FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
On March 1, 1967, The Jerusalem Post reported that foreign minister Abba Eban left for Thailand on the first leg of a month’s official goodwill tour of seven Asian countries. He was accompanied by Mrs. Eban and the director of the Foreign Ministry Bureau, Emmanuel Shimoni. His tour to Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Japan, Cambodia, Burma and back was expected to cover 44,213 km.
The Post’s editorial warmly welcomed Eban’s tour and said that relations with might eventually become one of Israel’s most important future issues. As to the past, however, Asia had proved a most difficult continent for Israel to establish friendly relations with fellow states. Only one state, the Philippines, voted in 1947 for the UN Partition Resolution, which recognized Israel’s right to independence.
Police searched the 16 stories of Tel Aviv’s Herut Party headquarters, Metzudat Ze’ev, for explosives, as Herut leader Menachem Begin was being installed, unopposed, as chairman of Herut’s Central Committee. The police had been rushed to Herut headquarters, following an anonymous phone call announcing a “bomb” plant.
25 YEARS AGO
On March 1, 1992, The Jerusalem Post reported that at least six persons were killed and 20 injured when the roof of a crowded east Jerusalem café collapsed. Dozens more were trapped in rubble, feared dead. Police Insp. Gen. Ya’acov Terner oversaw the rescue, as well as the efforts to control several hundred east Jerusalem Arabs who converged on the site.
In Washington, Congressional leaders had nearly completed an agreement that offered room for compromise between Israel and the Bush administration on the granting of $10 billion loan guarantees to Israel for the settlement of new immigrants. Sen. Patrick Leahy was scheduled to meet with US secretary of state James Baker to present him with the results of his bargaining with Israel’s strongest supporter on his subcommittee for foreign operations appropriation, Sen. Robert Kasten.
The cabinet was expected to act at its weekly meeting to relieve farmers’ distress, by invoking the Natural Disasters Law, following a promise given to them by prime minister and acting agriculture minister Yitzhak Shamir.
10 YEARS AGO
On March 1, 2007, The Jerusalem Post reported that the US decision to take part in a regional conference on Iraq, that would include Iran and Syria, did not send diplomatic officials in Jerusalem scrambling to change Israel’s diplomatic policies in order to deal with this seismic shift in the US’s Middle East policy, for the simple reason that Jerusalem did not feel that this was a seismic shift. It was seen rather as a tactical shift, but not a strategic regional shift.
A day after US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said that the US would take part in a “neighbors’ meeting” with Syrian and Iranian representatives on stabilizing Iraq, Israeli diplomatic officials said Jerusalem had no need “to feel threatened by the move.”
A song composed by religious kibbutz teenagers that mourned the demise of Zionism’s central ideals and called for a major ideological overhaul had won a Bnei Akiva youth movement contest.