Yahuda101 History of the Modern state of Israel

 

History of the Modern state of Israel

By Yahuda101

Timeline

Key moments in the Jewish state's history.

1882-1903: First Aliyah

The First Aliyah brings an estimated 25,000-35,000 immigrants to Palestine, the majority of them fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe.

The influx of immigrants into the Land of Israel during the years 1882-1903 is known as “The First Aliyah.” This was the first large wave of immigrants that were motivated by nationalism. During these years some 25,000 Jews emigrated from Russia and Rumania, and 2,500 arrived from Yemen. 

Primary Motivations

 Immigrants of the First Aliyah arrived in two waves, stimulated by pogroms and violence against the Jews.  The first influx followed pogroms in Russia in 1881-1882, and the second mass influx from Russia took place during 1890-1891 as a result of anti-Jewish legislation and the expulsion of Jews from Moscow.  Immigration from Yemen was primarily motivated by messianic expectations.

 

The Immigrants

The majority of Jews that left Russia and Rumania during this period chose to immigrate to the United States. Those that came to the Land of Israel were mainly middle class people with families.  Among them were also emissaries from different cities, organizations, and communities, who came to investigate the possibilities for settlement on behalf of their constituents.  Because of their middle-class backgrounds and lack of familiarity with rural life, most of these immigrants chose to settle in cities, primarily Jaffa and Jerusalem.  Only one quarter chose agricultural settlements.  Despite their small numbers, these original farmers became the foundation of the later pioneering agricultural settlements.

 

During the First Aliyah period some 2500 Jews also emigrated from Yemen.  The majority settled in Jerusalem, where many of them encountered economic difficulties as well as a lack of housing, and unfriendly treatment by other residents of the city. As a result, they created separate housing, community, and financial organizations for themselves.

1894: Dreyfus Affair

French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus is wrongly convicted of espionage. The case has a galvanizing effect on the development of Zionism by underscoring the precariousness of Jewish life in Europe.

At the end of the 19th century in France, the birthplace of European Jewish

emancipation, an espionage scandal erupted involving an assimilated Jewish army captain and questions about his “loyalty” to the state. The anti-Semitism that characterized the arrest, trial, and retrial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus shocked world Jewry.

1896: Herzl’s “The Jewish State”

Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist who covered the Dreyfus trial as a correspondent, publishes Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”), in which he proposes the creation of a Jewish state as the solution to anti-Semitism.

Der Judenstaat (German, literally The State of the Jews, commonly rendered as The Jewish State) is a pamphlet written by Theodor Herzl and published in February 1896 in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenstein's Verlags-Buchhandlung. It is subtitled with "Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage" ("Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question") and was originally called "Address to the Rothschilds", referring to the Rothschild family banking dynasty, as Herzl planned to deliver it as a speech to the Rothschild family. Baron Edmond de Rothschild rejected Herzl's plan, feeling that it threatened Jews in the Diaspora. He also thought it would put his own settlements at risk.

It is considered one of the most important texts of modern Zionism. As expressed in this book, Herzl envisioned the founding of a future independent Jewish state during the 20th century. He argued that the best way to avoid antisemitism in Europe was to create this independent Jewish state. The book encouraged Jews to purchase land in Palestine, although the possibility of a Jewish state in Argentina is also considered.

Herzl popularized the term "Zionism", which was coined by Nathan Birnbaum. The nationalist movement 


April 19, 1903: Kishinev Pogrom

The Kishinev Pogrom in the Russian Empire, in what is now Moldova, kills dozens of Jews and results in the destruction of hundreds of homes and business, prompting tens of thousands of Russian Jews to flee to Palestine.

The Kishinev Pogrom in the Russian Empire, in what is now Moldova, kills dozens of Jews and results in the destruction of hundreds of homes and business, prompting tens of thousands of Russian Jews to flee to Palestine.

How a small pogrom in Russia changed the course of history

Until the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was the archetype for anti-Jewish persecution, according to a new book about the massacre’s long afterlife

The terror lasted for less than three days, and “only” 49 Jews were killed, but the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 had surprisingly far-reaching ramifications. Within weeks of the pre-Easter massacre, the town’s name became synonymous with the worst horrors of Diaspora persecution, and political movements around the world took notice.


A photograph taken following the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, when 49 Jews were murdered following a ‘blood libel’ against the Jewish community. Here, the victims are laid out wrapped in prayer shawls prior to burial (public domain) 

The Pale of Settlement

Decided to add this because my great grandparents immigrated to the US from Belarus to escape the Russian pogroms 



Short film "The Pale of Settlement" 2013

Drama from the history of Imperial Russia.

Director Jacob Sillman.

Cast Kyle Catlett, Leya Catlett, Brandon deSpain and others.

Kyle Catlett received a prize as best actor on Greenville International Film Festival. 

The Pale of Settlement (Russian: Черта́ осе́длости, chertá osédlostiYiddish: דער תּחום-המושבֿ, der tkhum hamóyshevHebrew: תְּחוּם הַמּוֹשָב, t'ẖum hammosháv) was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.

The Pale of Settlement included all of modern-day BelarusLithuania and Moldova, much of Ukraine and east-central Poland, and relatively small parts of Latvia and what is now the western Russian Federation. It extended from the eastern pale, or demarcation line inside the country, westwards to the Imperial Russian border with the Kingdom of Prussia (later the German Empire) and Austria-Hungary. Furthermore, it comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia and largely corresponded to historical lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian CommonwealthCossack Hetmanate, the Ottoman Empire (with Yedisan), Crimean Khanate, and eastern Principality of Moldavia (Bessarabia).

Life in the Pale for many was economically bleak. Most people relied on small service or artisan work that could not support the number of inhabitants, which resulted in emigration, especially in the late 19th century. Even so, Jewish culture, especially in Yiddish, developed in the shtetls (small towns), and intellectual culture developed in the yeshivot (religious schools) and was also carried abroad.

The Russian Empire during the existence of the Pale was predominantly Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the area included in the Pale with its large minorities of Jewish, Roman Catholic and until mid-19th century Eastern Catholic population (although much of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova are predominantly Eastern Orthodox). While the religious nature of the edicts creating the Pale is clear (conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, the state religion, released individuals from the strictures), historians argue that the motivations for its creation and maintenance were primarily economic and nationalist in nature.

The end of the enforcement and formal demarcation of the Pale coincided with the beginning of World War I in 1914 and then ultimately, the fall of the Russian Empire in the February and October Revolutions of 1917.


April 11, 1909: Tel Aviv Founded

Tel Aviv, the first modern Jewish city, is founded on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea.


Tel Aviv was founded on April 11, 1909. On that day, several dozen families gathered on the sand dunes on the beach outside Yafo to allocate plots of land for a new neighborhood they called Ahuzat Bayit, later known as Tel Aviv 

1910: First Modern Hebrew Dictionary Published


Eliezer Ben-Yehuda begins publishing the first Hebrew dictionary, hastening the revival of the ancient language.

Nov. 2, 1917: Balfour Declaration

Britain issues the Balfour Declaration, endorsing the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people.


The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

Oct. 30, 1918: World War I Ends

The Armistice of Mudros ends World War I in the Middle East and begins the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, which had occupied Palestine since the 16th century 

June 1920: Haganah Founded


The Haganah is founded as an independent defense force for Jews in Palestine.

Haganah (Hebrew: הַהֲגָנָה, lit. The Defence) was the main Zionist paramilitary organization of the Jewish population ("Yishuv") in Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and its disestablishment in 1948, when it became the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).


Formed out of previous existing militias, its original purpose was to defend Jewish settlements from Arab attacks, such as the riots of 192019211929 and during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. It was under the control of the Jewish Agency, the official governmental body in charge of Palestine's Jewish community during the British Mandate. Until the end of the Second World War, Haganah's activities were moderate, in accordance with the policy of havlaga ("self-restraint"), which caused the splitting of the more radical Irgun and Lehi. The group received clandestine military support from Poland. Haganah sought cooperation with the British in the event of an Axis invasion of Palestine through North Africa, prompting the creation of the Palmach task force in 1941.


With the end of World War II and British refusal to cancel the 1939 White Paper's restrictions on Jewish immigration, the Haganah turned to sabotage activities against the British authorities, including bombing bridges, rail lines, and ships used to deport illegal Jewish immigrants, as well as assisting in bringing Jews to Palestine in defiance of British policy. After the United Nations adopted a partition plan for Palestine in 1947, the Haganah came into the open as the biggest fighting force among Palestinian Jews, successfully overcoming Arab forces during the civil war. Shortly after Israel's independence declaration and the beginning of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Haganah was merged with other groups and reorganized into the official army of the state.




July 24, 1922:

British Mandate Starts


The League of Nations adopts the Mandate for Palestine, granting Britain temporary authority over the territory.

On April 25, 1920, the Supreme Council of the League of Nations allocated the Palestine Mandate to Great Britain. On July 24, 1922, The League of Nations adopted the articles for Palestine's administrative and political management, the Articles of the Mandate.


Aug. 24, 1929: Hebron Massacre

Hebron Massacre, the first documented massacre in the holyland


The Arabs want to convince the world the Israelis and Jews are the aggressors and killers, while at the same time trying to cause the world to forget the first massacre, a massacre they committed against Jews, while trying to make people forget that over one million Jews were forced to flee Arab and Muslim lands to save themselves....many died but thanks to G-d many fled and survived.

For many years, the small community of 800 Jews in the ancient city of Hebron lived in peace with their tens of thousands of Arab neighbors. But, on the night of August 23, 1929, the tension simmering within this cauldron of nationalities bubbled over, and for a period of three days, Hebron turned into a city of terror and murder as the Arab residents led a rampaging massacre against the bewildered and helpless Jewish community.

By the time the massacre ended, 67 Jews lay dead – their homes and synagogues destroyed – and the few hundred survivors were relocated to Jerusalem.  The aftermath left Hebron barren of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.

The summer of 1929 was one of unrest in Palestine as Jewish immigrants were arriving in increasing numbers and the agitations of the mufti in Jerusalem spurred on Jewish-Arab tensions. Just one day prior to the start of the Hebron massacre, three Jews and three Arabs were killed in Jerusalem when fighting broke out after a Muslim prayer service on the Temple Mount. Arabs spread false rumors and libels throughout their communities, saying that Jews were carrying out “wholesale killings of Arabs.”

Hebron had up until this time been outwardly peaceful, although tensions hid below the surface. The Sephardi Jewish community (Jews who were originally from Spain, North Africa and Arab countries) in Hebron had lived quietly with its Arab neighbors for centuries. Theses Sephardi Jews spoke Arabic and had a cultural connection with the Arabs of Hebron.

In the mid-1800s, Ashkenazi (native European) Jews started moving to Hebron and, in 1925, the Slobodka Yeshiva – officially called the Yeshiva of Hebron Knesset Yisrael-Slobodka – was opened. Yeshiva students lived separately from both the Sephardi Jewish community and from the Arab population. This isolation fed the Arab view that these “Zionist immigrants” were suspicious. Still, one yeshiva student, Dov Cohen, recalled being on “very good” terms with the Arab neighbors. He remembered yeshiva boys taking long walks late at night on the outskirts of the city and not feeling afraid, even though only one British policeman guarded the entire city.

On Friday, August 23, 1929, that tranquility was lost.

Arab youths began the riots by hurling rocks at the yeshiva students as they walked by. That afternoon, student Shmuel Rosenholtz went to the yeshiva alone. Arab rioters broke into the building and killed him. Rosenholtz’s was but the first of dozens of murders.

On Friday night, Rabbi Ya’acov Slonim’s son invited any Jews fearful of the worsening situation to stay in their family house. The rabbi was highly regarded in the community, and he kept a gun. Many of the Jews in the community took this offer for shelter. Unfortunately, many of these people were eventually murdered there.

