FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
On July 30, 1950, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s newest highway, the 26-km. road, bringing Netanya within half an hour’s driving distance of Tel Aviv and Herzliya within 10 minutes, was officially declared open to traffic. Labor and national insurance minister Golda Myerson [Meir] cut a blue-andwhite tape stretching across the highway, just north of the Yarkon bridge at midday.
A debate was expected to develop in the Knesset on the Potash Works Ltd. after the government had presented its amendments to the company’s ordinances. The amendments were expected to be designed to enable the government to transfer the concessions from British to Israeli companies. The legal basis for a Development Authority, to be appointed by the government, was also expected to be passed.
Six other bills were to be voted on by the House for the second reading: The Amendments to the Compulsory Education Law, the Inheritance Law, the Bill for the Punishment of Nazis and Collaborators, the Child Marriage Bill, and various extensions to the emergency regulations.
Eamon de Valera, the former prime minister of Ireland, left Jerusalem to visit Galilee on his private Holy Year pilgrimage.
50 YEARS AGO
On July 30, 1965, The Jerusalem Post reported from London that a Labor member of Parliament, Maurice Orbach, had revealed his role as an intermediary in negotiations for an Egyptian reconciliation with Israel in 1954 and 1955. In an exclusive interview in the Jewish Chronicle, Orbach said he went to Cairo in 1954 to intercede on behalf of the young Jews arrested on espionage and sabotage charges. He said Egyptian prime minister Gamal Abdul Nasser had accepted his intervention, and while discussing it he urged him to take a message of goodwill to “my brother Sharett”, and to tell him that he wanted peace. [Moshe Sharett was at that time prime minister.]. Orbach met Nasser a number of times, and while the association remained highly secret, he had worked out with Ali Sabry, Nasser’s chief of cabinet, and with the authority from Sharett, certain basic arrangements for peace between the two countries. Later, after Britain established the Baghdad Pact with Iraq as the only member, Nasser broke off the negotiations. Sharett tried to renew the contact with the assistance of the Maltese Labor Party leader Dom Mintoff, but Nasser was no longer interested.
25 YEARS AGO
On July 30, 1990, The Jerusalem Post reported that the police were holding eight Arabs from the territories in the investigation of a pipe bomb blast that killed 17-year-old Canadian tourist Marnie Kimmelman and wounded 17 others on Tel Aviv’s Jerusalem Beach.
Housing minister Ariel Sharon had presented the cabinet with his plan for immigrant housing, including the purchase of mobile and prefabricated houses. The plan was sharply criticized by finance minister Yitzhak Moda’i, for failing to take into account where the immigrants would work and what supporting services they needed. Moda’i said he would present his own plan and that the immigrants would have to put up with makeshift housing for the time being. “Living in tents never hurt anybody,” Moda’i told the press.