FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
December 18, 1952
Czechoslovakian president Clement Gottwald said in a speech to the Communist Party in Prague that the “Slansky gang” (referring to the 15 party members, 11 of them Jews, and 11 of whom were hanged after being convicted in a show trial) had gone unnoticed for so long because they had their collaborators everywhere. In spite of their collaborators the gang had been unmasked “comparatively quickly,” Gottwald said. He added that the case had uncovered a “new channel through which treason infiltrated into the Party – that channel is Zionism.” Anti-Zionism, he said, was not antisemitism, which he called “an affair of fascist racists,” but rather a defense of Communism against American espionage. By liquidating the “American fifth column Czechoslovakia has become stronger,” Gottwald said.
“Although soldiers and policemen have priority to enter a bus without queuing up, they must not take advantage of this fact, and should give way to disabled civilians and pregnant women,” Petah Tikva magistrate I. Treivitch said when he sentenced two soldiers and a civilian to one month’s imprisonment each. The accused were charged with assaulting several people who had tried to prevent them from boarding a bus out of turn.
50 YEARS AGO
December 18, 1967
According to Jerusalem Post military reporter Ze’ev Schul, extensive minefields, electrified trip wires and fences could finally prove to be an effective measure to counter Fatah incursions into Israel, and the arguments which advocated against such measures before the Six Day War no longer applied. Before the Six Day War, Schul wrote, one of the principal arguments against physical barriers between Israel and her neighbors was to avoid establishing de facto boundaries at a time when not all of the territories granted Israel under the armistice agreement which concluded the War of Independence were actually under Israeli control. It was also felt that Israel should not take any steps which would be tantamount to the physical completion of the Arabs’ isolation of Israel and put barriers in the way of the possible exchange of certain territories. But the government’s new policy was to “sit it out” in the territories. If the Arabs were to intensify their terror campaign against Israel, most of the arguments against physical barriers would no longer apply. Minefields and other measures, distasteful as they were, would help to diminish the strain on the units then patrolling the borderlines.
December 18, 1992
Israel deported over 400 Hamas and Islamic jihad activists to Lebanon. This followed the abduction and murder less than a week earlier of border policeman Nissim Toledano by Hamas militants.
After nearly 24 hours of furious legal activity, the High Court of Justice ruled that the activists could be temporarily deported. Lebanese army troops and police were reported to be on full alert, after receiving orders to prevent the deportees from entering the country. Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin criticized civil rights groups who were against the deportations, saying “Nissim Toledano was not granted the right to appeal the brutal, bloody sentence passed on him. The Hamas deportees do get that right.”