As early as 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning - the Jewish Sabbath - Arabs began to gather en masse around the Jewish community. They came in mobs, armed with clubs, knives and axes. While the women and children threw stones, the men ransacked Jewish houses and destroyed Jewish property. With only a single police officer in all of Hebron, the Arabs were able to enter Jewish courtyards with literally no opposition.

Rabbi Slonim, who had tried to shelter the Jews, was approached by the rioters and offered a deal. If all the Ashkenazi yeshiva students were given over to the Arabs, the rioters would spare the lives of the Sephardi community.

Rabbi Slonim refused to turn over the students.  The Arabs killed him on the spot.

By the end of the massacre, 12 Sephardi Jews and 55 Ashkenazi Jews were murdered.

A few Arabs did try to help the Jews. Nineteen Arab families saved dozens if not hundreds of Hebron’s Jews. Zmira Mani wrote about an Arab named Abu Id Zaitoun who brought his brother and son to rescue her family. The Arab family protected the Manis with their swords, hid them in a cellar along with other Jews they had saved, and eventually found a policeman to escort them safely to the police station at Beit Romano.

The Beit Romano police station turned into a shelter for the Jews on the morning of Saturday, August 24. It also became a synagogue when the Orthodox Jews gathered there said their morning prayers. As they finished praying, they began to hear noises outside the building. Thousands of Arabs descended from Har Hebron, shouting “Kill the Jews!” in Arabic. They even tried to break down the doors of the station.

For three days, the Jews were besieged in Beit Romano by the rampaging Arabs. Each night, ten men were allowed to leave the building and go to Hebron’s ancient Jewish cemetery to conduct a funeral for any Jews murdered that day.

Violence throughout Palestine instigated by the Arabs resulted in the death of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs (most killed by British security forces).

Three days after the massacre, the British evacuated the 484 survivors, including 153 children, to Jerusalem. More than 200 Arabs and 15 Jews were tried and sentenced for their role in the unrest in 1929. Out of 27 capital cases involving Arabs, only three of the death sentences  were carried out, the others were granted “mercy” and their sentences were commuted to life in prison. Muhammad Jamjoum, Fuad Hijazi, and Ataa Al-Zir were put to death on June 17, 1930, because they were convicted of particularly brutal murders in Safad and Hebron.

On July 14, 1930, the Palestine Bulletin reported that Arab leaders wanted to honor the men and planned to discuss whether to erect a statue in their memory. The British, however, banned all public assemblies and political speeches to commemorate their death. Today, there is a memorial to the men in Acre and, every year, the Palestinian Authority commemorates the execution of these “heroes.”

A number of Jewish families tried to move back to Hebron, but were removed by the British authorities in 1936 at the start of the Arab revolt.

In 1948, Israel gained its independence from Britain, but Hebron was captured by King Abdullah’s Arab Legion during the War of Independence and ultimately annexed to Jordan.

When Israel finally regained control of the city in 1967, a small number of survivors from the massacre again tried to reclaim their old houses. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan supposedly told the survivors that if they returned, they would be arrested, and that they should be patient while the government worked out a solution to get their houses back.

Years later, settlers moved to parts of Hebron without the permission of the government, but for those massacre survivors still seeking their original homes, that solution never came.

1929: Fifth Aliyah Begins

The Fifth Aliyah begins, bringing over 200,000 Jews mainly from central and eastern Europe to pre-state Israel over the course of the decade leading up to World War II. Driven in large part by the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s, the large numbers of new arrivals exacerbate tensions between Jews and Arabs.

The signal event of this aliyah wave was the Nazi accession to power in Germany (1933). Persecution and the Jews' worsening situation caused aliyah from Germany to increase, and aliyah from Eastern Europe to resume. Many of the immigrants from Germany were professionals; their impact was to be felt in many fields of endeavor. Within a four-year period (1933-1936), 174,000 Jews settled in the country. The towns flourished as new industrial enterprises were founded and construction of the Haifa port and the oil refineries was completed. Throughout the country, "stockade and tower" settlements were established. During this period ­ in 1929 and again in 1936-39 ­ violent Arab attacks on the Jewish population took place, called "disturbances" by the British. The British government imposed restrictions on immigration, resulting in Aliyah Bet — clandestine, illegal immigration.

By 1940, nearly 250,000 Jews had arrived during the Fifth Aliyah (20,000 of them left later) and the yishuv's population reached 450,000. From this time on, the practice of "numbering" the waves of immigration was discontinued ­ which is not to say that aliyah had exhausted itself.

1936: Arab Revolt

Palestinian Arabs revolt against British rule, demanding Arab independence and the end of Jewish immigration 

The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, later known as The Great Revolt (al-Thawra al- Kubra) or The Great Palestinian Revolt (Thawrat Filastin al-Kubra), was a popular nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home". The uprising coincided with a peak in the influx of immigrant Jews, some 60,000 that year –the Jewish population having grown under British auspices from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935 – and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centers to escape their abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized. Since 1920 Jews and Arabs had been involved in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, and the immediate spark for the uprising was the murder of two Jews by a Qassamite band, and the retaliatory killing by Jewish gunmen of two Arab laborers, incidents which triggered a flare-up of violence across Palestine. A month into the disturbances Amin al-Husseini, president of the Arab Higher Committee and Mufti of Jerusalem, declared 16 May 1936 as 'Palestine Day' and called for a General Strike. The revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as "immoral and terroristic", often compared to fascism and NazismBen Gurion, however, described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism.

The general strike lasted from April to October 1936. The revolt is often analysed in terms of two distinct phases. The first phase was one of spontaneous popular resistance which was only, in a second moment, seized on by the urban and elitist Arab Higher Committee, which gave the movement an organized shape and was focused mainly on strikes and other forms of political protest, in order to secure a political result. By October 1936, this phase had been defeated by the British civil administration using a combination of political concessions, international diplomacy (involving the rulers of IraqSaudi ArabiaTransjordan and Yemen) and the threat of martial law. The second phase, which began late in 1937, was a peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British repression in 1936 in which increasingly British forces were targeted as the army itself increasingly targeted the villages it thought supportive of the revolt. During this phase, the rebellion was brutally suppressed by the British Army and the Palestine Police Force using repressive measures that were intended to intimidate the whole population and undermine popular support for the revolt. A more dominant role on the Arab side was taken by the Nashashibi clan, whose NDP party quickly withdrew from the rebel Arab Higher Committee, led by the radical faction of Amin al-Husseini, and instead sided with the British – dispatching "Fasail al-Salam" (the "Peace Bands") in coordination with the British Army against nationalist and Jihadist Arab "Fasail" units (literally "bands").

According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, and 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead due to intracommunal terrorism, and 14,760 wounded. By one estimate, ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed are up to several hundred.

The Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine was unsuccessful, and its consequences affected the outcome of the 1948 Palestine war. It caused the British Mandate to give crucial support to pre-state Zionist militias like the Haganah, whereas on the Palestinian Arab side, the revolt forced the flight into exile of the main Palestinian Arab leader of the period, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini.

May 23, 1939: The White Paper 

Jews demonstrating against the White Paper 

in Jerusalem, May 18, 1939. 

The British House of Commons approves the White Paper of 1939, which severely restricts Jewish immigration to Palestine at precisely the moment when the Nazi rise to power is prompting growing numbers of European Jews to seek refuge there.

The 1939 White Paper and its Tragic Consequences


Whose Land is a documentary, produced and directed by Hugh Kitson and narrated by Colonel Richard Kemp, which examines the claims to the Land of Israel, through the eyes of historians and international lawyers. 

Episode 8 covers the 1939 White Paper and its Tragic Consequences. 

Early on, the British Mandate over Palestine had started to run into serious trouble with a series of Muslim-Arab uprisings – under the leadership of Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The British had appointed this radical Islamist as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. His appointment was an act of appeasement – a policy that the British authorities thought would restore calm. A pattern had been set that would haunt the rest of British rule over Palestine. 

Mufti planned to kill Jews in Arab world and Palestine


There is documentary evidence that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, aimed to kill the Jews, not just in Palestine, but in the Arab world, and had secret plans to set up extermination camps near Nablus, writes Dr Edy Cohen in the Jerusalem Post. After his part in bringing the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali government into power in Iraq, the Mufti spent WW2 in Berlin as Hitler's guest, broadcasting vicious propaganda from a shortwave transmitter. (With thanks: Eliyahu)

The mufti lived in Germany until May 1945, when the Second World War came to an end. Throughout this entire period, the mufti was involved in espionage, sabotage, terrorist activity against the British and the Jews, as well as anti-Semitic propaganda.

As part of his alleged struggle for independence for the Palestinian people, the mufti attempted to prevent the arrival of European Jews to Palestine, as well as the establishment of a national Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. At least that’s what he claimed in his memoirs.

But this is far from the truth. In actuality, the mufti was constantly engaged in the deportation and extermination of Jews from Arab countries and from Palestine.

Recently documents have been discovered that attest to the depth of the Arab world’s animosity toward the Jews and how the Arabs incited against the Jews and spread propaganda. Many people have asked just how closely the mufti identified conceptually and practically to the Nazi approach regarding the extermination of the Jewish people.

There are recordings of the mufti broadcasting from Berlin to the Arab world in Arabic, in which he says, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them – this is God’s will.”

On November 2, 1943 – the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – the mufti organized a protest in Berlin in which thousands of Muslim immigrants to Germany participated. The following is an excerpt from the speech the mufti gave at the protest: “26 years ago the Jews received the Balfour Declaration so they could build a national Jewish homeland. The British betrayed the Arabs and Islam by supporting the Jews. Jews are selfish.

They think they are the chosen people and that all the other people of the world are meant to serve them. The Jews are the enemy of Islam – they are the ones killed the prophet Mohammad!” The Mufti continues, “The Jewish British minister [Benjamin] Disraeli bought the Suez Canal, thus paving the way for the British to conquer Egypt. And Algerian Jews helped France occupy Algeria. ...The Arabs – and especially the Muslims – must expel the Jews from Arab countries.

This is the ultimate solution.

The prophet Mohammad used this solution 1,300 years ago.

“The Treaty of Versailles was a disaster for Germany and for the Arabs, but the Germans know how to get rid of the Jews, and this is why the Arab world has such close relations with Germany.

Germany never harmed the Muslims and is fighting against our common enemy – the Jews.

The most important thing is that they have found the final solution to the Jewish problem. Time is working against the Jews even though the Allies are helping them.”

According to the mufti’s memoirs, he was aware of the Final Solution already in the summer of 1943.

On March 19, 1943, the mufti made a speech from the Islamic Mosque in Berlin in honor of the prophet Mohammad’s birthday, during which he said, “The Jews have managed to use their influence to control the British and the Americans. This is proven by the recent passing of a bill in Congress allowing the Jews to build a national homeland in Palestine.

“The Jews took advantage of the previous war to settle in the Holy Land. The Jews are a threat not just in Palestine, but in every Arab country, since this is where the Allies plan to resettle the millions of Jews who were expelled from Europe. The Arabs must fight with all their strength to put an end to this plot.”

From the above, we can clearly conclude that the mufti was aware of the Final Solution and the plan to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe from the beginning of the war. There is also documentation showing that the mufti toured concentration camps in Poland with Heinrich Himmler. Killing European Jews was not good enough for the mufti, though, and so he planned to kill all the Jews in the Arab world and in Palestine. While the mufti publicly called for Arab countries to expel Jews living in them, he secretly planned to build extermination camps for Jews from Arab countries and Palestine, so that he could implement the Final Solution in the Middle East. 


