Gen. de Gaulle carried a pail of Iraqi oil through the streets of Haifa while Egypt’s Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein conversed over the telephone in Tel Aviv today. It was all in the spirit of the Purim carnival which began last night and reached a peak in the famed Adioyada – Israel’s version of the Mardi Gras – that filled the streets with song, dances and especially children in the wildest costumes they could create.
The international political figures appeared in the form of life-size puppets on mobile floats that inched their way through the throngs. An estimated half million spectators watched the Purim parade in Tel Aviv and only slightly fewer were witness to similar parades in Haifa. The Nasser-Hussein float was a pointed reference to the famous telephone conversation, monitored by Israel during last June’s Six-Day War, in which the Egyptian leader and his Jordanian ally contrived the story of U.S. and British air support for Israeli forces.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
