FROM OUR ARCHIVES

50 YEARS AGO

February 7, 1968 Speaking to a full house at Binyanei Ha’uma in Jerusalem in an evening organized by the Hebrew University Students’ Association, defense minister Moshe Dayan declared that the Arabs were too weak, and they knew it, to go to war against Israel. He said they were back to about the strength they had before the Six Day War, with only slight differences in the way their forces were drawn up. He estimated that the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq could mount two fronts against Israel – each consisting of 100,000 men, 1,000 tanks and 250 aircraft. Asked about the future borders, Dayan said he believed they should include those territories in Judea and Samaria which were part of the “historic cradle of the Jewish nation,” but that the population there should live their own lives and maintain whatever contact they wished with the Arab countries.

Several hundred Arab high-school graduates from Acre were being interviewed by various government offices for employment opportunities that would begin in March when identity cards would be issued to some quarter of a million residents of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. The operation was expected to ease unemployment among Israeli Arab white-collar workers. Unemployment among manual laborers was reported to have been decreasing in most parts of the Galilee.

25 YEARS AGO

February 7, 1993 Energy minister Amnon Rubinstein wrote to chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Ehud Barak to inform him that IDF standing orders concerning soldiers who were homosexuals were inconsistent with several basic laws of the state. Barak promised to review the standing orders and examine the possibility of replacing them. Similarly, Rubinstein appealed to the security authorities to restore their professional relations with Prof. Uzi Even, head of the chemistry faculty at Tel Aviv University, who was dismissed from the army after he disclosed he was a homosexual.

Police were warning elderly people who lived alone to take special care to lock doors and windows and check that they recognized callers before answering the door, following a spare of murders of senior citizens in Tel Aviv.

15 YEARS AGO

February 7, 2003 Face with a lukewarm response from US allies to its indictment of Iraq, US president George W. Bush weighed a new move at the UN Security Council to specifically authorize the use of force against Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who set out the US case to the council that Iraq was deceiving UN weapons inspectors, met with the president at the White House to develop a strategy. Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Bush would welcome a second resolution and “many members of the council would not only welcome it, but some of them would say we require participation in whatever might come.” The committee’s top Democrat, Sen Joseph Biden, said to Powell, “I am proud to be associated with you. I think you did better than anyone could have because of your standing, your reputation, and your integrity as it is understood by our European friends as well as others around the world.” Daniel Kra