Thought this would be a good place for a video of my father being interviewed by the Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) 

Interview my father had with the AETN television network concerning his experiences while acting as an interpreter for his commanding officer during the liberation of the Dachau.

Female members of the Palmach in Ein Gedi,1942

May 15, 1941 : Palmach Created

The Haganah creates an elite fighting force called the Palmach to protect the local Jewish community. 

Eli Eli - Hannah Szenes Senesh - Sang in Hebrew & English - Holocaust Remembrance

Eli Eli - Poem by Hannah Szenes (Chanah Senesh) - Vocals Carli Golbin Nemany - Piano, Bruce Skolnick. Sang in Hebrew & English.

 Correction to text in video: She immigrated to Israel in 1939; she joined the agriculture school in1941.The text currently reads 1941 for both. Sorry for the error. 

No One Wanted Us - The Tragic Voyage of the SS St. Louis


In May, 1939, the SS St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution left Hamburg, bound for Havanna, Cuba. Without their knowledge, their landing passes had been voided by the Cuban President, Laredo Bru. When the ship arrived in Cuba, the passengers were not allowed to debark. Representatives from the Jewish Joint Distribution committee negotiated with the Cuban government, but to no avail. The passengers appealed to President Roosevelt to allow them to land in the United States, but they were again turned away. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where two-thirds of the passengers would perish in the Holocaust.

Exodus 1947: 70 Years Later (Curators Corner #46) 

In this episode of Curators Corner, Judy Cohen and Teresa Pollin talk about Exodus 1947, which sailed for Palestine from France in July 1947. Photographs from the Museum's collection illustrate the experiences of the passengers and crew as they sailed for Palestine, when they were attacked by the British in Palestine's territorial waters,  and when they were forcibly returned to Europe. 

I think this is a fitting end to this episode of the Exodus of Europe to Israel. To see the homeland of your dreams, and be turned around, a sad ending.

It’s 1945 and a ship called the "Unafraid," full of Holocaust survivors from Buchenwald, have just been informed that they are going to be arrested for trying to get into Israel. The passengers comes out of hiding, raise the Israeli flag, and sing Hatikva, the future national anthem of the Jewish state.

Nov. 29, 1947: UN Partition Plan


The United Nations votes to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Zionist leaders agree to the plan, but the leaders of several Arab countries and of the Palestinian Arab community reject it, leading to intercommunal clashes that ultimately develop into a full-blown civil war. 


December 1947: Arab Siege of Jerusalem Begins

Anger over the partition vote prompts rioting in Jerusalem that claims more than a dozen lives. The fighting marks the beginning of the Arab siege of Jerusalem, which seeks to cut off the 100,000 Jewish residents of the city from the rest of the country.

The Arabs Declare Holy War (1947)


Anger over the partition vote prompts rioting in Jerusalem that claims more than a dozen lives. The fighting marks the beginning of the Arab siege of Jerusalem, which seeks to cut off the 100,000 Jewish residents of the city from the rest of the country. 


April 9, 1948: Deir Yassin

More than 100 Arabs, including women and children, are killed by Jewish fighters in the village of Deir Yassin.

May 14, 1948: 

State of Israel Established

David Ben-Gurion proclaims the establishment of Israel in a ceremony in Tel Aviv on the day the British officially end their rule in Palestine. The following day, Israel is invaded by the armies of five Arab states, beginning the War of Independence. 


The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive - Israel Reborn

As soon as the State of Israel is declared, the Arab nations wage war and Israel is forced to fight for its survival.

On November 29, 1947, the UN voted into existence two new states: one called Israel for the Jews, and one for the Arabs, which never came into existence and never received a name. What happened?

Why was Israel born while its partition counterpart was aborted?

This is a crucial question because of the Palestinians’ success in propounding the notion that there was no state for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine in 1948 solely because of the animosity of the Jews, who heartlessly stole their land in war.

When the fighting was over, approximately 700,000 Arabs had fled. The question is “why”!!


The assertion that Israel caused the refugees to flee is a favourite hymn of most who flood the social media pages with opinions formed in basements and kitchens.

The facts, of course, are quite different and saying otherwise is nothing but a malicious myth successfully foisted upon the world for political gain by the very Arab states and leaders who were instrumental in causing the refugee problem in the first place……

Read on.

When the Arabs rejected the Peel commission’s recommendation for partition and the subsequent UN endorsement of that recommendation, between August-October of 1947, months before the UN partition plan would come into effect, it was clear that there would be war no matter what course of action the UN took.

In anticipation of this war, many of the well-to-do Arabs (about 85,000 of them) of the Western Galilee, from Haifa to Acco and villages in between, closed down their houses and went to Beirut or Damascus, where, with their wealth and connections, they could wait for the end of hostilities in safety. This happened between August-October 1947. They thought that once the war was over (no one imagined that Israel could win), they would come back to their homes.

In the Galilee, around November 1947, some 100,000 of the Arab peasantry fled as well, following their leaders’ example. Lacking the effendis’ money and connections, many of the fellahin simply walked with whatever they could carry to Lebanon or Syria.

At this point, neither Israel nor the Arab states were encouraging, frightening, or ordering these masses to flee. The war had not yet even begun.

From December 1947 full hostilities between the Jews and the Arabs erupted even though the Mandate was still in effect.

Anyway, with the termination of British control and the declaration of the State of Israel (14th May 1948), and freed from British obstruction, seven Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco) invaded at once.

When the war ended, some 700, 000 Arabs had fled.

Some anecdotal Arab accounts offered a candid explanation as to why they fled: “We feared that they would do to us what we would have done to them had we won.”

Considering the massacres of Jews by Arabs in Hebron, Gush Etzion, and the Jerusalem Jewish Quarter, it is understandable that the Arabs would project their own bloody fantasies onto Israel.

To the best of my knowledge, it was only in Ramle and Lod that Arab residents were forced to leave because

1.  They opened a hot war against the Hagana and

2.  They actively threatened strategically important sites and roads, particularly the approach to Jerusalem.

In other areas such as Yafo, kibbutzim in parts of the Galil and the hill country, and parts of West Jerusalem, in large part, the Jews adopted scare tactics in these areas because the Arab press and political elite were persistent in their messaging that this was to be a war of annihilation.

Thus, Israel was fighting not a war of independence, but one of survival.

However, lest the haters claim otherwise, in Haifa for example, the senior Jewish official there as well as the Hagana’s high command, drove through the Arab section of the city with a loudspeaker on April 26, 1948 (the State of Israel had STILL not been declared!!!), calling out in Arabic to the residents of his city to remain on their land and in their homes. A communique issued by the Haifa headquarters of the British police noted, “Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives, to get their shops and businesses open and to be assured that their lives and interests will be safe.” (see point 4 below)

For their part, Arab leaders of the paramilitary forces, and the forces of Syria, were blunt in their announcements that they wanted Arabs to leave these areas so that the Arab armies would have a clear field in which to initiate their genocide of the Jews.

In the words of the Nuri Said, Iraqi Prime Minister, “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in (he estimated it would take 6-8 weeks to wipe out the Jews). The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down.”

In 1953, the Jordanian newspaper Al Urdun wrote, “For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs…. By spreading rumours of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.”

Nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth…….

Other than that:

1.  Israel employed defensive actions to hold the territory assigned to it by the United Nations. Against 7 Arab armies explicitly promising a genocide.

2.  As mentioned above, part of that defensive action included driving Arab civilians from their homes in a few Arab villages located at strategically important sites or sitting upon major arteries, especially the road to Jerusalem.

3.  The above Hagana actions were both legal and commonplace in war since time immemorial (Muhammad is praised for doing the same thing to Jewish villages near Mecca before he besieged it).

4.  The REAL cause of the refugees’ flight was the Arab invasion. Had there been no war, there would have been no refugees. This is evidenced by peaceful Arabs who stayed in Israel and became citizens of Israel and who prospered (approximately 170,000 in 1949, now in excess of 2,000,000).

Today, Arab Israelis serve as members of parliament (the Knesset), faculty in universities, highly educated professionals in just about every field of endeavour, and enjoy a standard of living, political and personal freedom, and economic opportunity unparalleled anywhere in the Arab world.

Arab “Palestine” and the notion of “palestinianism”  and its (now) 7 million “refugees” is nowt but the Arab-Israeli conflict by its current name and a rallying call to closet non-Muslim and/or Arab anti-semites to profess public hatred of Jews and Israel which 21st century mores generally proscribe.

As Isa Blagden (The Crown of Life, 1869) stated, ” If a lie is only printed often enough it becomes a quasi-truth and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma and men will die for it.”

The Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue destruction by Jordanian army in 1948 war 

Jordan underwent systematic destruction of the Jewish Quarter including many synagogues. Under Jordanian rule of East Jerusalem, all Israelis (irrespective of their religion) were forbidden from entering the Old City and other holy sites. Between 40 000 and 50 000 tombstones from ancient Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery were desecrated. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter was destroyed after the end of fighting. The Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue was destroyed first, which was followed by the destruction of famous Hurva Synagogue built in 1701, first time destroyed by its Arab creditors in 1721 and rebuilt in 1864.

Between 1948 and 1974, 1 million Jews were expelled from Arab nations across the Middle East. This is their story from Pierre Rehov's documentary "Silent Exodus."


Feb. 24, 1949: 

Armistice with Egypt

An armistice agreement is signed between Israel and Egypt, formally ending hostilities. Israel signs similar agreements with Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in the months to come.


May 11, 1949: 

Israel Admitted to UN

Israel is admitted as a member state of the United Nations following a vote of the General Assembly.

June 1949: 

Major Immigration Waves Begin


Israel launches Operation Magic Carpet, which brings tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews to the Jewish state. Hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews will eventually resettle in the Jewish state, driven by mounting persecution and expulsion prompted by Israel’s establishment. More than two-thirds of Jewish displaced persons in Europe also arrive in the Jewish state between 1948 and 1951. 

A Day of Deliverance 

Aden (Excerpt) 1949

Operation Magic Carpet: Yemenite Jews, having crossed deserts, mountains and borders, often on foot,  arrive at Aden airport to be flown to the newly formed State of Israel. 


Oct. 29, 1956: Suez Crisis

Israel invades Egypt as part of a secret pact with France and Britain, prompting intense international criticism that eventually leads the three nations to withdraw.

Here's Why the Suez Crisis Almost Led to Nuclear War  History


Discover the history of the Suez Canal and how Egypt's President Nasser, with the support of the Soviet Union, seized the canal from the British in 1956, causing an international crisis. See how President Eisenhower intervened to help restore order. 


1962: Dimona Nuclear Reactor

Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona begins operations. Israel has never formally acknowledged that the reactor produces weapons materials, but the country is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons capacity.

June 1, 1962: 

Eichmann Execution

Adolf Eichmann is executed after having been found guilty by an Israeli court of crimes against humanity. The trial marks a turning point in Israeli discussion of the Holocaust and prompts many Holocaust survivors to speak of their wartime experiences for the first time.


June 5, 1967: Six Day War

An era of relative calm prevailed in the Middle East during the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the political situation continued to rest on a knife edge. Arab leaders were aggrieved by their military losses and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees created by Israel’s victory in the 1948 war.

Many Israelis, meanwhile, continued to believe they faced an existential threat from Egypt and other Arab nations.

ORIGINS OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

A series of border disputes were the major spark for the Six-Day War. By the mid-1960s, Syrian-backed Palestinian guerillas had begun staging attacks across the Israeli border, provoking reprisal raids from the Israel Defense Forces.

In April 1967, the skirmishes worsened after Israel and Syria fought a ferocious air and artillery engagement in which six Syrian fighter jets were destroyed.

In the wake of the April air battle, the Soviet Union provided Egypt with intelligence that Israel was moving troops to its northern border with Syria in preparation for a full-scale invasion. The information was inaccurate, but it nevertheless stirred Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser into action.

