1448: The Sunni-Ottoman army of Sultan Murad II defeats the Hungarian-led army of Catholic Europe led by John Hunyadi at the Second Battle of Kosovo. Turkey’s Janissaries again proved themselves a superior, decisive fighting force.
1957: Albert Camus, the French writer and philosopher born in Mondovi, Algeria, and whose work (such as The Stranger) was infused with the sensuality of Algeria, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Born in a small town in eastern Algeria,” Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, said of Camus in his award presentation speech, “he has returned to this North African milieu to find the source of all the determining influences that have marked his childhood and youth. Even today, the man Camus is aware of this great French overseas territory, and the writer in him is often pleased to recall this fact.”
1973: OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, begins an oil embargo against the United States and any country supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The embargo lasts several months but was never to be repeated as an instrument of Arab policy.
1977: The ordeal of Lufthansa Flight 181, hijacked four days earlier by four Palestinian militants, ends in Mogadishu, Somalia, when German commandos storm the plane and kill three of the hijackers. All 92 passengers and crew survive except for the plane’s captain, Jurgen Schumann, who was murdered in cold blood by the hijackers.
1994: In a ceremony in Amman, Jordan, Israel and Jordan “initial” a peace treaty in preparation for a formal signing ceremony at the White House, with President Bill Clinton officiating, on Oct. 26. “No one lost, no one won, we all won,” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin says in the Royal Guest Palace in Amman. Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, embraces King Hussein and kisses him on both cheeks in the traditional way of Arab greetings. Hussein Rabin had formally ended the state of war between Jordan and Israel in a ceremony at the White House in July.
- Jordan: Country Profile
- Israel: Country Profile
- Review: The Much Too Promised Land, by Aaron David Miller
2001: Rehavam Zeevi, leader of Israel’s far right and the tourism minister in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cabinet, is shot twice in the face and killed by a stealthy assailants in a hallway of the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine takes responsibility for the assassination, saying it was carried out in retaliation for Israel’s assassination two months earlier of the PFLP’s secretary general, Abu Ali Mustafa.
