In pictures: Israel at 70 – seven major moments
Seven major moments from Israel’s history, as the country turns 70.
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Israel is marking 70 years, according to the Hebrew calendar, since independence was proclaimed. The day – 14 May 1948, according to the the Gregorian calendar – was a moment of tremendous joy for Jewish people around the world, and came just three years after the Holocaust. The move was rejected by neighbouring Arab countries and five armies attacked the newborn state the next day.
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Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled or were driven from their homes in the war that followed Israel’s creation, marking the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem that continues to this day. About 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, as well as some 250,000 Holocaust survivors in Europe, settled in Israel in the first few years of the state’s existence, more than doubling its Jewish population.
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In 1961, Israel put on trial in Jerusalem the top-ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. Its agents had captured him in Argentina and smuggled him out of the country. For weeks, Israelis were gripped by harrowing testimony from survivors facing Eichmann in court. He was found guilty and hanged in 1962.
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The 1967 Six Day War changed the landscape of the Middle East. Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt, whose leader had threatened to wipe out the Jewish state. The ensuing conflict with Egypt, Jordan and Syria ended with Israel occupying the Sinai peninsula, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. It also placed the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, one of Judaism’s holiest sites, in Jewish hands for the first time in almost 2,000 years.
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A defining moment of Israel came in 1976, when Israeli commandos launched a dramatic raid to rescue more than 100 hostages, mostly Israelis or Jews, held by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe airport in Uganda. The freed hostages were then flown to Israel. The head of the commando force, Yoni Netanyahu – brother of the current prime minister – was killed in the operation.
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An historic handshake between two old adversaries – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat – created a rare moment of hope for an end to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In September 1993, after weeks of secret negotiations, an interim peace agreement was signed on the White House lawn in front of US President Bill Clinton.
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Two years later, Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv by a nationalist Jewish extremist opposed to the peace agreement. The murder sent shockwaves across Israel and dignitaries from around the world came to Rabin’s funeral, a sign of the esteem in which he was held.
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