In a show of support for his Syrian allies, he ordered Egyptian forces to advance into the Sinai Peninsula, where they expelled a United Nations peacekeeping force that had been guarding the border with Israel for over a decade.

MIDEAST TENSIONS ESCALATE

In the days that followed, Nasser continued to rattle the saber: On May 22, he banned Israeli shipping from the Straits of Tiran, the sea passage connecting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. A week later, he sealed a defense pact with King Hussein of Jordan.

As the situation in the Middle East deteriorated, American President Lyndon B. Johnson cautioned both sides against firing the first shot and attempted to garner support for an international maritime operation to reopen the Straits of Tiran.

The plan never materialized, however, and by early June 1967, Israeli leaders had voted to counter the Arab military buildup by launching a preemptive strike.

Arms to Israel

A lot of people are of the belief that the United States was the major military arms supplier to Israel. NOT TRUE!

In December 1947, in deference to the U.N.’s appeal to avoid inflaming the Palestine situation still further, Washington imposed an arms embargo on the Middle East. The United States continued its arms embargo, despite persistent pressure from Israel and her supporters, until the Kennedy Administration.

United States policy for denying American arms to Israel was based on the following arguments: 1) the country was strong enough to defend itself without U.S. arms; this belief was reinforced by Israel’s success during the Suez campaign; 2) Israel had access to arms from other sources; 3) the United States did not want to appear to be starting an arms race in the Middle East; 4) the U.S. sales of arms to Israel would lead the Arabs to ask the Russians and Chinese for arms; 5) the U.S. did not want to risk a Middle East confrontation with the Soviet Union; and 6) U.S. military aid to Israel would alienate the Arabs.

Not until 1962 did Israel receive its first major weapons system from the United States when Kennedy agreed to sell HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Israel.

From 1948 until the 1962 HAWK sale, the Israeli lobby (consisting of those individuals and organizations which attempt directly and indirectly to influence American policy to support Israel) was largely unaware of any U.S. military aid to Israel. In 1956, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, told the president of the American Jewish Committee, Irving Engel, that the main source of weapons was France. In fact, it was U.S. encouragement of third-party arms suppliers which had enabled Israel to meet its defense needs.

The French-Israeli relationship began in the mid-1950s, when Israel became a major customer for the French arms industry. But the bond was not merely commercial: at the time France was trying to quash a rebellion in Algeria, and it shared with Israel a strategic interest in combating radical Arab nationalism. In 1956, France and Israel even fought together against Egypt in the Suez crisis.

The tacit alliance, championed by Israel’s deputy defense minister, Shimon Peres, deepened during the late ’50s and early ’60s through military cooperation and cultural exchanges. French technical assistance helped Israel get nuclear weapons, and France supplied the advanced military aircraft that became the backbone of the Israeli Air Force.

The relationship only grew warmer when Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero, took over as French president in 1959. He recognized the historic justice of a Jewish “national home,” which he saw “as some compensation for suffering endured through long ages,” and he heaped praise on David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, as one of the “greatest leaders in the West.”

The bilateral bonds ran outside the government, too, with strongly pro-Israel public opinion, both among French Jews and non-Jews. But with the end of the Algerian war in 1962, de Gaulle began mending France’s ties to the Arab world and the relationship came under strain. Eventually France and Germany imposed a total weapons embargo on Israel.

Israel was now facing a dilemma!

The geopolitical drama of the Middle East is acutely linked to the Cold War because the Soviet Union was arming and funding Middle East regimes, notably Egypt and Syria. The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural resources was considered a prize, not only to the United States, but to France and Germany.


When Lyndon Johnson became President, the Israeli lobby was encouraged not only by the fact that he had pledged to carry on the work of John Kennedy but also by Johnson’s own record of support for Israel which dated back to his leadership in the Senate during the Eisenhower Administration.


Like most U.S. presidents, Johnson’s support for Israel was based on a combination of realism, romanticism, and cold political calculation. Viewed realistically, Israel was a relatively powerful, pro-Western democratic nation in a region of strategic importance where Communism and Pan-Arabism were seen as serious threats to U.S. interests. Although the United States did not yet perceive Israel as a strategic ally, it recognized that a strong Israel was a deterrent to the forces of radicalism in the Middle East.


Johnson’s dependability was tested immediately when the Israelis began to pressure the Administration to sell them tanks and planes. As early as January 1964, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Komer was complaining that Myer Feldman was badgering him about supplying Israel with tanks. Feldman, the holder of the “Jewish portfolio” as an aide in the Administration, meanwhile wrote to the President in May that he had “rarely been exposed to as much pressure as I have had recently on the question of tanks for Israel.” In the same memo, however, Feldman reveals how the White House successfully exerted its own pressure: “It has only been after considerable effort that members of Congress have been restrained against making speeches on the question, the Anglo-Jewish press has killed several articles and responsible leaders of the Jewish community have demonstrated their confidence in the Administration by keeping silent.”

The U.S. unsuccessfully pursued diplomatic efforts to recruit Israel government support for its Vietnam policy. At the same time, it mounted a similar effort at home to make Johnson’s support for the Israel lobby’s objectives conditional upon that lobby’s support on Vietnam. On September 9, 1966, for example, the National Commander of the Jewish War Veterans, Malcolm A. Tarlov, paying his annual courtesy call to the President, was told that “Jews who seek U.S. support for coreligionists in Russia and for Israel should vigorously identify with Administration actions in Vietnam.” The President could not understand why the American Jewish community was not supporting his Vietnam policy when he was improving U.S.-Israel relations.

Although Administration officials denied that Johnson had made support for his Vietnam policy a condition for U.S. support for Israel, the President’s obsession with protecting his own credibility led him to suspect Israel lobby demands were somehow responsible for the opposition to Vietnam. When it comes to Israel, he told Israeli Minister Evron, American Jews are interventionists, but when it comes to Vietnam, they want the United States to be a pacifist. Johnson could not understand the contradiction and believed that the Jewish community was too selective. Abba Eban recalled being told by Johnson how a group of rabbis who had come to visit him in May 1967, asked him to put the whole American fleet in the Gulf of Aqaba to show the U.S. flag in the Straits of Tiran. In the meantime, Johnson asserted, they didn’t think he should send a screwdriver to Vietnam.

The rise of Arab nationalism was also heating up as Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and the Marxist styled Baathist movements were flourishing. Syria and Iraq had shed western imposed monarchs and were raising their own brand of dictators. Israel was becoming America’s unofficial 51st state as the Evangelical movement was rising in anticipation of fulfilling Biblical prophecy now that Israel existed for the first time since Biblical times.

The bellicose rhetoric blossomed as Arab leaders publicly vowed to destroy Israel. This was nothing new and even the Israelis perceived that such utterances were an appeasement to the neurotic Arab Street rather than an actual threat.

The Middle East was a pawn on the chessboard of America vs. the Soviets during the Cold War because influential dominance of the region was a key goal of both nations. Of course, the obviously oily nature of Middle East natural resources was considered a prize.

SIX-DAY WAR ERUPTS

On June 5, 1967, the Israel Defense Forces initiated Operation Focus, a coordinated aerial attack on Egypt. That morning, some 200 aircraft took off from Israel and swooped west over the Mediterranean before converging on Egypt from the north.

After catching the Egyptians by surprise, they assaulted 18 different airfields and eliminated roughly 90 percent of the Egyptian air force as it sat on the ground. Israel then expanded the range of its attack and decimated the air forces of Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

By the end of the day on June 5, Israeli pilots had won full control of the skies over the Middle East.

Israel all but secured victory by establishing air superiority, but fierce fighting continued for several more days. The ground war in Egypt began on June 5. In concert with the air strikes, Israeli tanks and infantry stormed across the border and into the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.

Egyptian forces put up a spirited resistance, but later fell into disarray after Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer ordered a general retreat. Over the next several days, Israeli forces pursued the routed Egyptians across the Sinai, inflicting severe casualties.

A second front in the Six-Day War opened on June 5, when Jordan – reacting to false reports of an Egyptian victory – began shelling Israeli positions in Jerusalem. Israel responded with a devastating counterattack on East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

On June 7, Israeli troops captured the Old City of Jerusalem and celebrated by praying at the Western Wall.

The Miraculous Victory of Israel's 1967 - 6 Day War


ISRAEL CELEBRATES VICTORY

The last phase of the fighting took place along Israel’s northeastern border with Syria. On June 9, following an intense aerial bombardment, Israeli tanks and infantry advanced on a heavily

fortified region of Syria called the Golan Heights. They successfully captured the Golan the next day. 

On June 10, 1967, a United Nations-brokered ceasefire took effect and the Six-Day War came to an abrupt end. It was later estimated that some 20,000 Arabs and 800 Israelis had died in just 132 hours of fighting.

The leaders of the Arab states were left shocked by the severity of their defeat. Egyptian President Nasser even resigned in disgrace, only to promptly return to office after Egyptian citizens showed their support with massive street demonstrations.

In Israel, the national mood was jubilant. In less than a week, the young nation had captured the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Six-Day War song 

"For the Victor, song of Praise"

Jordan's King Hussein Concedes the Six Day War. *Note his blinking (he appears physically exhausted). 

Who was behind the Six Day War and why? 

It’s highly unlikely that Israel unilaterally initiated the Six Day War without specific instructions and support from the U.S. and continued source of weapons by the U.S. Some observers believe that the US and LBJ engineered the Six Day War as part of America’s Cold War strategy to humiliate the Soviet Union and advance U.S. hegemony in the Middle East.

I think that Israel was an unwilling partner, but the U.S. had an ace that was used to get Israel to go along with this plan.

U.S. policy changed markedly after the Six-Day War of 1967, in response to a perception that many Arab states (notably Egypt) had permanently drifted toward the Soviet Union. In 1968, with strong support from Congress, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson approved the sale of F-4 Phantom II fighters to Israel, establishing the precedent for U.S. support for Israel’s qualitative military edge over its neighbors. The U.S., however, would continue to supply arms to Israel’s neighbors, particularly Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, in order to counter Soviet arms sales and influence in the region.”)

USS Liberty

The attack on the Liberty was pre-planned, perhaps from at least a year beforehand,” Journalist Peter Hounam in his 2003 book “Operation Cyanide”.

However, the USS Liberty incident was far more sinister. Nasser, other Arab leaders and Arab journalists tended to believe that the U.S. and Britain were behind the Six Day War and actually participated. The consensus in the Arab world was that the entire Israeli Air Force wasn’t sufficient in numerical strength to accomplish the now infamous Israeli aerial armada that struck the Egyptian Air Force with such a devastating force that the entire Egyptian Air Force was demolished. Moreover, it appears that the Arab world was clueless about US plans to start a war with Egypt through its proxy Israel and/or that the nuclear bombing of Cairo was on the table. Hounam writes:

1967 USS Liberty attacked by submarine USS Amberjack — Crew member blows whistle

“The Liberty was sent into a very dangerous situation, where it was, in my view, placed in a position to be attacked.”

Mr Hounam says the intention was to sink the ship and kill everyone on board, but as the Liberty remained afloat the plan was aborted and has been hushed up ever since.

Before Day Four of the war, Nasser had been accusing the US and Britain of directly assisting Israel. After the hot-line exchange about the Liberty, he was convinced of it. Of course, he was not aware that the ‘reconnaissance planes’ had in fact been on their way to bomb Cairo or…..that an atomic device could have been detonated.

Hounam interviewed a guy named Joe Sorrels who back in the 1960′s was doing freelance special operations and intelligence work for the U.S. and Britain. Sorrels was no ordinary technician with skills; his function was sufficiently important that he personally met Meir Amit, head of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Hounam writes:

From his viewpoint, it seemed the Israelis were responding to pressure from the United States to eradicate Nasser; Israel was not the prime mover….

