This Week in History: Last British soldier sails, marking end of Mandatory Palestine

 

On June 30, 1948, the last British soldier sailed away from Haifa port, marking the end of the military occupation of Palestine by Britain. The Union Jack was lowered from the Port Authority''s building, the Israeli flag was hoisted, and Haifa's harbor became the main port of the State of Israel.  The Jerusalem Post reported on July 1, that  General MacMillan had been the last soldier to leave, issuing a proclamation formally ending Britain's "military jurisdiction" in Palestine. The British Mandate began in 1920, three years after the British defeated Ottoman Turkish forces and occupied Ottoman Syria, which was later divided into British Palestine and TransJordan and French Syria and Lebanon.

On July 4, 1976, over 100 hostages returned to Israel after Air France Flight 139 was hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and taken to Entebbe, Uganda. The hijacking culminated in a historic raid to save the 103 Jewish and Israeli hostages, led by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's brother Yonatan, who was killed during the rescue operation. The hijackers comprised two Germans from the Revolutionary Cells, and two Palestinians connected to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Three hostages died after being caught in the crossfire during the rescue operation, and a fourth was killed by Ugandan forces after they had taken her to a nearby hospital before the raid. 

 

On June 30, 2012, former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir died at the age of 96, at the nursing home in which he lived in Tel Aviv, after a long illness. Shamir was the state’s seventh prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992, the longest-serving premier after David Ben-Gurion. He was known for resisting international pressure to make concessions, yet initiated a peace process in Madrid that led to many diplomatic overtures by his successors.