May 4, 1947 The Irgun sets off explosives at 4:22 p.m. to blast open a hole in the wall of the Acre (Akko) fortress, used as a prison by the British Mandatory authorities, in an attempt to free 41 Jewish underground fighters (30 Irgun and 11 Lehi). The Ottoman-era fortress prison holds 400 Arabs and […]
March 15, 1939 Kol Tzion HaLokhemet (“Voice of Fighting Zion”), the underground radio network operated by the Irgun, sends out its first broadcasts across Palestine as Esther Raziel-Naor hits the airwaves. The network broadcasts messages related to the Irgun and Israel and reports news the British would censor. The Hebrew broadcasts from Tel Aviv often […]
December 29, 1946 The underground militant movement Irgun carries out the Night of the Beatings, an effort across Palestine to flog British soldiers in retribution for the lashing of captured Irgun members. Irgun members abduct soldiers in Netanya, Rishon LeZion and Tel Aviv and flog them in the streets, administering 18 lashes to each. That […]
Members of a Jewish defense organization, the Irgun, bomb the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, based in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing more than 90 British officials. The Irgun aims at making British governance in Palestine so costly that their actions hasten British withdrawal. Founded in 1931 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of its […]
June 29, 1946 The British military launches Operation Agatha, a two-week series of raids and arrests of Jewish resistance fighters, on a day that comes to be known as Black Sabbath. Involving some 17,000 soldiers, the operation is a response to the destruction June 17 of 10 bridges linking Palestine to its neighbors by the […]
May 15, 1947 The United Nations establishes its Special Committee on Palestine, known as UNSCOP, to study and propose options for the future of British Mandatory Palestine. The committee’s formation comes in response to a British request for the world body to resolve the situation in an increasingly violent Palestine, where both Jews and Arabs […]
May 6, 1947 Alexander Rubowitz, 16, is abducted in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem while on a mission for Lohamei HaHerut b’Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), known by the acronym Lehi or as the Stern Gang (after founder Avraham Stern). Rubowitz is never seen again. Lehi is dedicated to ending British rule in […]
April 21, 1947 Two Jewish underground fighters, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein, blow themselves up in a British prison in Jerusalem at night to avoid being hanged the next morning. Barazani, a Kurdish Jew born in Iraq in 1926, moved to Jerusalem when he was 6 years old and joined the youth division of Lehi […]
April 2, 1947 The British government notifies the United Nations of its intent to bring the question of Palestine’s future before the next U.N. General Assembly. The United Kingdom also requests a special General Assembly session to create a special commission that can study and make recommendations on Palestine before the next regular General Assembly […]
February 22, 1948 Arab militants disguised as British troops, joined by a pair of British deserters, detonate bombs in three British military trucks and an armored car in the morning along the shopping district of Ben Yehuda Street in downtown Jerusalem, killing as many as 58 Jewish civilians and wounding 140 to 200 others. The […]
February 18, 1947 British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin announces that after a quarter-century of holding the mandate for Palestine, the British government will ask the United Nations to address the question of what to do about the territory, in which 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews seem locked in an intractable conflict. In addition to battling each other, the Arab […]
December 27, 1925 Moshe Arens, an Israeli defense minister and foreign minister, is born in Kovno, Lithuania. After moving to Riga, Latvia, when he is a toddler, his family immigrates to New York in 1939. Arens leaves the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1944 to serve in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then finishes […]