For 40 years these documents lay in the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, many of them hidden, kept out of the reach of researchers and the general public. Now, in honor of the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics, which is coming up next week, the State Archives revealed 45 records related to the event.

On the menu are protocols of a cabinet meeting, consultations held by ministers, and of sessions of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, as well as, various reports and telegram exchanges. Half of the material was never before published, and is now being made public for the first time. In the interest of those readers and researchers interested in these documents, we have chosen to focus on the hitherto unpublished material. The remaining records can be viewed in full on the State Archives website.

The archive and its employees deserve special praise for the initiative to reveal so many high quality, authentic, and classified documents. Their location, selection, categorization, and scanning, as well as, getting the okay to publish them from the different security organization, took both time and expertise.

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That said, certain partsof the documents, whose publication was not cleared, were redacted. In addition, an unknown number of records remain unpublished, probably on orders of the Mossad and the Shin Bet security service. These orders can and should be questioned: Whose interest is being served by the suppression of information about an event that took place 40 years ago? What information about this event has not yet been revealed, and how can its publication today harm national security? These questions will have to wait for future revelations.

For more, go to Haaretz.com

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