• 1947: UN takes control over Palestine.
  — November 29: A UN plan for dividing Palestine into two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem as international zone, is presented. This plan was immediately met by violent protest from the Arabs. 590,000 Jews and 1,320,000 Arabs live in Palestine (31%).


• 1948 May 14: The new Jewish state, State of Israel, is proclaimed by the Jewish Provisional State Council. Chaim Weizmann becomes president, and the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion the new prime minister. The secret Jewish army, Haganah, is declared as the new army of Israel.
  — May 15: Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq join the Arab guerillas in fight against the Jews.


• 1948-51: Around 700,000 Jews immigrate to Israel.


• 1949 February 24: Peace in the Middle East. Egypt declares that the agreement on cease fire, is not an acceptance of the state of Israel. The Israeli territory has increased from the 15,500 km² that the UN-resolution of 1947 gave them, to 20,700 km². Gaza Strip becomes Egyptian, and the West Bank Jordanian. There had been 800,000 Arabs living in the area that now became Israel, and only 170,000 had been able to stay. The remaining hundreds of thousands, moved into refugee camps in neighboring countries.



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• 1950: Due to the heavy immigration, the Israeli economy faces serious difficulties. Aid is provided by Jewish organizations around the world, and the US government.


• 1956: Israel attacks Egypt, and is joined by British and French troops. Israel is much motivated by the Egyptian blockade of ships calling at the Israeli port of Eilat. The British and the French are taking revenge after the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The three countries had swift victories, but the UN, supported by both USA and the Soviet Union, intervened after few days. Towards the end of the year the three countries had left Sinai, but Israel still held forces in Gaza.


• 1957: Israel leaves Gaza, after USA had promised help to keep the Gulf of Aqaba open for ships calling at Israel.


• 1963: Ben Gurion resigns as prime minister and is succeeded by Levi Eshkol.


• 1967 June 5: Political and security tensions, with increase of Arab troops stationed along the Israeli borders, provokes Israel to a surprise attack on Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
  — June 10: Seizure of battles on the Syrian front, the last battleground of the war that came to be called the Six-Day War. Israel has occupied a large strip of the Syrian Golan Heights, along all of the former border line, East Jerusalem and the West Bank which had been annexed by Jordan almost 20 years earlier, the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, and the Egyptian territory of Sinai. About 1,5 million Arabs are now under Israeli administration.


• 1969: Golda Meir becomes new prime minister of Israel.


• 1972: 11 Israeli athletes are killed by Palestinian guerrilla in the Summer Olympics of Munich, Germany.


• 1973 October 6: Yom Kippur War, where Egypt and Syria attacks Israel in order to recapture territory occupied in


• 1967. Arab power had clearly increased since the last war, but after 3 weeks of fighting Israeli restores control.
  — Demands from the Israeli military costs so much that the budgets are exceeded to an extent that national economy suffers for years to come.


• 1974: With the ghost of the Yom Kippur War, and facing the defeat in the parliamentary elections, Golda Meir is not capable of establishing a new government, and resigns.
  — Yitzhak Rabin becomes new prime minister.


• 1977: When not being able to refute accusations on financial irregularities in the private economy, Rabin experiences a defeat in the parliamentary elections.
  — Menachim Begin becomes new prime minister. A period of even more deterioration of the economy starts, despite new politics from Begin's conservative government.
  — November 19: Visit to Jerusalem by the president of Egypt, Anwar as-Sadat, and the start of the peace process between Israel and Egypt.


• 1979 March 26: Camp David Agreement signed between Egypt and Israel. Israeli withdrawal from Sinai starts, and goes on for the next 3 years. The second part of the agreement, which dealt with autonomy for the Palestinians on Gaza Strip and the West Bank, is never observed from Israeli side.


• 1980: Knesset declares the united and complete Jerusalem as capital of Israel.


• 1981 June 7: Israel fighters bomb a nuclear reactor in Baghdad, Iraq, claiming that this was being used to produce nuclear weapons to be used against Israel.
  — December 14: Golan Heights are annexed by Israel.


• 1982 April 25: Israel hands Sinai back to Egypt. The process of withdrawal has been done in three stages, and have met only sporadic protests from Israeli settlers.
  — June 6: Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in an attempt to root out PLO presence in and around Beirut. Even if this campaign turns out to be a military success, it is a hard post to the strained Israeli budget.


• 1984 July 23: Inconclusive results in parliamentary elections, Labour wins 44 seats, Likud 41 (of 120).
  — September 13: Large coalition between the Likud bloc and the Labour party, the first of its kind in Israeli history. Shimon Peres of the Labour party, becomes prime minister.


• 1986 October 13: Yitzhak Shamir takes over the position as prime minister, in accordance with the agreement between the Labour party and the Likud bloc of 1984.


• 1987 December 10: The Palestinian Intifada starts, where Israel first starts with brutal suppression, only to realize that this adds momentum to the Palestinian struggle. The Intifada would come to awaken liberal groups in Israel, and would be a prelude to the rudimentary peace initiatives that came in the 1990s.


