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The 1948Arab–Israeli War was the second and final stage of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. It formally began following the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight on 14 May 1948; the Israeli Declaration of Independence had been issued earlier that day, and a military coalition of Arab states entered the territory of British Palestine in the morning of 15 May.
Haganah was the main Zionist paramilitary organization of the Jewish population ("Yishuv") in Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and its disestablishment in 1948, when it became the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
David Ben-Gurion was the primary national founder of the State of Israel and the first Prime Minister of Israel. Adopting the name of Ben-Gurion in 1909, he rose to become the preeminent leader of the Jewish community in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine from 1935 until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, which he led until 1963 with a short break in 1954–55.
Operation Hiram was a military operation conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was led by General Moshe Carmel, and aimed at capturing the Upper Galilee region from the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) forces led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji and a Syrian battalion. The operation, which lasted 60 hours, was marked by heavy fighting between Arabs and Jews, and ended just before the ceasefire with the neighboring Arab countries went into effect.
The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, later known as The Great Revolt or The Great Palestinian Revolt, was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home". The uprising coincided with a peak in the influx of immigrant Jews, some 60,000, that year – the Jewish population having grown under British auspices from 57,000 to 320,000 in 1935 – and with the growing plight of the rural fellahin rendered landless, who as they moved to metropolitan centers to escape their abject poverty found themselves socially marginalized. Since 1920 Jews and Palestinians had been involved in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks, and the immediate spark for the uprising was the murder of two Jews by a Qassamite band, and the retaliatory killing by Jewish gunmen of two Arab laborers, incidents which triggered a flare-up of violence across Palestine. A month into the disturbances Hajj Amin al-Husseini declared 16 May 1936 as 'Palestine Day' and called for a General Strike. The revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as "immoral and terroristic", often compared to fascism and Nazism. Ben Gurion, however, described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism.
Plan Dalet was a plan worked out by the Haganah in Mandatory Palestine in March 1948. Its name was from the letter Dalet (ד), the fourth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
The Patria disaster was the sinking on 25 November 1940 by the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah of a French-built ocean liner, the 11,885-ton SS Patria, in the port of Haifa, killing 267 people and injuring 172.
Haviva Reik was one of 32 or 33 parachutists sent by the Jewish Agency and Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) on military missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. Reik went to Slovakia in fall 1944 and worked with local Jewish people to resist the German occupation there. She established a camp for Russian prisoners of war who had escaped, and helped organize a Jewish resistance unit. The Germans organized forces to put down the Jewish resistance, and Reik and the other parachutists escaped with about 40 local Jews into the mountains. In November 1944, however, Reik and the other parachutists were captured, killed, and buried in a mass grave.
Shai, established in 1940, was the intelligence and counter-espionage arm of the Haganah and the forebear of the Military Intelligence Directorate in Mandate Palestine.
The Second Aliyah was an aliyah that took place between 1904 and 1914, during which approximately 35,000 Jews immigrated into Ottoman-ruled Palestine, mostly from the Russian Empire, some from Yemen.
The 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine was the first phase of the 1947–1949 Palestine war. It broke out after the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption of the Partition Plan for Palestine.
During the 1948 Palestine War in which the State of Israel was established, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs or 85% of the total population of the territory Israel captured fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. The causes for this mass displacement is a matter of great controversy among historians, journalists, and commentators.
The Saison was the name given to the Haganah's attempt, as ordered by the official bodies of the pre-state Yishuv, to suppress the Irgun's insurgency against the government of the British Mandate in Palestine, from November 1944 to February 1945.
The intercommunal conflict in Mandatory Palestine was the civil, political and armed struggle between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Yishuv during the British rule in Mandatory Palestine, beginning from the violent spillover of the Franco-Syrian War in 1920 and until the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
The Battles of Latrun were a series of military engagements between the Israel Defense Forces and the Jordanian Arab Legion on the outskirts of Latrun between 25 May and 18 July 1948, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Latrun takes its name from the monastery close to the junction of two major highways: Jerusalem to Jaffa/Tel Aviv and Gaza to Ramallah. During the British Mandate it became a Palestine Police base with a Tegart fort. The United Nations Resolution 181 placed this area within the proposed Arab state. In May 1948, it was under the control of the Arab Legion. It commanded the only road linking the Yishuv-controlled area of Jerusalem to Israel, giving Latrun strategic importance in the battle for Jerusalem.
Tuvia Friling is a professor at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism and teaches at the Israel Studies Program both at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust is a book by Israeli historian Tuvia Friling dealing with the attitude toward the Holocaust of the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine that existed before the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. The book examines the leadership's attempts to rescue European Jews who were under threat, and the controversy that surrounds those efforts. The Hebrew edition of the book was published in 1998 and the English version in 2005.
Gad Machnes was an Israeli politician and businessman. He was an orientalist in the Arab Affairs Department at the Jewish Agency as part of the Palestine Jewish Yishuv during the British Mandate of Palestine.
Yolande Harmer was an Israeli intelligence officer who operated in Egypt in 1948. She was recruited due to her connections in elite and royal circles and she has been described as "Israel's Mata Hari". A town square in Jerusalem, 'Yolande Harmer Square', is named after her.
Daniel Halperin Kurzman, was an American journalist and writer of military history books. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley, served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, and completed his studies at Berkeley with a Bachelor's degree in Political Science. At the end of his life, Dan Kurzman lived in North Bergen with his wife, Florence. He died December 12, 2010, at the age of 88, in Manhattan.