According to Sorrels the war plans went well, the driving force being the US…

Sorrels described as ‘horse shit’ the commonly-held notion that Israel fought this war on its own: ‘Anybody working around intelligence knows it isn’t true’. He repeated that Operation Cyanide was a secret plan to start a war against Egypt….and it was elements in the United States who were pushing them to invade Egypt…”

At a 5/4/2002 gathering, Hounam met with Moe Schafer and shared his recollection of two important USS Liberty events.

Moe said he was hurt by shrapnel during the assault….Unlike most of the injured who had already been taken away to the USS America, he was loaded into a helicopter and flown to the USS Davis, the flagship of Sixth Fleet commander Admiral Martin. The next morning, he was sitting on his bunk with two or three other injured men when Martin came in to see them.

Shafer said he seemed to want to tell someone about what had happened before he would be obliged through pressure from above to clam up: ‘Not only did Admiral Martin tell me that four jets were on their way to the Liberty with conventional weapons [and were recalled]; he stated that four were on their way to Cairo loaded with nuclear weapons. He stated they were three minutes from bombing them [the Egyptians]. He also said that the jets could not land back on the carrier with nuclear arms and they had had to land in Athens. He stated this from my bedside while on the Little Rock [the codename of the flagship] after the attack.

The story told by Moe Schafer about Admiral Martin confirming that the US planned to nuke Cairo is also a story that is validated by Air Force pilot Jim Nanjo in California and a member of the H-bomb attack force. Nanjo didn’t know that Cairo was the target, only that he and other crews were on standby to take-off and drop nuclear bombs. Nanjo could never understand why he was called out of bed in the middle of the night on June 8, 1967 (California time) BEFORE the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel. Nanjo also confirmed that he knew that other nuclear bomb units were on under the same alert in Guam, Britain, Moron, Spain as well as in the US.

Lyndon Johnson and the USS Liberty Murders of 1967

By Roger Stone

on June 08 ‘15

Operation Cyanide: How the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War Three (2003) for greater detail.

The reason LBJ ordered the USS Liberty destroyed and all 294 crew members murdered was because he was going to blame the massacre of the USS Liberty on Egypt so that the United States would have a pretext to attack, bomb and take out Nasser of Egypt who, as author Barry Chamish points out, had drifted into the Soviet camp over the previous ten years.

LBJ as the mastermind behind murdering JFK, in the spring of 1962, he and the full Joint Chiefs of Staff were proposing Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was a Pentagon proposed Fake Terror Attacks on Citizens to Create Support for Cuban War.

The argument has been made that Operation Northwoods was a diabolical U.S. military proposal that was never carried out. The counter reply to that is the JFK assassination itself was the expression of Operation Northwoods by Lyndon Johnson and his Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The Nazi-like crime against the men of the USS Liberty comes out of the precise playbook of Operation Northwoods and the JFK assassination.

Author Peter Hounam discovered the smoking gun on LBJ’s participation in the USS Liberty murders when he interviewed former SAC (Strategic Air Command, i.e., nuclear) B-52 pilot Jim Nanjo who told him his nuclear SAC unit in San Diego went on high alert 1–2 hours before the Liberty was attacked on June 8, 1967. Only President Johnson could have given the grave order to go on nuclear high alert, which implies LBJ knew about Israeli attack on the Liberty in advance.

So here we have a sitting US President not only proposing a false flag military attack by Israeli aircraft and patrol boats against a non-combatant US naval electronic surveillance vessel in international waters, but going so far as to have a US submarine fire a torpedo on a US naval vessel, and then stop a US aircraft carrier from launching a rescue within 10 minutes of the attack.

One US officer, the captain of the USS Amberjack, dismissed his oath to defend the Constitution of the USA, and fired on shipmates instead of refusing what was clearly an illegal order and high treason on the part of the sitting president, LBJ. Admiral Lawrence Geis, betrayed his oath as well, in obeying an illegal order to stand down any rescue of the USS Liberty as was well within his power as the senior flag officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS America. So also did Admiral John McCain, in willfully covering up this atrocity and failing to hold his own President culpable, betray his oath to defend and support the Constitution against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign.

In 1979 Liberty survivor James M. Ennes Jr. wrote the first full treatment concerning the Israeli assault on the unarmed U.S. naval ship. After the release of his book, Ennes pursued further research at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. Within that research, Ennes found a misfiled document that detailed the minutes of a meeting held by a “303 Committee” in April 1967. The 303 Committee was responsible for all covert CIA operations within the Johnson administration.

The 303 Committee consisted of CIA director Richard Helms, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Foy Kohler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. Rostow.

McNamara was often used by LBJ as the key liaison of the covert operations birthed by the 303 Committee and the other groups.

The minutes of the 303 Committee meeting — held two months before the attack on the Liberty — referenced an operation called “Frontlet 615.” Operation Cyanide was found within the subparts of Frontlet 615. The 303 Committee used Frontlet 615 as a code name for the pending Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt. As planned, the war was scheduled to begin on June 15. The Americans had agreed to provide equipment, officer training, and the limited use of aircraft to the Israelis.

Operation Cyanide was a provocative false flag that called for an Israel Defense Force attack on a U.S. ship. The assault on the unarmed ship would use unmarked fighter jets so that the destruction could then be blamed on the Egyptians, and the Americans could enter the war on the side of Israel.

It was not the first time Johnson had dabbled in false-flag operations. Years earlier, he had tasked National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy with “Plan 34A” in Vietnam. Buddy was charged with constructing a series of provocations that would cause the North Vietnamese to attack American destroyers (i.e., Gulf of Tonkin). Some historians cite Tonkin as the primary reason for Johnson’s 1964 win over Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.).

In a decision that confounded LBJ, Israel began its war with Egypt 10 days early. The USS Liberty was rushed from its position off the horn of Africa to the Mediterranean Sea. The Liberty had been chosen as the victim of Operation Cyanide.

In Remember the Liberty! Nelson recalls the tense confusion and abandonment Admiral Lawrence Geis experienced as the Liberty was being attacked. Geis later relayed the tale to Chief Intelligence Officer David Lewis, who agreed not to reveal the information until Geis had died, which he did in 1987.

Geis explained to Lewis that Johnson had ordered two sorties of fighter jets recalled — one that had been en-route to the Liberty ten minutes after the attack. Johnson had also recalled two A-4s, launched from the USS America within minutes, armed with nuclear weapons and headed for Cairo, Egypt.

McNamara called Geis and instructed him to recall the aircraft. “We’re not going to war over a few dead soldiers,” McNamara told Geis. McNamara, expecting the Liberty to sink within the hour, told Geis that he could order another sortie of fighter jets in 90 minutes. When the hour-and-a-half had passed, Geis prepared to order assistance. McNamara again instructed him to recall the order.

Geis demanded to speak to the president, who was standing next to McNamara. Johnson confirmed to Geis that he should “recall the wings.” He told Geis that he didn’t care if the Liberty sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Upon assuming the presidency after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Johnson had told Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Golda Meir in 1963, “You’ve lost a great friend, but you’ve found a better one.”

In Remember the Liberty! Nelson further details the political maneuverings that make Johnson, McNamara, and LBJ’s administration culpable in the 1967 attack on American sailors off the coast of Egypt and Israel. A part of the proceeds from Nelson’s work are donated to the Liberty Veterans Association.

Edited and shortened version of USS Liberty Dead In The Water (BBC Documentary 2002)

>Click Here to see video<

LEGACY OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

The Six-Day War had momentous geopolitical consequences in the Middle East. Victory in the war led to a surge of national pride in Israel, which had tripled in size, but it also fanned the flames of the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Still wounded by their defeat in the Six-Day War, Arab leaders met in Khartoum, Sudan, in August 1967, and signed a resolution that promised “no peace, no recognition and no negotiation” with Israel.

By claiming the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel also absorbed over one million Palestinian Arabs. Several hundred thousand Palestinians later fled Israeli rule, worsening a refugee crisis that had begun during the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and laying the groundwork for ongoing political turmoil and violence.

Since 1967, the lands Israel seized in the Six-Day War have been at the center of efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

‘Land for peace’

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, laid out the concept of Israel relinquishing land it captured during its defensive war in return for recognition, an end of conflict and peaceful relations with its neighbors.  

While Jordan gave up its illegal claims to sovereignty over Judea and Samaria (aka “the West Bank”) after the 1967 war, its later treaty with Israel did not formalize trading this land for peace. 

As it is, Israel remains at war—in an active and daily sense—with many of its direct neighbors, who do not seek peace, but rather Israel’s ultimate destruction. No amount of land will quench this bloody thirst. 

Sept. 1, 1967: Khartoum Resolution

The Arab League issues the Khartoum Resolution with its famous “three no’s”: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no recognition of Israel.

September, 1967: 

First West Bank Settlement


Kfar Etzion, a religious kibbutz located in Gush Etzion, fifteen minutes from Jerusalem and less than an hour from Tel Aviv. Destroyed in the 1948 war and re-established following the Six Day War. The construction sets off decades of Israeli settlement building in the territory that most of the world considers illegal. 

The story of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion – the first settlement in 1943, the fall of the bloc with the establishment of the State of Israel, the many settlers who died and the orphans who returned to establish the kibbutz after the Six Day War – all fill many pages of history and literature.  


The Hebron hills are the cradle of the Jewish people- the fathers of the nation, kings and prophets, vine growers, farmers, and shepherds, fighters and rebels all of them passed this way. They form the backdrop to the story of Gush Etzion, nestled between Jerusalem, the Holy City, and Hebron, the City of the Fathers. They are the unbroken Jewish chain from father to son.

The heritage of Gush Etzion symbolizes the history of the Jewish people and its attachment to its homeland. Four waves of Jewish settlement came to Gush Etzion. Three of them shattered against its hostile, stony hills. The fourth is thriving and prospering. In the words of the prophet Haggai: "The glory of this latter house shall be greater than that of the former one. And in this place, I will grant peace (2:9).

In 1947-1948 Gush Etzion was the site of blood-drenched battles when a small number of fighters and settlers took a heroic stand in the defense of Gush Etzion and Jerusalem. The four settlements were under siege. Convoys attempting to relieve the blockade were ambushed, and many fighters were killed. Between the 12th and 14th of May 1948, on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, Gush Etzion fell. Some 240 fighters died in battle and the rest were taken captive.

For 19 years the survivors could only look towards Gush Etzion from afar, but in 5727 (1967) the children of Kfar Etzion were able to return to their ruined home, redeem it from the wilderness, and rebuild it.

"…I do not know of a more glorious, tragic and heroic struggle in all the valiant battles of the Israel Defense Forces than that of Gush Etzion...Their sacrifice, more than any other war effort, saved Jerusalem... The Gush Etzion campaign is the great and terrible epic of the Jewish war... If a Hebrew Jerusalem exists... the gratitude of Jewish history goes first and foremost to the fighters of Gush Etzion."

David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

Gush Etzion Heritage Memorial Site

"If you wish to know the source of all settlement in the Land of Israel, come to the Gush Etzion Visitors Center in the heart of the hills and the heart of the nation. There you will see the return to Zion in all its glory the heroic battles, working the land, and the remarkable homecoming. An exciting journey in time and place for all the family. Very highly recommended!"

Gen. (Res.) Uzi Dayan

"The story of Gush Etzion mirrors the history of modern-day Israel It is the story of the Jewish people and our long connection to the land and its people. It is the story of bravery, sacrifice and hope It is our past, our present and our future and upon us lays the responsibility to cherish and to preserve this site Jewish National Fund will always honor and remember those who gave their all to call this place home".

