On February 17th, 1949, Dr. Chaim Weizmann became the first Israeli president, just as the Independence war was coming to an end and armistice agreements were being signed. Dr. Weizmann was born in 1874 in the town of Motol in modern-day Belarus and was the 3rd of 15 children.
On January 25th, 1904, while visiting Italy the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl met with Pope Pius X in a failed attempt to gain the support of the Catholic Church.
In the early 1960’s Israel constantly expressed intent on negotiating with its Arab neighbors. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, former leader of the Arab world, however, expressed that his country would never recognize the Jewish State of Israel.
The Fedayeen Insurgency refers to the cross-border conflict occurring between 1949 and 1956 involving Israeli defense forces and Palestinian militants. This conflict was mainly based in the Gaza Strip ruled under Fatah, a group formed outside of Palestine with a mission to liberate all of the lands. Fatah eventually became the current Palestinian authority. The Gaza Strip at the time was known as the All-Palestinian Protectorate. This conflict emerged from Arabs who fled their villages which created an anti-Israeli militia known as the Fedayeen to perform cross-border operations into Israel from surrounding Arab nations.
Despite being called "The Israeli War of Independence", the term is a misnomer. The name suggests Israel declared war to gain its independence, when in fact the Israeli military position began as a defensive one. The war marked the first of many wars between an independent Jewish state called Israel and the collective Arab world. The war itself was 60 years in the making, as friction between these two groups had been building up ever since European Jews began returning to the land en masse with permission from the Ottoman rulers during the late 1800s.
