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…
January 16, 1948 A convoy of 35 Haganah men carrying supplies on foot to the blockaded settlements of Gush Etzion is spotted by Arab civilians around daybreak after departing from Hartuv at 11 the night…
A two-day debate on the future of Britain’s presence in Palestine begins in the British House of Commons. Eventually it is decided to terminate the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
The United Nations General Assembly passes Resolution 181 by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. The Resolution recommended the creation of separate Arab and Jewish states in Palestine, linked by an economic union.
The Aliyah Bet ship Kadima arrives in Haifa under British escort. All of its passengers are arrested and moved to detention camps in Cyprus.
David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency since 1935, formally accepts the partition plan proposed by the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP).
September 29, 1947 The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine formally rejects the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine’s partition plan, which advocates for the division of the land into a separate Jewish and Arab states and…
The United Nations had set up UNSCOP in April 1947. Its purpose, like previous commissions that visited Palestine, is to investigate underlying causes for communal unrest and to make political recommendations about curtailing violence.
Known as one of the most cherished violinists of his generation, and one of the greatest Jewish musicians of all time, Bronislaw Huberman passed away at his home in Switzerland at the age of 64.
Emma Gottheil, one of the first and most important women in Zionist leaders, passes away at her New York home at the age of 85.
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko proposes a unitary state for Palestine, but vows to support partition if it is deemed the only workable solution.
April 21, 1947 Two Jewish underground fighters, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein, blow themselves up in a British prison in Jerusalem at night to avoid being hanged the next morning. Barazani, a Kurdish Jew born…
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…
A Land Transfer Committee report reveals that Arabs in Palestine willingly continued to sell land to Zionists in the early 1940s despite the British legal prohibition on doing so.
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…
The Harrison Report, an inquiry into the conditions of displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, reveals that many of the rumors of poor treatment of Jews are indeed true and that “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”
April 15, 1945 The British 11th Armored Division liberates the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, discovering 60,000 starving prisoners, most of them seriously ill, and 13,000 unburied corpses. They are the remnants of…
Rattled by numerous attempts on his life, and fearing for the safety of his family, MacMichael steps down in August 1944.
Berl Katznelson, a leader in the Labor Zionist movement, dies suddenly at the age of 57 in Jerusalem. His advocacy for the creation of a labor-based society in Israel would eventually form the basis of the Mapai party, which was created in 1930 and would dominate Israeli politics until the late 1970′s.
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.
After World War I, Iraq was under the British Mandate, in accordance with the plan put forth by the League of Nations. In April 1941, a pro-Nazi government seized power and it took the British three months to regain control of the government.
The agricultural outpost of Mitzpe Gevulot was established.
A joint communiqué is issued, and it is clear that no widespread action to rescue Jews will be forthcoming. This bolsters the Zionist argument for a Jewish homeland.
The Biltmore Conference will set the framework for Zionist policy in the years during and after World War II.
