During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team are killed after being taken hostage by Black September, a Palestinian terrorist organization affiliated with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and the left-wing terrorist group The Red Army.
May 30, 1972 Three Japanese Red Army terrorists working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-External Operations attack Israel’s international airport at Lod, now Ben Gurion Airport, with machine guns and hand grenades….
May 22, 1970 Palestinian terrorists ambush an Egged school bus on the road from Moshav Avivim, near the Lebanese border, to Dovev and kill eight children and four adults. The ambush takes place at a…
December 26, 1968 El Al Flight 253 from Tel Aviv to New York is about to take off after a layover in Athens when two men posing as passengers approach the Boeing 707. One draws…
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is established during a Palestinian National Council meeting of nearly 400 delegates convened by King Hussein of Jordan.
Killed in an ambush along the Gaza border, Ro’i Rothberg is eulogized by Moshe Dayan. Rothberg becomes a symbol for the inability to achieve peace in Israel’s early years.
Two Israeli paratrooper platoons made up of approximately fifty IDF soldiers storm an Egyptian army camp in Gaza. The raid is a reprisal for continued fedayeen (Palestinian militants) attacks against Israeli civilians.
The Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv is bombed, injuring one diplomat and the wives of two others, in an attack blamed on the Kingdom of Israel terrorist group. The Israeli government apologies, but the Soviets break off diplomatic relations.
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…
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…
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…
Members of the Irgun, a Jewish military organization that is absorbed into the IDF during the 1948 War, bomb the British administrative headquarters in Palestine, based in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Twenty-eight British, forty-one Arabs, and seventeen Jews are killed.
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…
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, one of the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is born in Benghazi, Libya.
Violence between Jews and Arabs quickly escalated as Arab workers went on a six-month strike as violence erupted in different parts of British-ruled Palestine.
Ariel Sharon, Israel’s 11th Prime Minister, is born in K’far Malal (near Hod Hasharon). Born Ariel Scheinerman to political, socialist parents who had come to Eretz Yisrael during the Second Aliyah, Sharon joined the Haganah in 1945, serving in the War of Independence.
March 17, 1921 Meir Amit, a career soldier who builds the Mossad into an internationally renowned intelligence agency, is born Meir Slutzky on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Tiberias. He attends agricultural…
September 11, 1881 Yosef Haim Brenner, the leading Israeli literary figure of the early 20th century, is born in Novi Mlini, Ukraine. He grows up receiving a Jewish education and joins the Bund, a Jewish…