Russell F. Robinson, CEO, Jewish National Fund-USA

"l am excited to visit Kfar Etzion's innovative and fascinating sound and light show It relates the story of Gush Etzion from the War of Independence to the homecoming in the Six Day War This journey empowers the Jewish people in this place and holds great symbolism for the settlement of the land"

Danny Atar, former MK and KKL World Chairman

"The film is a masterpiece from every aspect, both cinematically and in terms of writing. Well done"

Dr. Avshalom Kor


Sept. 5, 1972: 

Terror at Munich Olympics

During the Summer Olympics in Munich, Palestinian gunmen sneak into apartments housing 11 members of the Israeli team, taking them hostage and eventually killing them during a failed rescue operation.

Oct. 6, 1973: 

Yom Kippur War Begins

The Yom Kippur War begins when a coalition of Arab states launches a surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

The Israeli Tank Troops Who Destroyed an Egyptian Brigade in the Yom Kippur War

They were badly outnumbered and caught by surprise, but used their far better skills to block the Egyptians' progress in the Sinai Peninsula

Early in the morning of October 14, 1973, Ira Efron, a company commander of the Armored Division’s 46th Battalion, was in the middle of a shower. As panic ensued, he was called to get on top of a tank. 


“I was naked. I put on overalls and ran barefoot to the tank,” “The map flew away from me, but I didn’t stop.”

When he approached Wadi Mabouk in the Sinai Peninsula, he didn’t believe his eyes. “I saw in the valley below many Egyptian tanks in a completely static position,” he recalled. “We fired wildly at them from a very short distance. We finally behaved like real tank crewmen. It was over very quickly.”

Despite this clash’s overwhelming success for the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF has yet to document the battle sufficiently. Thus the story of the tank crews’ heroism has been absent from the discussion both inside and outside the army.

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Gideon Avidor was the intelligence officer of the 252nd Division, which commanded Dan Shomron’s 401st Brigade, within which the battalion operated.

A few years ago, Avidor decided to thoroughly research the fighting “in order to present the full battle picture,” as he put it. He spent months in the archives and met with veterans of the clash in the desert. He also reviewed the division’s record of operations, transcripts of communications recordings, and Egyptian archival material. 


That produced a booklet called “From Surprise to Knockout,” which notes how the fighters of the 46th Battalion “managed a firing range and destroyed dozens of targets” – Egyptian tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks.

The Israeli tank battalion, which fought alongside the 202nd paratrooper battalion, the 89th Battalion and air and artillery support, destroyed most of the 60 Egyptian tanks that were taken out that day. The Egyptians thus failed in their bid to capture a key pass in the Sinai.

“At around 6:30 we started to hear on the communications about clouds of dust. We realized that something was happening,” said David Shoval, the battalion’s commander. Shoval later became a brigadier general.

Attorney Gilead Sher, a chief of staff under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and today chairman of Sapir Academic College, was then a gunner in a tank led by Yaron Ram.

“I fired the first shell while madly charging,” he said. “We caught a large part of the tanks from fairly close range of a few hundred meters. We fired continuously until the ammunition ran out. We realized that the attack was halted, so we then went from target to target.”

As Itay Margalit, a company commander in the 89th Battalion, put it, "Yaron's tanks hit all the positions; those guys lit up tank after tank. You don’t even see such a thing in the movies.”

“We were in ideal firing positions,” Shoval added. The Egyptians “looked like a dream target a turkey shoot. They were spread across the Wadi.”

Within a few hours, the Egyptians were routed. “The Egyptian armored brigade was caught in a fatal trap,” according to the book “The Story of a Battalion” about the 46th Battalion.

The Egyptian brigade commander was killed, and the brigade’s soldiers abandoned their tanks, jumped from the trucks and armored personnel carriers, and “everyone tried to save himself,” Avidor wrote. “What started as potential chaos ended in total victory.”

The Israeli success wasn’t a given because the Egyptian attack caught the division by surprise. The division was expecting an Egyptian attack elsewhere.

For this reason, as Avidor writes, “the battle was improvised according to the procedure of a hasty battle while staying on the move.”

Avidor concluded that a number of factors contributed to the victory, including quick, correct responses and the high professionalism of the fighters and commanders. But he admits that there were two more key factors: “a lot of luck and the schlemiel-like character and low professionalism of the Egyptians.”

Nov. 10, 1975: 

UN Resolution 3379

The United Nations General Assembly adopts resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

The racist are the ones screaming racism

Kaddish for the UN

In an emotionally charged session, the 3000 Reform delegates to the 53rd biennial assembly to the Union of American Hebrew Congregations uttered a prayer for the dead (Kaddish), pronouncing the “moral collapse of the United Nations” as a result of the international body’s approval of the resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Led by youth delegates, the representatives of 715 Reform congregations signed their names to a 100 foot-long petition to be sent to UN Secretary General Waldheim. The petition said. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with our brethren in Israel. We are Americans, we are Jews, we are Zionists.”

Upon receiving the UAHC’s award as an out standing American and Jew, Philip M. Klutznick, former UN Ambassador to the Economic Committee, and chairman of the governing council of the World Jewish Congress, called the action “a plain lie, clumsy, and a stupid act.” He asserted that this doctrine adopted by the UN “could only harm the welfare and movement of International peace.”

He indicated that this step represents “a very tough question for the American people and Congress regarding our relationship to the United Nations.” He added: “This may be one of the saddest days for the entire world. I hope it does not precipitate the kind of chain reaction that may bring us back to the days of what occurred to the League of Nations, If that were to happen, then we are on the brink of something much bigger than what a General Assembly resolution could mean.”

The United States should withdraw membership from the UN taking their money with them, kick all UN members out of New York, and put a lock on the building!

July 4, 1976: 

Entebbe Rescue Operation

Details of the spectacular rescue of 102 hijack victims from their terrorist captors at Entebbe Airport in Uganda were unfolded at a press conference by the officer who commanded the operation, Brig. Gen. Dan Shomron.

Flanked by Defense Minister Shimon Peres and Chief of Staff Gen. Mordechai Gur, the youngish tough-looking soldier wearing a paratrooper’s beret, said the fighting to extricate the hostages–passengers and crew members of the Air France air bus–was easier than the decision by the Cabinet to mount the rescue mission against a target in a hostile country 2,500 miles distant and with very little time for advance planning.

Addressing the Knesset Premier Yitzhak Rabin officially confirmed that three of the hostages and one Israeli army officer had lost their lives in the rescue operation. Only two of the civilians were immediately identified. They were Ida Borowitz, 56, who was going to Paris to visit her son, and Jean Jacques Maimoni, 19, en route to Paris to continue his studies. there. The third civilian succumbed to wounds at a Nairobi hospital.

The officer killed in the Entebbe Airport action as Lt, Col. Jonathan Nethanyahu, 30, who was born in the United States and brought to Israel at age two. He was the commander of the strike force that freed the hostages. Funeral services were held at the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. Rabin expressed his grief to the families of the victims and the Knesset rose for one minute’s silence. Ten wounded persons were returned to Israel and transferred to Tel Hashomer Sheba Hospital.


ONE HOSTAGE STILL IN UGANDA

One hostage, Mrs. Dora Bloch, 75, a holder of both a British and an Israeli passport, was left behind in Uganda when the rest of the hostages were freed because she had been taken earlier to a hospital in Kampala. Mrs. Bloch, an Israeli resident, was travelling with her son. He was among those rescued. It is understood that Israel and Britain are working closely together to try to ensure her release from Uganda. She is reportedly now well enough to be moved from the hospital.

Shomron estimated that there were fewer than 20 casualties among the Ugandan troops at the airport. He confirmed reports by the returned hostages that the Ugandans were actually helping the hijackers to guard the hostages while Ugandan President Idi Amin was posing in the role of a neutral mediator. Shomron also disclosed that seven terrorists were killed. Only four terrorists actually participated in the hijack of the Air France “air bus” after it left Athens Airport June 27. Several more were apparently brought in with the consent of Ugandan authorities to reenforce the original hijackers.

Gur said the Ugandans were guarding the entrance to the hangar where the hostages were held. They had watch posts on the gallery that overlooked the hangar, they were on the roof of the hangar, and they were around the hanger, he said.

MOST DARING OPERATION EVER

The hijackers released 148 hostages, most of them Jews of various nationalities. They held 102 persons–about 80 of them Israelis and a number of suspected Israelis plus the flight crew of the seized French airliner. The hijackers demanded the release of 53 Palestinian or pro-Palestinian terrorists–40 of them serving prison sentences in Israel and 13 imprisoned in West Germany. Switzerland, France and Kenya.

Israel agreed to negotiate for their release and asked the French government to conduct the negotiations. The hijackers set a deadline at which time they threatened to kill the hostages if their demands were not met.

Peres told the press conference that it became apparent that the negotiations were getting nowhere and that the possibility existed to rescue the hostages. The decision to carry out this action was taken in view of the grave danger to their lives, he said. He noted that the operation was the most daring one ever undertaken by the Israeli army because of the distance involved and the short time left for planning. He said that to the best of his knowledge, the Israeli rescue party did not request permission to land at Entebbe Airport.

The rescue was carried out with giant American-built Hercules transports. Some foreign press reports said there was one Hercules and two Boeing 707 military cargo jets.

Peres had high praise for the behavior of the Air France flight crew. He said they treated the other hostages as their passengers throughout the ordeal. He reiterated that Israel had consulted with no other government before it undertook the operation and bore sole responsibility.

According to the accounts of Shomrom, Gur and Peres, the soldiers in the rescue party shouted to the hostages to keep their heads down as they ran to the rescue plane but some of the civilians did not hear or could not obey that order. The Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on anyone who fired on them. They were fired on by Ugandan troops, some of whom were in the airport control tower. They fired back and some of their bullets hit and damaged 6-10 Soviet-made MIG planes of various types belonging to the Ugandan Air Force. Gur said the airport was not put out of operation by the battle.

May 17, 1977: Likud “Upheaval”

The right-wing Likud party, led by Menachem Begin, wins parliamentary elections in a landslide, ending decades of left-wing domination of Israeli politics in an event that comes to be known as “the upheaval.”

Nov. 19, 1977: 

Sadat Addresses Knesset

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to visit Israel, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and addressing lawmakers in the Knesset.

The Topic Was Peace

The main message was peace in the speech by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the response by Premier Menachem Begin of Israel before a packed Knesset this afternoon. Both leaders refrained from emphasizing those points of disagreement most painful to the other.

The core of Sadat’s hour-long address in Arabic was Egypt’s readiness for full recognition of Israel as a legitimate sovereign state in the Middle East. Begin, who spoke for 45 minutes in Hebrew, called for a peace treaty, normal diplomatic relations and open frontiers between Israel and Egypt allowing their peoples to move freely between the two counties.

Although Sadat reiterated his oft-repeated call for complete withdrawal by Israel from the occupied Arab territories including “Arab Jerusalem” and its recognition of the right of the Palestinians to establish their own state, he did not mention the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Begin, while affirming Israel’s “eternal undisputed rights, “did not refer to any areas that Israel would never give up, not even East Jerusalem, but emphasized Israel’s commitment to free access to the holy places.

The unprecedented appearance by the Egyptian leader before Israel’s parliament and all the pomp and ceremony occasioned by such a momentous event was broadcast and televised world-wide via satellite. When Sadat arrived at the Knesset he laid a wreath at the eternal light memorial to fallen Jewish soldiers everywhere. His entry into the chamber was greeted by a trumpet fanfare and a warm standing ovation by the assembled Knesset members and guests. “Today I announce and declare that we welcome you, we are ready to accept you and live with you under a permanent peace,” Sadat proclaimed from the Knesset podium.

