a Congressional Committee that Israel was making great use of the funds granted to it by the US Export-Import Bank. Gaston said that Israel was administering its projects in a very satisfactory manner.
Finance minister Eliezer Kaplan told the Knesset that he had offered premiums on the net income from citrus exports.
Israeli newspapers appeared in a limited and smaller number of pages due to the shortage of newsprint.
50 YEARS AGO
On February 12, 1967, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel had called on Syria to refrain from organizing or encouraging terrorist acts, if the meetings of the UN Mixed Israel-Syrian Armistice Commission were to make any progress. Foreign minister Abba Eban, in a letter to UN secretary-general U Thant, circulated to other members of the UN Security Council, had charged that the tension in the area had been heightened even when the meetings were taking place. Five cases of mine-laying in Israeli territory had been discovered since the last MAC meeting on January 25, 1967.
A group of Syrian fellahin crossed into Israeli territory in the demilitarized zone near Almagor and sowed a field which had been ploughed on the previous day. UN Observers and Israeli delegates to the MAC watched their activities in order to report to the special session of the MAC which was expected to meet to discuss all the problems of border land cultivation.
Israel had rejected as “mischievous and absurd” two recent letters addressed by Jordan to the UN Security Council. The first concerned the Independence Day parade in Jerusalem, and the second that Israel had prevented UN observers from investigating two Israeli charges that landmines had been found and dismantled on December 9, 1966, on a railway track. Michael Comay, the Israeli representative to the UN, stated that Israel’s intention to hold the Independence Day parade in Jerusalem was within the framework of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement and that Jordan was fully aware of this fact, and that the parade was no provocation. The Israeli government found it deplorable that the government of Jordan and its representatives should seek to artificially create tension.
25 YEARS AGO
On February 12, 1992, The Jerusalem Post reported that the head of the General Security Services charged that the criticism of the service’s involvement in the death of a security detainee Mohammed Akawi before an inquiry was conducted had caused the GSS “inestimable damage” and was both unfair and unwarranted. Akawi, 35, died in the GSS interrogation facility at the Hebron police station. All standard procedures had been followed in the case of Akawi with respect to arrest and medical treatment.
The mysterious affair of two Israeli Arab visitors in Egypt, accused of espionage, took another turn, when Egyptian interior minister Mohammed Moussa retracted his earlier statement that the two had confessed to spying for the Mossad. This was the first time that Israelis were arrested for espionage in Egypt since the signing of the peace treaty in 1979.