FROM OUR ARCHIVES

50 YEARS AGO

December 19, 1967 Jordan acted to ensure that imports from the West Bank were not coming from Israel, enacting a stringent emergency law designed to prevent “trade with the enemy.” Violators would be subject to trial by a military tribunal.

Members of the “Operation Headquarters for the Retention of the [Occupied] Areas” said that the government was permitting developments that would cause the return of part of the territories. A spokesman for the organization claimed that they were instrumental in pushing through the return to the Etzion Bloc settlements and that they planned to sponsor the return of religious seminaries to Hebron, whose Jewish community was massacred in 1929. In exerting pressure for the return to Etzion, the spokesman said that the group achieved their aim: an act which demonstrated de facto integration of the whole of Palestine and of an additional million Arabs into what was now the State of Israel.

15 YEARS AGO

December 19, 2002 Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, testified in the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court that he never directly informed Shin Bet agent provocateur Avishai Raviv of his intention to kill the prime minister, but said that he had publicly spoken of the “need” to murder Rabin several times. According to the indictment issued against Raviv three-and-a-half years earlier, Amir told him several times in 1995 that he was planning to kill Rabin, but Raviv failed to report that to his operators. But in his testimony, Amir repeatedly told the court that he never once told Raviv that he planned to murder Rabin, in part because he suspected that Raviv was a Shin Bet agent. “I never told Avishai [Raviv] that I wanted to kill Rabin. I said it must be done, I said someone must do it… but I never said I would do it,” Amir said. A former Kach activist recruited by the Shin Bet as a paid informer in 1987, Raviv was charged with failing to notify authorities of Yigal Amir’s intention to assassinate Rabin. [Raviv successfully defended himself on the grounds that he had just been doing his job, but that things just got out of hand.]

10 YEARS AGO

December 19, 2007 Israel’s closure of its border with the Gaza Strip had caused a shortage of livestock for sacrifice at the upcoming Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, according to merchants in the territory. A senior agriculture ministry official in Gaza said the average demand for the feast was around 10,000 cows and 50,000 goats. The official said Israel had allowed around 7,700 cows through in November; however, no goats or sheep had been permitted, apart from 30 goats and 30 camels donated by Israeli Muslims for the Gaza poor. At the feast, honoring the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, Muslims slaughter sheep, goats, cows or camels, sharing the meat with friends and family and donating one-third to the poor. Gaza meat company owner Saleh Affana said most of the cows shipped into Gaza were under two years old, which according to Islamic tradition is the minimum age for them to be sacrificed. IDF officials had no comment.