• 1989 March: Collapse of the coalition government between Likud and the Labour party. Shamir acts as leader of a temporary government for the following 15 months.
  — Heavy immigration of Soviet Jews starts.


• 1991: Peace talks between Israel, the Arab countries, and the Palestinians start. These were necessitated by the latent anger demonstrated in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait the preceding year. Nothing materializes directly from these talks.


• 1993 August: After secret negotiations outside Oslo in Norway, a peace treaty is outlined, involving the principle of "peace for land", the establishment of a Palestinian state in 1999 after 5 years of gradually increasing autonomy for the Palestinians on most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
  — The peace treaty is signed in Washington, USA, after that the American president, Bill Clinton, has almost succeeded to make the American public believe that he has had anything to do with it.


• 1994 July: Peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.
  — This year saw some of the most dramatic actions against civilians on both side. An Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians performing prayers in a mosque in Hebron. A suicide bomber from Hamas blew up a bus in Tel Aviv, leaving 22 dead and 47 injured.


• 1995 April 27: Palestinian land is annexed to build houses which Palestinians had no right to own or lease.
  — September 24: Oslo 2 Agreement is signed in Washington, USA
  — November 4: Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by the Jewish right-wing extremist Yigal Amir.
  — November 22: Shimon Peres is sworn in as new prime minister.


• 1996 February 25: Palestinian guerrilla attacks inside Israel, one suicide bomber in Ashqelon, killing 2, another in Jerusalem, killing 24. Borders between Israel and Palestine are closed in an Israeli retaliation.
  — April 11: Israel launches an attack against a refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon, leaving about 100 dead, of these many children. The attack was a clear military failure, as there was no military action in the area. Daring speculations connected the bombing to the ongoing electorate in Israel, and for a short period the killings increased the popularity of Shimon Peres.
  — May 29: Benjamin Netanyahu wins the first direct prime minister elections of Israel, with a margin of 29,457 votes over his only contender, the ruling prime minister Shimon Peres.
  — May 29: In the elections for Knesset the Labour party gets 34 (-10) seats, Likud bloc 32 (-8), Shas 10 (+4), Meretz 9 (-3), Yisrael Ba'aliya 7 (+7), United Arab List 4 (+2), United Torah Judaism party 4 (0). There are 120 seats in the Knesset.
  — August 2: Netanyahu lifts a ban imposed in 1992 on new Jewish settlements in occupied Palestine. The new politics intended to increase the Jewish presence with 50,000, a relative increase of 35%.


• 1997 March: Netanyahu's government initiates building of new apartments that are reserved for Jews alone, in the Palestinian owned territory called Har Homa in Hebrew, and Jabal Abu Gnayn in Arabic. With this settlement East Jerusalem will be surrounded by all-Jewish housing estates.
  — March 31: Arab countries reimposes boycott of Israel, as a retaliation of what they consider Israeli violations of the Oslo 2 Agreement.


• 1998 November 11: Israeli cabinet adopted the Wye River Agreement, involving gradual Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands, resulting in 40% of the West Bank under Palestinian control.
  — December 21: Prime minister Netanyahu suspends the Wye River Agreement, due to internal conflicts in his cabinet. He called for new elections to be held.


• 1999 May 17: General elections are held, resulting a fractured parliament and Ehud Barak as new prime minister.
  — December 15: Syrian foreign minister Faruq ash-Shara meets Barak in Washington D.C., USA for peace negotations.


• 2000 January 18: Syrian president Hafez al-Assad suspends the Syrian-Israeli talks, calling for Israeli willingness to withdraw to the 1967 borders between the two countries.
  — July 11-24: Negotiations between Barak and the Palestinian president Yassir Arafat in USA (Camp David) believed to have been concluded by a Israeli/US suggestion to give the Palestinians control over most of the occupied territory and shared control over Muslim parts of Jerusalem. According to some reports Arafat refused this, calling for full control over East Jerusalem, according to other reports he was positive to the suggestion but demanded clear guarantees for its implementation.
  — September 28: Ariel Sharon visits the Temple Mount, demonstrating Jewish sovereignty here. His visit causes strong reactions in the Muslim world, and would soon ignite what is called the Second Intifada.


• 2001 February 6: Barak loses to Ariel Sharon in the election.


• 2004 January 12: Israel starts building a wall between Jerusalem and the Palestinian dominated areas of West Bank, all on Palestinian territory.
  — October 26: Sharon's plan for complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is ratified by Knesset.


• 2006 June 25: An Israeli soldier is kidnapped by militant Palestinians. Israel starts a campaign against Gaza Strip, lasting 2 weeks, in which many central infrastructure is destroyed.

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma'pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE ALMIGHTY, WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).

David Ben-Gurion
Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner
Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib
Hacohen Fishman
David Zvi Pinkas
Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok