History of Israel

722 Assyrians invade Kingdom of Israel. Samaria laid waste by Assyria – The Ten Tribes are exiled

589-587 Jerusalem falls to Nebuchadnezzar – First Temple destroyed. Babylonians destroy Judah

1897 Theodor Herzl founded the Zionist movement to lobby for a Jewish state in Palestine.

1917 Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, expressing support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine after World War I (1914-1918).

1930s Large numbers of European Jews emigrated to Palestine to flee Nazi persecution.

1947 The United Nations agreed to a plan dividing Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. Fighting broke out between Jewish groups favoring the plan and Arab groups opposed to it.

1948 Israel officially became an independent state. Armies from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Transjordan (now Jordan) immediately invaded in an attempt to destroy the Jewish state.

1956 Egypt closed the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. Israel invaded Egypt along with French and British forces, but they were forced to withdraw by the United Nations.

1967 Fearing another Arab invasion, Israel destroyed the air forces of its Arab neighbors. Israeli ground forces then defeated Arab forces in the Six-Day War. Israel gained complete control of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and the West Bank.

1972 Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany.

1973 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. After initial setbacks, Israeli forces repulsed the invasion and captured additional Syrian territory.

1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, and Israel agreed to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula.

1982 Israeli forces mounted a large invasion of Lebanon in retaliation for attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on northern Israel. The PLO withdrew from Lebanon.

1987 Palestinians in the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began a series of uprisings against Israeli rule known as the intifada.

1988 King Hussein of Jordan withdrew his support of the West Bank and called for the PLO to assume Jordan's former administrative role.

1993 Israel and the PLO signed a peace agreement paving the way for Palestinian self-rule.

1994 Limited Palestinian self-rule was established in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. The leaders of Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty.

1995 Israel and the PLO signed a second peace agreement extending limited Palestinian self-rule to all Palestinian towns in the West Bank except Hebron. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli opposed to the peace agreements.

1996 Four suicide bombs set by Palestinian militants exploded in Israel, killing 59 people, and security became one of the central issues in Israeli politics. Benjamin Netanyahu won the election and became the youngest prime minister ever elected in Israel.

1990 – 1998 Aliya from USSR. Over 500 000 Jews emigrated from Russia to Israel .

The Tombs of the Patriarchs in Hebron Abraham was ahead of his generation in many a field, and most important of all – he was the first to believe in the One God. For Hittite inhabitants of Hebron, he was perhaps the first to demonstrate the high level that the woman should occupy in family life, when he purchased the Cave of Machpela, at a good price, to bury his wife Sara. Tradition says that also buried here were Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah, and legend has it that the Cave is the burial place of Adam and Eve as well. The Arabs of Hebron had denied Jews access to the Cave ever since the 12th Century. The Turks allowed individuals, favored with the special permission of the Sultan, to approach the gates; the others could go up to the seventh step of the outer staircase, whence they could see the gates – but no farther. During the violence which swept Hebron in August of 1929, the Arabs murdered scores of Jews, old and young, in a single day of massacre. No battles took place in the Hebron area during the Six Day War in 1967
	Kingdom of Israel Ancient Hebrew state that at its greatest extent included present-day Israel, with parts of Jordan and southern Syria. It came into existence under King Saul in the 11th century BC, and reached its height under his successors, David and Solomon. After Solomon's death in 922 BC, the country was divided into two parts. The name Israel was retained by the northern kingdom, with its capital at Samaria, near modern Nabulus. It was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BC. The southern kingdom, known as Judah, continued to exist until the 6th century BC.
Judaism Religious culture of the Jews (also known as the people of Israel); one of the world's oldest continuing religious traditions.It is a system of sanctification in which all is to be subsumed under God's rule, that is, under divinely revealed models of cosmic order and lawfulness. Christianity originated as one among several competing Jewish ideologies in 1st-century Palestine, and Islam drew in part on Jewish sources at the outset. Because most Jews, from the 7th century on, have lived in the cultural ambit of either Christianity or Islam, these religions have had an impact on the subsequent history of Judaism.
	Holocaust When the Nazi regime came to power in Germany in January 1933, it immediately began to take systematic measures against the Jews. Jews being taken to Death Camps as Nazi forces conquered many of the countries of Europe during World War II (1939-1945), millions of Jews were rounded up and killed outright or imprisoned in concentration camps. By the end of the war, the Nazis had killed nearly six million Jewish men, women, and children.About 3 million in killing centers and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos. (Traditional estimates are closer to 6 million.) Pressure was placed on the Allied powers to establish a permanent haven in Palestine for Jewish survivors. The establishment of Israel three years after Germany's defeat was thus an aftereffect of the Holocaust.
The war of independence On May,15, 1948 the armies of Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq joined Palestinian and other Arab guerrillas who had been fighting Jewish forces since November 1947. The civil war now became an international conflict, the first Arab-Israeli War, called the war of independence by Israel. The Arabs failed to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, and the war ended with four UN-arranged armistice agreements between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The frontiers defined in the armistice agreements remained until they were altered by Israel's conquests during the Six Day War in 1967.
	Jerusalem Capital and largest city of Israel, situated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea, about 93 km (about 58 mi) east of Tel Aviv-Yafo. The city dominates the intersection of Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. Jerusalem is considered a holy city by adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it contains sites sacred to all three religions. Because of both its location and its religious significance, the city has been a focal point for conflict between Arabs and Israelis since the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Middle East Peace Accord In September 1993, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat agreed to sign a peace accord. The accord paved the way for limited Palestinian self-rule in Israeli territories.

The number of Jews in Palestine was small in the early 20th century; it increased from 12,000 in 1845 to nearly 85,000 by 1914. Most people in Palestine were Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians. Support for the Zionist movement came largely from Jews in Europe and North America. By World War I (1914-1918) the Zionist movement had won backing from Great Britain, which wanted Jewish support for its struggle against Germany. The British government therefore issued the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, in the form of a letter to a British Zionist leader from the foreign secretary Arthur J. Balfour:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Israel - Democratic Republic in southwestern Asia, located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is bounded on the north by Lebanon, on the northeast by Syria, on the east by Jordan, and on the southwest by Egypt. Its southernmost tip extends to the Gulf of Aqaba, an arm of the Red Sea. Israel was established in 1948. It covers an area of about 21,596 sq km (about 8338 sq mi).

The population of Israel is overwhelmingly urban and although about 82 percent Jewish, contains considerable racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity. More than half of the Jews in Israel are Israeli-born (called Sabras), but their parents or grandparents came from more than 100 different countries and spoke, among them, about 85 different languages or major dialects. Major groupings include the Ashkenazim, whose forebears lived in European countries during the Middle Ages; Sephardim, some of whose ancestors once lived in the Iberian Peninsula; and those Israelis descending from North Africa and the Middle East. Most of the non-Jewish population of Israel is Arab.The population of Israel (1998 estimate) is about 6,084,000; the overall population density is about 272 persons per sq km (about 706 per sq mi). Non-Jews amount to about 18 percent of the total population. Sunni Muslims form a majority among the non-Jewish population; Christians and Druze compose most of the remainder.