How it started
History
The company's beginnings date back to the British Mandate for Palestine when Consolidated Refineries Limited (CRL), a joint venture of Shell and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP), started constructing a sprawling refinery complex which sat at the end of the British-built Mosul–Haifa oil pipeline which stretched from the oil fields near Kirkuk in then British-controlled Iraq.
Construction of the first refinery unit started in 1938 and was carried out by the M. W. Kellogg Co. with assistance from Solel Boneh, with an annual capacity of two million tons of crude oil. Construction was completed in 1944, increasing the annual yield to four million tons of crude oil.
During World War II, the complex supplied refined products to British and American forces operating in the Mediterranean and Middle East theatre, and was bombed many times during the early stage of the war by Italy. Damage to the refineries was quickly repaired.
On December 30, 1947, after several weeks of attacks following the UN partition vote in which a number of Jews were killed, members of the Irgun threw two bombs from a passing car into a crowd of Arab workers outside the refinery, killing 6 and wounding 42. In the immediate aftermath, Arab workers at the refinery attacked their Jewish coworkers, killing 39 and wounding 49 in what became known as the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre.
Due to concerns about the Arab League Boycott, the British Government sold CRL to the State of Israel in 1958 which then changed its name to Oil Refineries Ltd.
From Wikipedia’s article on Oil Refineries Ltd., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2