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…
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.
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,…
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…
June 27, 1945 Ami Ayalon, who leads the Shin Bet and the Israeli navy, is born in Tiberias. He serves in the navy from 1963 to 1996. He volunteers for the Shayetet 13 commando unit,…
Eliyahu Golomb, prominent leader of the Jewish defense effort in Palestine, passed away at the age of 52.
November 20, 1944 Haviva Reik and two other paratroopers from British Mandatory Palestine are among about 40 Jewish fighters executed by the Nazis after the suppression of an uprising in Slovakia. Reik, who was born…
Hannah Senesh (Szenes), the poet and Haganah fighter who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue Jews, is executed by Hungarian firing squad in a Budapest prison courtyard.
In a letter written to Leon Kubowitzki, head of the Rescue Department of the World Jewish Congress, US Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy states that the War Department would not order the bombing of Nazi Death Camps because they did not see it as a priority for US military resources.
Some 156,000 Allied troops land at Normandy and begin their fight to liberate France and ultimately all of Europe from the Nazis. D-Day is the largest seaborne invasion in history.
Ron Ben-Yishai, a famous war correspondent and recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize, is born in Jerusalem.
In his final communication, ZOB commander Mordechai Anielewicz outlines the success of the revolt even in the face of almost certain defeat.
The Palmach, an elite strike force of the Haganah, goes on to play a significant role in the 1948-1949 War.
November 25, 1940 A Haganah bomb does more damage than intended to the immigrant transport ship SS Patria, which sinks within 16 minutes in Haifa’s harbor, killing 267 people, including members of the British crew,…
Weightlifter Yossef Romano, one of the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is born in Benghazi, Libya.
March 15, 1939 Kol Tzion HaLokhemet (“Voice of the 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…
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.
The Mosul-Haifa pipeline, which spans 590 miles, connects the Mosul oil fields and the Mediterranean Sea. It begins in Kirkuk, Iraq and ends in Haifa.
March 9, 1932 Pinhas Rutenberg and the Palestine Electric Co. open a hydroelectric power plant at Naharayim. It supplies much of the electricity in Palestine until its destruction by Iraqi troops during the 1948 War…
The idea of an emergency medical society such as Magen David Adom is revived in response to the 1929 Arab riots against Jewish settlements in Palestine.
January 11, 1929 Rafael Eitan, the 11th chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, is born in Tel Adashim to a mother whose family immigrated to Palestine during the First Aliyah and a father…
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.
November 23, 1926 Rafi Eitan, whose intelligence career ranges from the high of capturing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina to the low of handling U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard as a spy, is born on a…
