1886: David Ben-Gurion, founder of Israel and its first prime minister, is born in Plonsk, Poland. He died of a brain hemorrhage in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Dec. 1, 1973, age 87.
1951: Liaquat Ali Khan, first prime minister of Pakistan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military city — the same city where the two-time prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated in 2007. Khan’s assassin, Seyed Aktar, was believed to have been from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
- What Are Pakistan’s Tribal Areas?
- Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan Agencies
- Terrorist Bomb in Pakistan Unravels a Country’s Failing Stability
- Pakistan: Country Profile
- Profile: Benazir Bhutto
1982: Responding to attempts at the United Nations to exclude Israel from participating in various conferences, the Reagan administration, through U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, warns that “If Israel were excluded from the General Assembly, the United States would withdraw from participation in the Assembly and would withhold payments to the United Nations until Israel's right to participate is restored.” The United Nations backs down.
2002: The $225 million, 11-story, 31,000-square-foot Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 30 years in the works, is dedicated in Alexandria, Egypt. The library, which Egyptians refer to as the “fourth pyramid,” is meant to evoke its predecessor, the legendary library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I in 306 B.C. and mostly destroyed by fire in 47 B.C. That library contained some 700,000 items. “There is a need today to remind people that Egypt is not just a flag-waving tribe,” Mona Makram-Ebeid, a former member of Parliament and professor of political science at the American University of Cairo, tells The New York Times. “It’s very timely because of all the attacks against Arabs, and putting all Arabs in the same basket.” The library is built for 4 million books, but contains barely 250,000 at the time of its dedication.
