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 […]
May 4, 1948 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
December 25, 1925 Politician and activist Geulah Cohen, the founder of the Tehiya party, is born in Tel Aviv. Cohen becomes involved with political movements in Mandatory Palestine when she is young, and she joins Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. She signs up for the Irgun underground military organization in 1942, then jumps to […]
December 23, 1907 Avraham Stern, who becomes one of the leading fighters against British rule in Palestine, is born into a Zionist family in Suwalki, Poland. He immigrates to the Land of Israel in 1925 and briefly studies at the Gymnasium in Jerusalem before enrolling at the Hebrew University. He wins a scholarship to study […]
November 1, 1945 The newly formed Jewish Resistance Movement sets off explosions at more than 150 sites along the railway system of British Mandatory Palestine and blows up three British gunboats in the Jaffa and Haifa harbors in synchronized attacks known as the Night of the Trains. Palmach units carry out most of the sabotage, […]
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion summons dozens of Palmach commanders for a conference. There he announces a plan to dismantle the elite, underground fighting unit and integrate it into the newly established Israel Defense Forces.