April 17, 1954 Gamal Abdel Nasser, 36, is appointed the prime minister of Egypt. Nasser’s interest in politics goes back to age 12 when he accidentally participated in an ultranationalist protest calling for the overthrow…
September 2, 1953 Israel starts work on a project to divert some of the water of the Jordan River at the B’not Yaakov (Daughters of Jacob) Bridge in the north of the state for use…
May 11, 1953 U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles arrives in Cairo at the start of a 2½-week fact-finding trip to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Libya. Dulles emphasizes…
Jordan formally annexes the West Bank and East Jerusalem, allowing the Palestinian inhabitants therein to obtain Jordanian citizenship.
Shaikh Yusuf Yassin, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, states that “Arab states would never agree to any working relationship with Israel.”
March 3, 1950 The Iraqi government retracts a policy banning emigration to move to Israel, on the condition that Jews give up their Iraqi citizenship when they leave the country. In addition, those who previously…
December 13, 1949 Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion appoints Reuven Shiloah, a former Jewish Agency official and a Foreign Ministry special operations adviser, to establish and lead the Institute for Collating and Coordinating Intelligence Operations, the…
December 5, 1949 Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declares in a Knesset speech that “Jewish Jerusalem is an organic, inseparable part of the state of Israel” and that Israel rejects any attempt by the United Nations…
Israel’s War of Independence ends with the signing of individual armistice agreements between the newly established Jewish state and Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon in 1949.
Israeli politician, diplomat, historian, and writer Abba Eban is born in Cape Town, South Africa.
Golda Meir, Israel’s first female prime minister, is born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of czarist Russia.
