In early January, the ten-member inner cabinet met to discuss the stalemate in the talks in Nakura between the Israelis and the Lebanese on Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, following the invasion of 1982. Israel argued that UNIFIL should take over responsibility for security between the Zahrani and Awali rivers, while the South Lebanon Army (SLA) would patrol the area between the Litani River and the Israeli border. Lebanon did not recognise the Israeli-backed Christian militia, the SLA, and insisted on a more limited role for UNIFIL.

The political fallout from the second Lebanon war continued when a judgement of Olmert’s conduct was published in the Winograd Commission Report at the end of January. The Commission found that while he had acted in good faith, the military operation failed in achieving its goal to inflict a decisive defeat on Hezbollah. Within a few weeks, the head of Hezbollah’s military activities, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus. He was wanted by the Argentinian authorities for the attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992. In June, Samir Kuntar was released in exchange for the bodies of Regev and Goldwasser whose abduction and killing had sparked off the war. In 1979, Kuntar had left Tyre, sailed down the coast to Nahariya and been involved in the killing of members of the Haran family in their apartment.

David Levy resigned as foreign minister at the beginning of the year and pulled his Gesher faction out of the coalition. He accused the government of ‘stonewalling’ on foreign policy and stalling on social policy. He was the third minister to resign from Netanyahu’s administration. This left Netanyahu with a majority of two seats in the Knesset, 61 to 59.

In mid-January, a conference of thirteen Arab states in Cairo discussed measures to counter Israel’s water development project of pumping water from the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee to the Negev in the south of Israel. Mekorot, the company in charge, began to test pump and pipe pressures along the 70-mile carrier to the central distribution station near Petah Tiqvah. More than 30 billion gallons per annum would be taken from the Sea of Galilee initially and then increased to 75 billion within a few years.

The new government, elected in 2015, took a turn to the Right when Yisrael Beiteinu joined the government rather than Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union. Two ministers resigned, the defence minister Moshe Yaalon (Likud) and environment minister Avi Gabai (Kulanu). Avigdor Lieberman was appointed in Yaalon’s place.

The Yom Kippur war in 1973 ended more as a draw than an Israeli victory. Unlike the war in 1967, Israel suffered heavy losses and although a ceasefire was organised as the Israelis marched on Cairo, it was close-run thing in the early stages.

The fallout from the war also marked a changeover in generations when Yitzhak Rabin succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister in 1974.

The Yom Kippur war did provide the space for the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, to make peace with Israel. Sadat visited Jerusalem in 1977 and spoke in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. In 1979, Egypt and Israel signed the peace accord, the Camp David agreement. It did not however solve the problem of the Palestinians.

The Labour party continued to decline amidst further splits in 1977. At the 1977 election, Menahem Begin’s Likud emerged as the leading party. Israel had switched for the first time from the Left to the Right.

The campaign to elect a prime minister – as opposed to voting for political parties – pitched a weakened Barak against an internationally controversial Ariel Sharon. Barak’s election campaign referred to Sharon’s part in the Lebanon war of 1982 and to the killing of Palestinians in the camps at Sabra and Shatilla, but as his walk on the Temple Mount in September the year before had demonstrated, history had moved on.

The Oslo Accord of September 1993 came close to collapse because of the attacks on Israelis by Hamas during 1994. The killing of twenty-nine worshippers in the al-Ibrahimi mosque within the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron caused a profound reaction within the Arab and Muslim worlds. Its perpetrator, Baruch (Benjamin) Goldstein, originally from Brooklyn’s Bensenhurst neighbourhood, was associated with Meir Kahane’s Kach. His action was widely condemned by Israeli Jews including both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Chief Rabbis. There were demonstrations in Arab population centres in Israel such as Jaffa and Nazareth. There were also disturbances in East Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount. Syria, Lebanon and Jordan suspended the bilateral negotiations in Washington.

