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.

Sharon’s determination to follow through and unilaterally leave Gaza as well as dismantling the settlements there led to a deepening conflict within the Likud. While the move was popular within the country, Sharon found himself in a minority in the Likud and at odds with Netanyahu, his minister of finance.

Begin’s autonomy plan for the West Bank called for the formation of an administrative council which would be responsible for education, transportation, housing, industry, commerce, tourism, agriculture, health, labour and the police. This proposal began to create schisms within the Likud coalition of Herut, La’am and Liberals. La’am split into its components of the State List and Greater Israel adherents. Even the DMC did not last a year with Shinui’s secession.

In May, the Right came to power in the HaMahapakh – ‘the Earthquake’ – that characterised the ninth Israeli election. For the first time since Herzl founded the modern Zionist movement in 1897, a coalition of the Right – astutely assembled by Menahem Begin – outstripped support for the Left and its liberal partners. The Labour party had been beset by scandal, corruption, defections and infighting between its dual leadership of Prime Minister Rabin and Defence Minister Peres. The Labour Alignment lost a third of its voters in the election – most of whom switched to Yigael Yadin’s Democratic Movement for Change (Dash) which garnered fifteen seats. The NRP, influenced by its Young Guard and Gush Emunim, moved to the Right and also gained seats. Ariel Sharon’s Shlomzion and the party of Shmuel Flatto-Sharon, who was standing to escape extradition to France, both attained a couple of mandates. While Sheli entered the Knesset, both the Civil Rights Movement and the ILP lost a majority of their seats. The Right coalesced as the Left fragmented.

Netanyahu was returned to office in January in the highest turnout of voters since 1999. His Likud and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu had formed an electoral alliance at the end of October 2012. The Likud, however, lost seven seats overall and Yisrael Beiteinu another four. Likud critics of the alliance had warned that Yisrael Beiteinu’s anti-religious coercion policy and its disproportionate number of Russian supporters would drive away both religious and Mizrahi voters.

So wrote Primo Levi after he had returned from his imprisonment by the Nazis. The poem was addressed to those ‘who live secure in your warm houses’. While the Jews of the United States and the United Kingdom had suffered hardship and austerity, they remained at liberty. Thousands fought in the Allied armies to defeat Nazism. In the weeks before VE Day, the British and the Canadians had liberated Bergen-Belsen and the Americans had taken control of Dachau. While there were no gas chambers to carry out mass extermination in these camps, the landscape of bestiality was shown to London cinema audiences. The images of stacked dead bodies and living emaciated ones shocked all. While British soldiers wearing handkerchiefs on their faces shovelled the bodies into pits, the stench of death permeated those who bore witness – even on the silver screen. The Allies may have won the war, but the Jews certainly lost it.

At the very beginning of the year, Prime Minister Sharon had a major stroke – this time ruling him out of the political equation completely. Ehud Olmert stepped in as acting prime minister and as head of the new party, Kadima.

The election victory of the Likud, which won thirty-eight seats to Labour’s nineteen, was a resounding vote of confidence in Ariel Sharon and his handling of the al-Aqsa Intifada. His opponent, Amram Mitzna, the former mayor of Haifa, put forward a dovish platform which featured a willingness to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and to engage in negotiations with Arafat. In the midst of an ongoing campaign of suicide bombing, such an approach did not resonate with the Israeli voter and marked the diminution of Labour’s centrality in the political arena – even though Mitzna criticised Sharon for not moving faster to construct a security barrier.

The complexities of the Syrian civil war brought both Iranian and Russian forces to Israel’s northern border. While both wished to assist Bashar Assad and ensure the survival of his regime, only Iran expressed hostile intentions towards Israel and supported its ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon with arms supplies.