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 […]
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 […]
September 17, 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte, a diplomat sent by the United Nations to mediate between Israel and the Arabs during the War of Independence, is assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi (the Stern Gang). Born in 1895 to a politically prominent Swedish family, Bernadotte prospered in a multifaceted career in international relations. He […]
Think tanks, scholars and analysts are producing excellent assessments of the impact that the Coronavirus pandemic is having on Middle Eastern countries. The number of monthly articles devoted to the pandemic was extraordinarily high until mid-July 2020, when the topic took a back seat to intense discussions on speculations about Israel’s possible annexation of portions […]
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 […]
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 […]
February 9, 1953 The Soviet Union’s diplomatic outpost in Tel Aviv is bombed, leading the Soviets to break off diplomatic relations a few days later. One Soviet diplomat and the wives of two others are injured by the blast of 70 pounds of explosives in the garden, and the building is damaged. Brawls break out […]
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 […]
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.
Using original sources and employing perspective are keys to substantive Israel education. Failure to use either, handicaps and prejudices learning about Israel. When documents and texts or a broad overview of the literature in a field are not employed, there is a strong possibility that the educator either has a personal political agenda or, is covering up for their own lack of knowledge of what they are teaching. This premise is true for teaching any country’s history and through the lens of any discipline. I reside in the discipline of history.