Word: israells
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...terrorists, led by what one bystander called a "tall, blond and tough-looking Palestinian," stormed their way into the Egyptian embassy in Ankara, firing automatic weapons. They seized 20 hostages, including Ambassador Ahmed Kamal Olama and his son. The terrorists demanded that Turkey sever its relations with Egypt and Israel, release two Palestinian prisoners in Egypt and provide a flight to a friendly Arab country. The gunmen, reported to belong to the Revolutionary Eagles of Palestine, part of a Syrian-backed faction of the P.L.O., threatened to blow up the building unless their demands were met. Two Turkish guards were...
Israeli Novelist Amos Oz has written of his people that their demand is absolute: "Either they have the best country in the world, the purest, the fulfillment of the highest moral standards, or else there is total disillusionment. Paradoxically, the outside world tends to view Israel with much the same perspective." Nowhere in the outside world are Israel and its actions subjected to greater scrutiny than in the U.S., home to 6 million Jews...
Last month, 59 prominent American Jews sent Premier Menachem Begin an open letter that criticized Israel's policy of setting up new Jewish settlements in densely populated Arab areas of the occupied West Bank. "A policy which requires the expropriation of Arab land unrelated to Israel's security needs," the letter read, "and which presumes to occupy permanently a region populated by 750,-000 Palestinian Arabs, we find morally unacceptable, and perilous for the democratic character of the Jewish state." Among those who signed were Nobel Prizewinning Novelist Saul Bellow, Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome B. Wiesner...
Israelis were taken aback by the criticism. Traditionally, American Jews tend to refrain from public criticism of elected officials responsible for the fate of the Jewish state. The letter did not question Israel's basic right to establish such settlements, but as one government official put it, "when you have clever people who argue that the settlements are legal but illadvised, the impression is still left that something is wrong with building settlements...
...interview with TIME last week, Premier Begin's Adviser on Information, Harry Hurwitz, chided those who signed the letter, saying, "While we take account of the opinion of our friends in the Jewish community, the guiding principles that have to influence the government of Israel are the interests of the people of Israel, their security and safety." The influential Jerusalem Post, however, argued: "Israel should, of course, not determine its policies at the behest of American Jewish leaders. But the considered opinions of American Jewry should be one of the elements in the formulation of policies that must take...