FROM OUR ARCHIVES

50 YEARS AGO

For the first time since the Six Day War ended, the Hebrew University provided a guided tour of the campus in Arabic for a group of students from the Ramallah Teachers’ College. A number of young Arabs had already made inquiries about entrance requirements and courses of study.

The first meeting between Old City Muslim leaders and religious affairs minister Zerah Warhaftig took place in Jerusalem. The religious leaders “expressed satisfaction at the steps taken to renew Muslim religious life and at the condition of the Holy Places,” a ministry spokesman said. Of the 42 mosques in the Old City, only a few were damaged in the fighting, including the minaret and a gate of al-Aksa. The management of the Wakf religious endowment fund had already started repair work. It was also announced that Muslim watchmen had taken over all guard duties at the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa. IDF units had ceased patrolling the compound in accordance with a request made by the mufti of Jerusalem, Saad Eddin el-Alami, to premier Levi Eshkol two weeks earlier. Under study was a request that a police station manned by Muslims be set up at the compound, an arrangement that had been in force during the Ottoman and Mandatory periods.

25 YEARS AGO

Outgoing prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said it was “sheer nonsense” that he wanted to prolong peace talks with Palestinians for 10 years to ensure mass Jewish settlement in the territories, though he did not deny making the remarks attributed to him by Ma’ariv. The newspaper quoted Shamir as saying: “I would have carried out autonomy talks for 10 years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.”

The Japanese government took the unusual step of repudiating an article in a major Japanese magazine that blamed an international Jewish conspiracy for that year’s 27% tumble in the Tokyo stock market. The fourpage article claimed that Japan’s capitalistic system was being destroyed by the arbitrage of Salomon Brothers Inc. and Morgan Stanley & Co., both supposedly controlled by Jewish forces linked to the Rothschild banking family. The Japanese Foreign Ministry labeled the antisemitic article “undesirable,” “inappropriate” and prejudicial.

15 YEARS AGO

Hezbollah rejected the terms of a proposed prisoner-exchange deal relayed to the organization by German mediators, according to a Beirut newspaper. A German newspaper reported that Hezbollah was seeking the release of 100 prisoners held by Israel, including jailed Fatah West Bank leader Marwan Barghouti and 17 Lebanese, in return for the release of businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum. A German intermediary had given Israel proof that Tannenbaum was still alive. [Tannenbaum was released in January 2004 along with the bodies of three soldiers killed during an ambush along the Israeli-Lebanese border, in exchange for 435 prisoners held by Israel.]

Marwan Barghouti, the general-secretary of the Fatah movement in the West Bank and head of the Tanzim militia, would be tried in a civilian court along with four other suspected terrorist leaders, the Justice Ministry announced. Ministry spokesman Ya’acov Galanti was quoted as saying “military courts have less exposure. We want the public to see the evidence and know justice was done.”