SINATRA HELPED RUN GUNS TO ISRAEL IN 1948

Sinatra reportedly helped run guns to Israel (JTA)
Frank Sinatra reportedly played a role in smuggling guns to Israel in 1948.

Brian Greenspun, a son of Hank Greenspun, the Las Vegas media and real estate magnate who helped lead the gun smuggling effort, related the account Wednesday night to a Washington fund-raising dinner for Israel's Rabin Center, an institute that promotes democracy and pluralism.

Greenspun, who said he heard the story from his father, later confirmed it with Teddy Kollek, the late Jerusalem mayor. According to the account, which Greenspun said he was making public for the first time, Kollek – who was in 1948 Israel's point man heading the arms smuggling effort in New York – got to know the singer while staying in Hotel 14, atop the old Copacabana nightclub where Sinatra headlined.

Kollek needed to pay the captain of a ship a cash bribe to smuggle the weapons out of New York harbor, but knew he was being watched by the FBI because the United States was party to an arms embargo of all parties to the conflict.

Kollek left the hotel on the appointed day carrying a satchel, and was followed by the agents; Sinatra left through another entrance with a paper bag containing the money and paid the captain.

Sinatra and Kollek remained friends and the singer contributed to a number of Jerusalem building projects at the mayor's behest.

Clinton: Israel's birth proved ok to ignore laws (JTA)
Bill Clinton said U.S. citizens who broke the law smuggling guns to the nascent Jewish state proved there are times when it's acceptable to break the law.

"Once in a while it's worth risking your neck to make sure nobody sinks just because the rules are rigged against them," the former U.S. president said Wednesday to raucous applause at a Washington dinner honoring Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary Teamsters leader who facilitated such smuggling.

U.S. authorities at the time banned the sales of guns to any parties to the conflict, placing the struggling Jewish state at a disadvantage over enemies that had standing armies.

The fund-raising dinner for the Yitzhak Rabin Center raised over $2 million and showered honors on the children of Hoffa, who disappeared in 1975, and the children of his associate in the arms-smuggling enterprise, Hank Greenspun, a Nevada real estate and newspaper magnate who died in 1989.

Clinton remembered Rabin as a leader who understood that Israel would not achieve security "unless a just and lasting peace could be achieved for the Palestinians and their children too."

HOW AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS HELPED ISRAEL WIN 1948 WAR

How Amateur Astronomers Helped Israel Win the War of Independence - Yuval Azoulay
Mordechai Gihon, 85, a professor, archaeologist and historian, was a former intelligence officer in the pre-state Haganah's astronomers unit - amateur astronomers who assisted in gathering intelligence about the Arab Legion's movements in and around Jerusalem. Gihon recalls that in the fall of 1947, David Zaichik, a botany professor and an amateur astronomer, "said that he could help us with his telescopes. We tried it and discovered that his telescopes permitted us to see deep into enemy territory, 100 times better than we had in the past." About 30 amateur astronomers from Jerusalem were enlisted by Gihon and Zaichik to observe enemy positions from hills, towers and tall buildings in the city. The astronomers, who worked in shifts throughout the day, provided daily close-ups of Arab Legion positions at a level of definition that permitted the identification of firing apertures and gun barrels pointed at Jewish forces. Zaichik's people attached cameras to the telescopes and produced detailed pictures for intelligence officers. (Ha'aretz)

ISRAEL PRODUCES TEXTBOOKS FOR ISRAELI-ARABS CITING PALI VERSION OF 1948 WAR

Israeli Arab schoolbooks cite Palestinian version of war
JERUSALEM (AFP) - History textbooks for Israeli Arab students this year will for the first time present the Palestinian version of Israel’s creation as a “catastrophe,” the education ministry said on Sunday.

“For these types of events, both the Israeli and Palestinian versions have to be presented,” Education Minister Yuli Tamir said in a statement.

Alongside presenting the Israeli interpretation of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the books will also present the version “that is generally accepted among the Arabs, according to which Israel’s War of Independence is perceived as a catastrophe (Naqba) by the Palestinians,” Tamir said.

Another Catastrophe by Emanuele Ottolenghi (Contentions)
School textbooks used by Israeli Arabs will henceforth embrace the new historians’ version of history: the 1948 Israeli War of Independence is now officially “al-Naqba” (the Catastrophe), in books vetted by Israel’s Education Ministry. Education Minister Yuli Tamir defended her decision by saying that “the Arab public deserves to be allowed to express their feelings.” The Minister is entitled to believe, of course, that textbooks are the natural conduit for the expression of collective feelings—rather than the preferred instrument of instruction in history. But the real question is not whether Israeli Arabs—or a guilt-ridden minister—should be allowed to “express their feelings.” They are, and they do (as anyone who has spent any time in Israel can tell you). The real question is: should the discipline of history be the victim of those feelings? (Hillel Halkin’s 1999 COMMENTARY article “Was Zionism Unjust?” suggests an answer.)