SEPARATE PEACE PACT NOT OBJECT OF VISIT

Early in his address, the Egyptian leader stressed that he did not come to Jerusalem to negotiate a separate peace between Israel and Egypt because a separate peace would not lead to permanent peace in the area. He said he did not come to achieve an agreement to terminate the state of war between the two nations nor does he seek disengagement either in the Sinai the Golan Heights, or the West Bank. “I came to you today on solid ground to shape a new life and to establish peace. I came here so that we together can build a durable peace in the region, “Sadat declared.

He insisted that there can be no peace without the Palestinians, that the Palestinian issue was the crux of the Middle East conflict and noted pointedly that the United States, Israel’s area test friend and ally, the provider of military economic and moral support to Israel “has accepted the fact that Palestinians are entitled to get their legitimate rights.”

Urging Israel’s acceptance of the right of the Palestinians to establish their own state, Sadat declared that Israel had nothing to fear from “a newly born state” which would need world assistance and would not be a threat to anyone.

WHAT ISRAEL WOULD RECEIVE

Sadat declared that for ending the occupation of Arab territory and acknowledging the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, Israel would receive a peace agreement recognizing its secure boundaries and any international guarantees it chooses to accept. The relations between Israel and the Arab countries should be based on the principle of no resort to force, he said. “Israel must live within its own borders, with its Arab neighbors, with all the international guarantees afforded to it and the other parties, “Sadat asserted.

He deplored that “many months in which peace could have been brought have been wasted over differences and fruitless discussions on the procedures to be followed at a reconvened Geneva peace conference.”

“If God Almighty has made it my fate to assume the responsibility on behalf of the Egyptian people and to share in the fate-determining possibility of the Arab nation, the main duty dictated by this responsibility is to try by every means to save my Egyptian people and the entire Arab nation from the horrors of new, shocking and destructive wars,” Sadat declared. He said to accomplish that, he became convinced that he must “go to the farthest corners of the world, even to Jerusalem, to address the Knesset, the representatives of the people, to acquaint them with all the facts.”

Sadat acknowledged that there were many in the Arab world and some in Israel who looked upon his trip to Jerusalem with anger and suspicion. He said he forgave them. He referred indirectly to a charge by Israel’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Mordechai Gur, that his trip was a cover for war preparations. He said that was not the case. “We must all rise above all forms of fanaticism, above all forms of self-deception and above all, forms of obsolete theories of superiority. The most important thing is never to forget that infallibility is the prerogative of God, “Sadat said.

He said that he has been asked, ever since arriving in Israel, what he intends to achieve by his visit. “I came here without the intention to achieve something but to start a new rood, ” Sadat said.

ISRAEL HAS ONE HOPE: PEACE

Begin, who followed Sadat at the podium, had warm words for Sadat’s trip. “The distance between Cairo and Jerusalem is almost infinite but President Sadat has crossed that distance graciously, ” he said. He said the trip required courage and “We, the Jewish people, know how to appreciate such cour-

“We ask for a complete and true peace, a total appeasement between the Jewish people and the Arabs, “the Israeli leader said. He recalled that at its birth Israel was attacked on three fronts by its neighbors and that the hand of peace it extended then and over the years that followed was rejected. But, he declared, “We should not drown ourselves in past memories of the wars between us. We have to overcome those memories and care for the future, ” he said.

Begin observed to Sadat that “we did not invite you and you did not come to form a barrier between Egypt and the other Arab countries. “But, he said, Egypt and Israel must recognize that they have to live together forever and should freely negotiate a peace treaty. “War is avoidable but peace is unavoidable, ” he said. He proposed that the first clause of a peace treaty should deal with the termination of all states of war.

“Let our frontiers be open for free movement. Let your people come here and our people go to you. Our country is open to the people of Egypt without conditions, ” Begin said. He also reiterated his invitations to President Hafez Assad of Syria and King Hussein of Jordan to open negotiations for peace with Israel. Begin said that he himself was ready to travel to any Arab capital to promote good relations and peace

Begin’s speech was interrupted twice by Communist MK Meir Wilner. Begin sighed, lapsed into English and told Sadat, “The Communist member here disturbs me but this is the price I had to pay to convince him not to disturb you,”

MUTUAL CONCESSIONS URGED

Labor Alignment leader Shimon Peres, who followed Begin to the Knesset rostrum, declared that “peace cannot be achieved without mutual concessions. We will have to concede things dear to us and the Egyptians will have to do the same.”

The Israeli opposition leader said that “some sort of formula will have to be found to the problem of Palestinian identity, but not at the cost of national security to Israel and Jordan.” Peres suggested “a Kind of federation between the Palestinians and Jordanians.” He stressed that “a momentous opportunity is here and we must all practice patience and mutual trust.”

Peres, who was the former Defense Minister , said he felt peace settlements could also be reached with Jordan and Syria as well as Egypt. At the outset, Peres said he was not speaking in the name of the opposition but for the united people to Israel who wants peace.

BEGIN, SADAT EXPRESS OPTIMISM

Sadat and Begin expressed optimism today following the special Knesset session, during an inter view by the correspondent of Israel Radio.

Asked to describe the talks with Begin, Sadat said, shortly after he came out of Begin’s work room in the Knesset, that the real negotiations haven’t started yet. He said the negotiations would start tonight.

Sadat was then asked whether the negotiations would lead to peace. He responded, “I am always optimistic.” Begin then joined him and said: “I share the President’s optimism.” The two leaders were then interviewed by ABC-TV newscaster Barbara Walters–the first ever interview held with an Israeli and an Arab statesman sitting side by side.

Tonight, Begin and Sadat held a working dinner at the King David Hotel where the Egyptian President and his entourage are staying, Tomorrow, Sadat is scheduled to meet with leaders of Israeli political parties and lunch with Begin and his aides. In the afternoon, prior to his return home, Sadat and Begin will hold a news conference at the Jerusalem Theater.

Sept. 17, 1978: 

Camp David Accords


Israel and Egypt sign the Camp David Accords after days of negotiations brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The agreement leads to awarding of the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and to the 1979 signing of Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab state. 

The Edith Wolfson 

Medical Center

Wolfson Medical Center 1980 (Hebrew: מרכז רפואי וולפסון) (transliterationMerkaz Refui Wolfson) is a hospital in the Tel Aviv District city of HolonIsrael. Wolfson Hospital is located in southern Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area in a vicinity abounded by a population of nearly half a million inhabitants. It ranks as the ninth largest hospital in Israel. The medical center was founded with the assistance of the Wolfson Foundation and named after Lady Edith Specterman Wolfson, Sir Isaac Wolfson's wife. 

Edith Wolfson Wife of Sir Isaac Wolfson, 1st Baronet, Who was a businessman and philanthropist and one of my relatives. 

Sir Isaac and Lady Edith Wolfson were extraordinary people - who exemplified the values of generosity and commitment in all of their endeavors.

The Edith Wolfson Medical Center is a fitting tribute to the caring and compassion exhibited by this remarkable couple,  whose benevolence made the founding of this hospital possible.

Sir Isaac dedicated himself to philanthropy and established the Wolfson Foundation to support worthy causes in health,  education and science in Britain,  the Commonwealth and Israel.

He was knighted in 1962 by the Queen of England in recognition of his contribution.

Lady Edith Specterman Wolfson was raised with a strong tradition of communal service.

She served as president of Emunah and Vice President of the Jewish Welfare Board,  as well as co-chairman and President of the Youth Aliyah Aid Society.

The memory of Lady Edith Wolfson has been immortalized in this medical center which bears her name.

The ideals and spirit of service which she and her husband epitomized have become the creed of this institution and have been adopted by all its staff:  to fulfill the physical,  emotional and spiritual needs of every patient. 


Operation Opera - Israel's Raid on the Iraqi Reactor 1981

Operation Opera (Hebrew: מבצע אופרה), also known as Operation Babylon, was a surprise airstrike conducted by the Israeli Air Force on 7 June 1981, which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometres (11 miles) southeast of BaghdadIraq. The Israeli operation came after Iran's partially successful Operation Scorch Sword had caused minor damage to the same nuclear facility a year prior, with the damage having been subsequently repaired by French technicians. Operation Opera, and related Israeli government statements following it, established the Begin Doctrine, which explicitly stated the strike was not an anomaly, but instead "a precedent for every future government in Israel". Israel's counter-proliferation preventive strike added another dimension to its existing policy of deliberate ambiguity, as it related to the nuclear weapons capability of other states in the region.


In 1976, Iraq purchased an Osiris-class nuclear reactor from France. While Iraq and France maintained that the reactor, named Osirak by the French, was intended for peaceful scientific research, the Israelis viewed the reactor with suspicion, believing it was designed to make nuclear weapons that could escalate the ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict. On 7 June 1981, a flight of Israeli Air Force F-16A fighter aircraft, with an escort of F-15As, bombed the Osirak reactor deep inside Iraq. Israel called the operation an act of self-defense, saying that the reactor had "less than a month to go" before "it might have become critical." The airstrike reportedly killed ten Iraqi soldiers and one French civilian. The attack took place about three weeks before the 1981 Israeli legislative elections for the Knesset.


At the time of its occurrence, the attack was met with sharp international criticism, including in the United States, and Israel was rebuked by the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly in two separate resolutions.[14][15] Media reactions were also negative: "Israel's sneak attack ... was an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression", wrote the New York Times, while the Los Angeles Times called it "state-sponsored terrorism". The destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor has been cited as an example of a preventive strike in contemporary scholarship on international law. The efficacy of the attack is debated by historians, who acknowledge that it brought Iraq back from the brink of nuclear capability but drove its weapons program underground and cemented Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's future ambitions for acquiring nuclear weapons.

June 6, 1982 — 

Lebanon War Begins

Israel invades southern Lebanon in an effort to stop attacks on civilians in northern Israel, resulting in the expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon.


Sept. 16, 1982 — 

Sabra and Shatila Massacre

Christian Phalangists begin massacring hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in what becomes known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. An Israeli governmental commission will later find Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible for the killings.

Cabinet Rejects All Accusations That Israel Was Responsible for Massacre of Palestinians in Beirut

The Cabinet has angrily rejected “all director implicit accusations” that Israel was in any way responsible for the massacre of civilians in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps in west Beirut Friday, reportedly by elements of the Christian Phalangists and Maj. Saad Haddad’s Christian militia, private military forces armed and supported by Israel.

A communique bristling with anger was issued after a three-hour emergency meeting of the Cabinet late last night denouncing such accusations as a “blood libel” against Israel, its government and its army.

The communique was in response to a flood of criticism abroad alleging that Israel had acquiesced in and may even have facilitated the slaughter of at least 300 Palestinian men, women and children by allowing the armed Christian forces into the camps and doing nothing to halt the carnage.

The Cabinet communique also reacted to mounting criticism at Home of Israel’s deepening involvement in strife-torn Lebanon by calling on all Israelis to “rally round their democratically elected government.”

Anti-government criticism boiled over at home. Demonstrators outside Begin’s Jerusalem residence and elsewhere in Israel demanded that Israel pull out of west Beirut and out of Lebanon. Labor Party leaders called for the prompt resignation of Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Begin declared today that he would not resign. At the Cabinet session last night he accused the Laborites of “degenerate galutism” and of “kneeling before the goy.”

RELATED EVENTS CITED

Other developments, related to the events which began with Israel’s occupation of west Beirut and climaxed by the discovery of hundreds of murdered civilians in the refugee camps included:

Acknowledgement by Cabinet ministers that Israel was in grave crisis with the U.S.; the Cabinets agreement to increase the number of United Nations observers in Beirut but its flat rejection of the dispatch of an international force to the Lebanese capital or the transfer there of elements of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), now confined to south Lebanon; Egypt’s recall of its Ambassador to Israel, Saad Mortada, conflicting reports of events in west Beirut by Israeli military sources which seemed to cast doubt on the government’s version of what transpired.

