Twenty years after the start of World War II, Israelis still felt strongly about any association with Germans and Germany. In early January, a showing of a German film about Israel, entitled Paradise and Pressure Cooker, had to be cancelled for fear of protests – regardless of its very positive approach to the country.

At the beginning of the year, the Knesset debated the government’s desire to move forward with negotiations with West Germany about reparations for Nazi war crimes conducted against the Jews. This sensitive issue divided the Knesset. While the General Zionists, Herut, Mapam and the Communists were vehemently opposed, many parties including some in the ruling Mapai had similar misgivings. A Gallup poll, published in Ma’ariv, indicated that 80 per cent were opposed to any negotiations with Adenauer’s Germany.

Netanyahu was prime minister for the entire decade, becoming the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history despite being accused of bribery, breach of trust and moral turpitude.He was able to outmanoeuvre and dispose of many potential rivals and adversaries.

There were repeated military clashes with Hamas and its allies in Gaza in which the air force was utilised, amidst targeted killings of Islamist leaders and civilian casualties.

Israel had developed the Iron Dome system which neutralised any incoming missiles from Gaza. However Iranian forces progressively embedded itself in Syria, aided by its ally, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

Netanyahu who was close to the US Republicans and President Obama repeatedly clashed over questions such as peace and negotiations with the Palestinians. John Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy came to nothing.

The election of Donald Trump allowed Netanyahu to promote the West Bank settlements. Trump authorised the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem. The Trump Plan which would have allowed Israel to annex part of the West Bank was side-lined by the Abraham Accords. Diplomatic relations were established between Israel and the UAE and other states in the Arab world and beyond. The decade ended with Netanyahu’s court cases and the advent of the coronavirus. Israel became a world leader in vaccine manufacture and roll-out.

The central event of the year was the Six Day War in June, during which the territory controlled by Israel expanded almost fourfold. It proved to be a watershed in the history of Israel and broadly indicated a breaking with the political philosophy and ideology that had characterised the first two decades of the state’s existence.

The Lebanon war of 1982 divided the country and the Jewish Diaspora. The conduct of both the political and military leadership led to the establishment of the Kahan Commission of Inquiry after the mass killings of Palestinians by Israel’s Phalangist allies in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in September.

Zionism grew out of nineteenth century European nationalism in the aftermath of the French revolution. It was led by Zionist ideologues who regarded the Jews as a nation in exile who should be returned to their geographical origins in the Middle East.

Zionism was unusual since it did not fit into any conventional theory about national liberation movements. It also took many forms.

Some Zionists wrote poems about the attempt to reclaim the land.

Theodor Herzl, ’the father of modern Zionism’ was a general Zionist who came from a middle-class Viennese background. Other such as Syrkin, Borokhov and Katznelson were socialists who believed in the dignity of labour in building up the country and the collectivist nature of the kibbutz. Others such as Vladimir Jabotinsky espoused nationalism and his disciples such as Menahem Begin embarked on an armed struggle, Military Zionism. Others looked to the IRA to conduct their fight against the British presence in Palestine during the 1940s.

The PLO continued its diplomatic assault at the United Nations and within international bodies, while it left attacks in urban centres in Israel and hijackings to other Palestinian groups. Two attempts to attack El Al passenger flights at Orly airport in Paris took place within days of each other in mid-January. In the second, hostages were taken, and in exchange for their release, the assailants were allowed to fly out.

The aftermath of the Six Day War was marked by the commencement of a war of attrition. The Beit She’an (Beisan) Valley, close to the Jordanian border, was often targeted by Jordanian gunners. On 1 January, a mortar attack from across the River Jordan was aimed at Kfar Ruppin in the Beisan Valley, followed by a two-hour exchange of fire between the Jordanians and Israeli forces on the West Bank, about ten miles north of Damiyah Bridge. The New Year weekend also saw grenades thrown near a cinema in Gaza, a mine exploding under an Israeli half-track in Khan Yunis, a car driver wounded by sniper fire on the Golan Heights and a firing on workers in the fields of Ein Yanav in the northern Arava near the Dead Sea. A Chinese-manufactured mine killed one soldier and injured four border policemen in their jeep near Kibbutz Gesher in the Beisan Valley.

In January, more than three thousand international observers led by former US president Jimmy Carter were present during the Palestinian elections for both the president and the eighty-eight-member legislative council. Arafat removed candidates from the Fatah list that he did not care for and several therefore ran as independents. Arafat received almost 90 per cent of the vote and Fatah secured fifty-five mandates. Hamas did not put up any candidates and the turn-out was therefore low in Hebron.

The proclamation of a state of Palestine at the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in Algiers in November was the culmination of a series of historic events. The Intifada that had erupted on the West Bank and Gaza during the previous December intensified with little abatement. The IDF announced in June that it had claimed the lives of 156 Arabs, while 8,000 had been arrested, 5,300 detained and another 2,500 placed in administrative detention.

The tenth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel was commemorated, according to the Hebrew calendar, at the end of April.

Menahem Begin announced his intention to resign in August and this came as a great surprise to the Israeli cabinet as well as to those close to him. Since the death of his wife at the end of 1982, he had been unable to function properly as prime minister and to provide leadership. The Kahan Commission Report into the killings in the Sabra and Shatilla camps had further called into question his leadership during Operation Peace for Galilee and his judgement in deferring to the approach of the defence minister, Ariel Sharon. The report and the cabinet’s decision, by a vote of 16–1, to accept the commission’s recommendations finally led to Sharon’s resignation despite Begin’s support for him. Sharon refused to accept ‘indirect responsibility’ for the killings in the camps at Sabra and Shatilla and remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.

At the beginning of the year, the minister of religion, Yehuda Leib Maimon, resigned from the government only to retract his resignation a few days later. Maimon was in dispute over the provision of religious education to mainly Yemenite children who had been brought to Israel in Operation Flying Carpet. The critical report of a commission headed by Judge Gad Frumkin was rejected by Ben-Gurion.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November was the culmination of a year of incitement and an undermining of the peace process by both the protests of the far Right and the suicide bombers of the Palestinian Islamists. Shimon Peres became prime minister and formed a new government which included Rabbi Yehuda Amital of the dovish religious party Meimad as minister without portfolio.

Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinian Nakba moved towards its close at the beginning of the year. Even so, there was fighting in Kfar Saba and Israeli cities were still being bombed by Egyptian aircraft. At the end of December 1948, the IDF, under the command of Yigal Allon, conducted Operation Horev to drive out Egyptian forces from the Negev and ‘the Faluja Pocket’. Egyptian airfields were attacked and undamaged Spitfires removed. The head of the IDF, Yigael Yadin, warned the Egyptians not to use gas as a weapon in attacks on Jewish settlements.

Despite an unpublicised meeting between Arafat and Netanyahu at the Erez crossing into Gaza, an accord on Hebron initially remained elusive, in part because Netanyahu feared division within his cabinet and dissension amongst his supporters on the Right. There had already been a lone attack by a yeshiva student on the marketplace in Hebron in which several Palestinians had been shot and injured.

Several raids across the Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese borders by members of Fatah marked an escalation in its activities. Mines were planted on Israeli territory near the Syrian border and acts of sabotage carried out on Israeli territory. Syria was blamed by the Israeli government for sponsoring and assisting in Fatah raids.