The major part of the year 5742 was marked by increased anti-Semitism, sparked in part by Israel’s military operation in Lebanon, and by a series of terrorist actions against Israeli and Jewish installations, especially in Paris. At the United Nations, the Arab-Soviet-Third World bloc attempted to lay the groundwork for Israel’s expulsion from the world body. On the positive side, Zaire re-established diplomatic relations with Israel.
AROUND THE WORLD:
February 1982–The PLO information office in Budapest is granted diplomatic status.
The United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution calling for the total isolation of Israel in all spheres because of its annexation of the Golan Heights.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirk-patrick, charges the UN with laying the ground-work for the expulsion of Israel and warns of “serious consequences” if any further steps against Israel are taken.
An identified former Nazi musicologist, Wolfgang Boetticher, an expert on Schumann, who teaches at the University of Gottingen, West Germany, is invited to participate in a Mendelssohn-Schumann conference scheduled for April in North Carolina. He subsequently cancels his visit.
MARCH–The UN Special Committee Against Apartheid places Israeli tennis star Shlomo Glickstein and other Israeli athletes on a blacklist of 350 sportsmen who compete in South Africa.
Italy and Israel sign a three-year renewal of their cultural, educational and scientific exchange agreement.
The Argentina ruling military government officially condemns the desecration of the main Jewish cemetery in Mar del Plata, Argentina’s major seaside resort some 250 miles south of Buenos Aires.
A group of prominent international affairs experts, including three former Democratic Secretaries of State, issue a report calling for the U.S. to reassess its policy toward the UN within the framework of American foreign policy goals.
The Reagan Administration decides to ban imports of Libyan oil and halt U.S. exports of oil and gas technology to the Libyan government because of what it terms Libyan terrorism and subversion against a number of countries in the Middle East and Africa.
APRIL–Three gunmen strafe the Israel military trade mission in Paris. No one is injured in the afternoon attack.
Two powerful bombs explode outside Jewish owned shops in the center of Rome causing severe damage but no casualties.
A German-Arab Friendship Association calls on the Nobel Committee in Stockholm to revoke the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Premier Begin in 1979.
Yaacov Bar Simantov, 42, second secretary in charge of political affairs at the Israel Embassy in Paris, is gunned down outside his home by an unidentified woman.
At the conclusion of a debate on the “Palestinian question,” the UN General Assembly adopts a resolution declaring Israel “is not a peace loving member state” and demanding international sanctions against it.
MAY–As a direct result of President Francais Mitterrand’s visit to Israel, the Franco-Israel mixed commission convenes for the first time in 12 years.
Israel agrees to make no further arms deals with Argentina but indicates it will deliver any arms already contracted for while the South American country is warring over the Falkland Islands with Britain.
Three unidentified Bahai leaders are executed in the Iranian city of Karaj after a Moslem court finds them guilty of espionage and “Zionist activities.”
JUNE–The U.S. vetoes measures at the UN against Israel for its incursion into Lebanon against the PLO.
The prestigious French Catholic weekly, Tamoignage Chretien, is found guilty by a criminal court in Paris of inciting racial hatred in an editorial attacking Israel as a “terrorist state” and is fined 1500 francs ($300).
The 10-member states of the European Economic Community meeting in Brussels adopts a resolution which “vigorously condemned” the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Begin, addressing the UN Special Session on Disarmament, offers a three-stage plan for peace and disarmament. Not many delegates listen to the Premier’s speech as some 100 of the 157 UN delegates boycott the session.
JULY–Former French Premier Pierre Mendes France and former World Jewish Congress presidents Nahum Goldmann and Philip Klutznick appeal for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon and for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
The World Zionist Organization announces that it is shutting down the Jewish Agency’s immigrant transit center in Vienna “for budgetary reasons.”
A former captain of the police in Darmstadt, Hans Heinemann, is sentenced by a court in Kaiserslautern to three years imprisonment for complicity in the murder of some 100 Jewish men, women and children near the town of Kiev in 1941.
Internal security services in West Germany report a sharp rise in 1981 in the number of extreme rightwing organizations operating in West Germany and in their membership which is placed at 10,300.
Israeli officials lodge a formal complaint against Mitterrand’s reported comparison between Israel’s military action in Lebanon and the World War II massacre carried out by the Nazis in Oradour sur Olane in the southwest of France.
AUGUST–The Israel Foreign Ministry publicly rejects a statement by the World Council of Churches blaming Israel for the plight of the refugees and homeless and demanding immediate lifting of Israel’s siege of west Beirut where the PLO is trapped by Israeli military forces.
The official visit by Begin to Zaire is postponed because President Mobutu Sese Seko fears a political attempt on his life, and not for the given reason of poor health, Maariv’s correspondent in Paris, Tamar Golan, reports.
A bomb hidden in a suitcase explodes in the hallway leading to the departure section next to the El Al terminal in Reim Airport in Munich. Seven persons are injure and the hallway is demolished.
Three shots are fired at the empty car of an Israeli diplomat in Paris. Jewish members of the extremist leftwing terrorist group “Direct Action” claim” responsibility.
A terrorist squad kills six people, including two American citizens, and wounds 22, when they open fire on customers eating lunch in the city’s best known Jewish restaurant, Jo Goldenberg’s, in the heart of Paris’s traditional Jewish quarter, the Marais.
Mitterrand announces a series of measures designed to root out terrorism and blames the recent outbreak of terrorist incidents in France on the fact that his government is playing a major role in efforts to bring about Israeli-Arab peace.
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the fiery and often controversial world Zionist leader, dies in a hospital in West Germany at the age of 87. He is buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem among the founders of the State of Israel.
SEPTEMBER–Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union from January through August totalled 1, 961 as compared to the 35, 553 Jews who were permitted to leave during the same period in 1979, a peak year for Jewish emigration.
(Continued Sunday)
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