Foreign Ministry sources in Cairo said that Ambassador Mortada was instructed to take the first available plane to Cairo for consultations arising from events in Beirut which have been strongly condemned by the Egyptian government. But this fell far short of a rupture of diplomatic relations with Israel.

Foreign Minister Kamal Hassan Ali dispatched a note to UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar calling Israel solely to blame for the massacre of civilians in the Palestinian refugee camps in west Beirut “because of its occupation of the Lebanese capital.” The note referred to “the bestial acts of Israel in Lebanon.”

8 ISRAELI SOLDIERS KILLED, 100 WOUNDED

The army, meanwhile, acknowledged that eight Israeli soldiers have been killed and about 100 wounded — a dozen seriously — since Israeli forces occupied west Beirut last Wednesday following the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalangist party. Three of the dead were killed when their tank was blown up, apparently by a rocket launched grenade.

STATEMENT BY THE CABINET

The escalating crisis caused Begin to summon his Cabinet into extra ordinary session immediately after the conclusion of the Rash Hashanah to holiday. The government communique, read to reporters by Cabinet Secretary Dan Meridor, referred to only one of the refugee camps, Shatila, which is adjacent to the Sabra camp. It said:

“In a place where there was no position of the Israeli army, a Lebanese unit entered a refugee center where terrorists were hiding in order to apprehend them. This unit caused many casualties to innocent civilians. We state this fact with deep grief and regret.

“The IDF (Israel Defense Force), as soon as it learned of the tragic events in the Shatila camp, put an end to the slaughter of the innocent civilian population and forced the Lebanese units to evacuate the camp. The civilian population itself gave clear expression to is gratitude to the act of salvation by the IDF.

“All the director the implicit accusations that the IDF bears any blame whatsoever for this human tragedy in the Shatila camp are entirely baseless and without any foundation. The Government of Israel rejects them with the contempt they deserve. The fact remains that without the intervention of the IDF, there would have been much greater loss of life.

“Despite the internal incitement, we call upon the people of Israel to unite around its democratically elected government in its struggle for security and peace for Israel and all her citizens. No one would preach to us ethics and respect for human lives, values on which we have dedicated–and we will continue to dedicate–generations of Israeli fighters.”

ISRAEL’S EXPLANATION OF THE EVENTS

Israeli officials said that the Phalangists entered the refugee camps to search for terrorists and arms supplies. They encountered resistance in the camps and that was when the killings started, the officials said. They claimed that Israeli forces in the vicinity heard the shooting but believed it was an encounter with the terrorists.

No one could think or know that the Phalangists would carry out a massacre inasmuch as Israel believed tempers had cooled in the days following Gemayel’s assassination officials said.

Ironically, Israel had justified its occupation of west Beirut, in face of strong remonstrations from Washington, in part on grounds that it sought to prevent Phalangists from wreaking bloody revenge for the assassination of their leader. Israel also claimed it had been hoodwinked by the Palestine Liberation Organization and that at least 2,000 armed PLO terrorists remained in west Beirut after their main body evacuated the city.

Although the Cabinet accepted the UN Security Council’s call to station UN observers in west Beirut, it rejected an American demand that two or three UNIFIL battalions from south Lebanon be transferred there. Israel is insisting that the Lebanese army take over the positions presently held by Israeli forces.

Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir sent U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz a cable expressing Israel’s readiness to allow some 40 UN observers into west Beirut, in accordance with the Security Council resolution. Shamir reportedly received a strongly worded message from Shultz demanding Israel’s immediate withdrawal from west Beirut.

CONTRADICTORY REPORTS CITED

Meanwhile, an analysis of army and other official statements and pronouncements over the holiday weekend revealed many contradictions and inconsistencies. Defense Minister Sharon claimed that Israeli forces “surrounded the (refugee) camps.” Chief of Staff Gen. Rafael Eitan said Israeli forces were positioned only at the western periphery of the camps, leaving their eastern approaches open for the Phalangist forces.

While some Israeli reports said Phalangist elements who entered the camp did so on their own authority, other official reports stated that they were sent in by the Israeli army on orders of higher civilian authorities, to help, or to carry out alone the search for PLO terrorists believed hiding in the camps.

Galei Zahal, the Israel armed forces radio, reported from Beirut, that the IDF had “decided to leave the cleansing of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to the Phalange force.”

Zeev Schiff, the respected military correspondent of the independent daily Haaretz, reported that he had learned that a slaughter had occurred in the refugee camps during the night.

Schiff is understood to have passed his information on to Communications Minister Mordechai Zipori who, in turn, conveyed it to Shamir.

When reminded by Zipori that he had given him the information, Shamir reportedly told aides that he “treated Zipori’s statement like he treated many other reports by him — with suspicion.” He added that he had checked with the army which told him it knew nothing of a massacre. But this apparently was hours after the massacre occurred and hours after the army had intervened to get the Phalangists out of the camp area.

LONG HISTORY OF BLOOD FEUDS

Hirsh Goodman, military correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, reported that Israeli intelligence services had warned Begin and Sharon of the danger of a blood feud between the unarmed Palestinians in the camps and the armed Phalangists groups. Observers here noted that the Middle East in general and Lebanon in particular, have a long history of blood feuds, something Israeli leaders could not have been unaware of.

Christians and Druze clashed in Lebanon until Israeli soldiers intervened. Maj. Haddad’s forces have been accused of murdering many women and children in south Lebanon after Israel invaded that region in the Litani River campaign of 1978.

While refugee camp survivors were claiming that Haddad’s men took part in the massacre, this was denied by Haddad and by Israeli officers. Haddad claimed that the Israeli forces had prevented his men from advancing beyond the Awali River, just north of Sidon in south Lebanon. But Israeli officers reported that “at least one” of Haddad’s militiamen was shot when Israeli troops acted to oust the Phalangists from the area.

Reports from Beirut today said surviving refugees were fleeing the camps in panic when rumors spread that Haddad’s men were returning. The refugees tried to rush past an Israel army roadblock but were turned back when Israeli troops fired into the air. Israeli sources said the panic ended when Lebanese security forces persuaded the refugees that the reports of Haddad’s return were baseless.

BEGIN LINKS CRISIS WITH REAGAN’S PLAN

During the Cabinet session, Begin reportedly linked the west Beirut crisis with President Reagan’s plan for the West Bank and Palestinian autonomy, announced by the President September I and immediately and categorically rejected by the Begin government. He reportedly accused the Reagan Administration of using the west Beirut crisis to force Israel to accept the Reagan plan.

One senior political source was quoted as saying, “west Beirut is the turning point in relations between the two countries” (Israel and the U.S.). Although there was criticism in the Cabinet against the decision to occupy west Beirut — taken by Begin and Sharon without consulting their fellow ministers — objections, if any, by the ministers attending the meeting were kept off the record.

Begin rejected all criticism of Israel. He said the Cabinet ministers knew of the plan to allow the Phalangists to enter the Palestinian camps to get rid of the remaining terrorists. Nobody could have surmised the results, Begin said. He dismissed criticism around the Cabinet table as “wisdom after the event.”

CRITICIZES THE LABOR PARTY

He lashed out against the Labor Party. “That party suffers from degenerate galutism,” he said, meaning a diaspora mentality. “This is their way of shaking off responsibility, of kneeling before the goy, even if it’s libel.” He charged that it always had been the practice of Labor to say: “It is not us, it is the separationists, (Herut). That’s the way they escaped responsibility in the bombing of the King David Hotel.”

He was referring to the bombing of the Jerusalem hotel in 1947 where the British Mandate authorities maintained offices. The underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, then headed by Begin, claimed responsibility. About 90 lives were lost.

PERES: BEGIN, SHARON SHOULD RESIGN

The Labor Alignment did not respond directly to Begin’s remarks but demanded that he and Sharon “resign because of their responsibility in ordering the IDF to enter west Beirut and thus indirectly created the conditions for the massacre.”

Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres stressed that the Premier’s and the Defense Minister’s responsibility, though “indirect,” was sufficient to justify their resignation because they ignored the Labor Alignments repeated warnings to stay out of west Beirut.

Labor also demanded the immediate creation of a state commission of inquiry — similar to the one established to investigate Israel’s lack of preparedness when the Yom Kippur War broke out in October, 1973 — to study the massacre. Peres insisted today that Israel leave west Beirut immediately “even if it means leaving behind stocks of weapons.”

Nov. 21, 1984: Operation Moses

Israel launches Operation Moses, the covert evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees from Sudan.

Dec. 9, 1987: Intifada Begins

Protests erupt in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, setting off the violent uprising that comes to be known as the First Palestinian Intifada.

The 1st Intifada: When Non-Violent Protests Turned Violent | History of Israel Explained | Unpacked

Jan. 18, 1991: 

Scud Missile Attacks

Iraq launches the first of dozens of missiles at Israeli in response to U.S. bombardment during the Persian Gulf War. Several dozen Israelis die in the attacks, the majority from heart attacks and suffocation due to difficulties managing gas masks.

Why Did Israel Refrain from Retaliating against Iraq in 1991?

Operation Solomon

Ethiopian Jews, their flight to Israel with Ambassador Asher Naim.

The rescue of Ethiopian Jews began in the 1980s, and reached its peak in 1991 in the dramatic airlift of more than 14,000 in the course of a single day. 

Oct. 30, 1991: 

Madrid Peace Conference

The Madrid conference opens in an effort to kickstart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

The United States and the Soviet Union brought Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians, along with Egypt, the Gulf Arab states, the Arab League, the European Community and the United Nations, together in a palace in Madrid for a Middle East peace conference from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 1991. It was the first time in modern Israel's history that it met publicly with all of its immediate neighbors to talk about peace.

Getting to Madrid required a dedicated U.S. administration, a dying Soviet empire, the conquest and liberation of Kuwait, Israeli willingness not to respond to Iraqi Scud missiles and its need for financial support to absorb 1 million Soviet Jews, and plenty of gentle and not-so-gentle persuasion. 


Dec. 16, 1991 — 

UN Rescinds Resolution 3379

The United Nations rescinds its 1975 declaration equating Zionism with racism.


Sept. 13, 1993: Oslo Accords

Israel and the Palestinians sign the first Oslo Accord at the White House, creating a framework for the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The agreement provides for the creation of an interim Palestinian self-governing authority and for the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from certain Palestinian territories.

Feb. 25, 1994: Baruch Goldstein Massacre

In a rare act of Jewish terrorism aimed at Arab civilians, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein opens fire at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, killing 29 Muslims at prayer. Goldstein is beaten to death at the scene by survivors.

Oct. 14, 1994: Peres-Rabin-Arafat Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announces it will award the 1994 Peace Prize jointly to Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. 

Oct. 26, 1994: 

Jordan Peace Treaty

Israel and Jordan sign historic peace treaty

Israel and Jordan ended 46 years of hostility by signing a peace treaty witnessed by US President Bill Clinton at the Arava desert border crossing south of the Dead Sea. The prime ministers of both countries signed the historic document to the applause of nearly 5,000 guests. Yitzhak Rabin signed for Israel while King Hussein looked on as his prime minister Abdul-Salam al-Majali signed for Jordan. Clinton welcomed the treaty, saying it had broken the chains of the past in the Middle East. Israel signed its first and only other treaty with an Arab state in 1979 with Egypt. Last year it signed an interim peace deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The treaty, backed by all Israelis except the extreme rightwing, ended a 46-year-old state of war between Jordan and Israel. However, it was condemned by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Muslim militants on both sides of the border. The signing ended with the release of 10,000 balloons in the colours of the Israeli and Jordanian flags. 


Nov. 4, 1995: