FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
April 2, 1968 In a ghoulish act of malice, the Jordanians returned only one of three bodies of IDF soldiers killed in action and initially reported missing in the operation against a Fatah base in Karama two weeks earlier. Two of the coffins were found to contain only sand and earth. A few days after the operation, the Jordanians announced that they would return to Israel the body of one soldier and the remains of two others. Israel returned 12 Jordanian soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the operation. Israel incurred 28 fatalities during and after the mission.
The West German Constitutional Court declared illegal a wartime Nazi law under which thousands of Third Reich Jews and other people were stripped of German citizenship. The decision meant that Jews and others deprived of citizenship were still German, or could become German again if they so desired. The court handed down its ruling in connection with an inheritance case in which the descendant of a “racially persecuted” German was refused legal papers he needed to claim reparations, because the deceased had been deprived of citizenship.
Representatives of the Italian film studio Mercurio Films visited Eilat to begin working on plans for a “cowboy town,” which would be an outdoor film studio incorporating all the ingredients of a “Western” – saloon bar, bank and jail. Eilat residents would be groomed as extras and once the cowboy town was completed, a Mexican village would be built in the same area. [A number of so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” were filmed in Israel in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including God’s Gun and Madron, the first feature film shot in Israel that was set in a non-Israeli location. Madron tells the story of a nun, the only survivor of an Apache massacre of a wagon train, who is taken in by a cantankerous old gunfighter.
25 YEARS AGO
April 2, 1993 Two IAF soldiers were moderately injured during a mock attack demonstration for parents of the troops. A Phantom warplane’s 30-millimeter cannon continued firing after the pilot passed over the target and stopped pressing the firing button, probably because of an electrical short circuit. The shots hit the soldiers who stood 200 meters away from the target area.
Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen Ehud Barak ordered 1,500 soldiers to be sent to assist farmers who were suffering from a shortage of workers ever since Israel barred entry to Palestinians a week earlier.
15 YEARS AGO
April 2, 2003 While the Iraqi war kept prime minister Ariel Sharon from traveling to Washington that week, plans were in the works for Sharon to visit central Europe, central Asia and possibly India “sometime after the war ends,” sources said.
US president George W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair, US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and British foreign secretary Jack Straw were all banned for life from entering the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “They are war criminals and murderers of children,” church official Father Panaritus said after he announced the ban. “Therefore, the Church of the Nativity decided to ban them access into the holy shrine forever.”
– Daniel Kra