The spiralling inflation that had plagued the economy led to the resignation of the finance minister, Yigal Hurwitz, who wished to delay a rise in teachers’ salaries until April 1982. Hurwitz, the leader of the eight-member La’am faction of the Likud, had followed a free market policy of cuts in government subsidies while promulgating a period of austerity. Within days of his resignation, El Al employees staged a national strike amidst widespread labour disputes. Moreover, three La’am members simultaneously left the government coalition and thereby the prospect of early elections loomed. While Begin’s coalition appeared to be crumbling, the NRP opposed early elections because one of its representatives, the religious affairs minister Aharon Abuhatzeira, had been charged with taking bribes, while another, Yosef Burg, had been accused of blocking an investigation into financial irregularities in the Ministry of the Interior.

The style of the Trump White House in promoting its policies encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu to embark on promoting more adversarial politics. At the end of the year, Israel formally left UNESCO.

Operation Cast Lead began at the very end of 2008, lasted twenty-two days and took a heavy toll in Palestinian civilian casualties. The conflict had broken out after a failure by Hamas to renew the six-month ceasefire – in part due to internal differences between its political and military wings. At the beginning of January, the minister of defence, Ehud Barak, ordered a ground invasion and fighting took place in the built-up areas of Gaza.

Following the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein publicly promised that if Baghdad was attacked, then Tel Aviv would be also. Despite a French diplomatic initiative to avert war, many airlines stopped flying to Tel Aviv or operated a reduced service. There was an exodus of foreign nationals from Israel and foreign embassies moved their headquarters out of Tel Aviv. El Al continued to fly normally and Soviet Jews arrived on Malev flights, whose charter aircraft had been hired by the Jewish Agency.

Ben-Gurion began the year by going on holiday and leaving an unsent letter of resignation. He had reacted strongly to the exoneration of Pinhas Lavon by the cabinet, based on the unanimous findings of a ministerial committee that the former defence minister’s instructions in 1954 had been forged. Ben-Gurion demanded a reversal of the ministerial committee’s decision, the resignation of Lavon as secretary-general of the Histadrut and a further judicial inquiry. Abba Eban and Moshe Dayan supported Ben-Gurion, while Golda Meir, Pinhas Sapir and Levi Eshkol were loath to reverse a cabinet vote. A twelve-hour meeting of the Mapai secretariat ended in total deadlock at 4 a.m.

The question of $10 billion in loan guarantees over a five-year period proved to be a central bone of contention between the Bush White House and the Shamir coalition of the Right and far Right in an election year for both regimes. There was initially an unspoken linkage between the loan guarantees and the building of new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza which the Bush administration believed to be an obstacle to peace in the area. This linkage became more public when the US secretary of state, James Baker, called for a settlement freeze in return for the release of the loan guarantees which were needed to secure loans from commercial banks. The White House wanted to review the loan guarantees scheme annually.

As Israel’s second prime minister, Moshe Sharett had difficulty in forming a coalition, eventually taking fifty-one days. The Progressives refused to join any government until the threshold to gain a Knesset seat had been raised to 4.2 per cent. Such a threshold would have eliminated the smaller parties. Ben-Gurion, now living a spartan life in Sde Boqer in the Negev desert as an example to other Israelis, suggested a provocative 10 per cent threshold.

The Netanyahu coalition of the centre Right and far Right utilised its majority in the Knesset to pass measures which limited the freedom of action and of speech of both its political opponents and its enemies.

Aharon Cohen and Israel Beer were sentenced to terms of imprisonment for passing information to Soviet diplomats in Israel. Both had been members of Mapam, the Marxist–Zionist pro-Soviet political party. Cohen, who was the party’s Arab affairs expert, often met Soviet diplomats outside the gates of his kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amikim. He was accused of ‘unauthorised contacts with foreign agents’ rather than spying and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

The remarkable rescue of mainly Israeli passengers at Entebbe airport in July was applauded both in Israel and internationally. The Air France Airbus had been hijacked by a breakaway faction of the PFLP and two members of the German Revolutionary Cells. Identifiable Jews and Israelis were separated from the other passengers. Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu who led the operation was killed as were the hijackers and forty-five Ugandan soldiers.

The raid on Beirut airport in response to the attack on an El Al airliner at Athens was met by widespread international condemnation. In February, an El Al Boeing 720B airliner was machine-gunned by PFLP members as it taxied on the runway at Kloten International Airport, Zurich. At the end of August, the PFLP hijacked a TWA airliner carrying several Israeli passengers and diverted it to Damascus. In the following months, hand grenades were thrown into El Al’s Brussels and Athens offices.