FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
March 14, 1968
The growing student unrest in Poland spread to new cities, with reports that club-wielding police were called in to quell demonstrations in Krakow and Poznan. Students marched in the streets with banners proclaiming “Warsaw is not alone,” burning newspapers and tearing down posters on walls that blamed the Warsaw demonstrations on Jews.
The barbed humor of the Technion’s architecture students’ Purim parade aroused smiles, but not much more among the crowds of stolid spectators gathered in Haifa. The students flourished posters poking fun at president Charles de Gaulle of France, at the air pollution potential of the proposed Tel Aviv power station, at the United Jewish Appeal (“Altshnorrland”), at the tiny print of the new telephone directory, and prime minister Levi Eshkol (a stork delivering “kinderlech”). Riding aboard gaily decorated cars, trucks and scooters, the male and female students dressed up as beatniks and hippies, declaring their preference for making love, not war, for guitars, beards, flowers and for “more experts on anything.”
25 YEARS AGO
March 14, 1993
As a wave of terror took two more victims, Police inspector-general Ya’acov Terner called on citizens licensed to carry weapons to do so at all times. “I don’t suggest people go around with hunting guns, but pistols that can be tucked into a belt don’t have to be left in the drawer,” Terner said in an interview, adding that more than 300,000 citizens had gun licenses.
Two sisters from Abu Ghosh, who came to Jerusalem to shop, were surrounded by an angry crowd who accused them of being terrorists after they bought a kitchen knife. They were detained by police, who determined that the sisters had in fact purchased the knife for their mother.
The surgeon who discovered a week earlier that he was an AIDS carrier agreed to disclose his name, as his identity was becoming widely known among journalists and fellow physicians. Health Ministry officials said that the ministry put “no pressure” on the doctor to disclose his identity, and would have withheld it if he did not want to make it known. The ministry stressed that the possibility that the surgeon infected any patients with HIV was extremely unlikely. At the time, the only documented case of a doctor infecting a patient with the virus was of a Florida dentist, who was suspected of having done it intentionally.
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15 YEARS AGO
March 14, 2003
Two Israeli security guards were killed when soldiers on the ground and in the air, mistaking them for terrorists, opened fire on them near Pnei Hever in the southern Hebron hills. The soldiers, Yehuda Ben-Yosef and Sec.-Lt. Yoav Doron, were hired by the regional council to guard an isolated outpost. The IDF Spokesman expressed regret for the incident, calling it “a tragic mistake,” and said there would be an investigation
Saddam Hussein distributed $260,000 to 26 families of Palestinians killed in attacks on Israel, including $25,000 awarded to the family of a Hamas suicide bomber. The money was distributed as the United States tried to get UN Security Council support to use military force to disarm Iraq and oust Saddam, who it said supported terrorism.