The Assassination of Count Bernadotte
(September 17, 1948)
During the fight for Jewish statehood, extremist
military groups sometimes resorted to the use of terrorist tactics.
One such instance occurred in 1948 when members of the Jewish
underground organization LEHI killed UN Peace Mediator Count Folke
Bernadotte to protest his diplomatic efforts
to modify the Palestine partition
plan.
Bernadotte, a Swede with family ties to the
Swedish King, gained international recognition through his work as
head of the Swedish Red Cross during World War II. Bernadotte used
his position to negotiate with Heinrich
Himmler and save thousands of Jews from concentration
camps, although many argue that he could have done more had he
been less cautious in negotiations.
A diplomat fluent in six languages, Bernadotte was
appointed mediator of the UN General
Assembly on May 20, 1948, and was immediately faced with the
volatile situation in the Middle East. Arabs and Jews had been
fighting over Palestine for decades and the conflict escalated after
the adoption of the UN
partition resolution on November 29, 1947. When Israel declared
its independence on May 14, 1948, five
Arab armies invaded Israel.
On
June 11, Bernadotte succeeded in arranging a 30-day cease-fire. After
visiting Cairo, Beirut, Amman and Tel Aviv, he came to the conclusion
that the UN partition plan was an “unfortunate” resolution and proposed his
own plan to unite the two feuding peoples. Instead of
establishing individual states, he suggested that Arabs and Jews form
a “union” consisting of a small Jewish entity and an enlarged
Transjordan. Haifa and Lydda (Lod) airport would become free zones.
Israel would receive the Western Galilee and unlimited immigration
for two years, after which the UN would take control of the issue. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Arab
refugees would be permitted to return to Arab territory with
compensation and Transjordan would control the Negev and, despite
Israeli claims, Jerusalem.
The Arab world rejected the Bernadotte plan on the
grounds that, as Syrian officer Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib said, “Most
of these mediators are spies for the Jews anyway.” The Israeli
government, hating the idea of giving up Jerusalem and bent on
military victory, quickly followed suit. Fighting resumed on July 8
and the Israeli army gained strength and succeeded in pushing back
the Arabs until a second UN cease-fire was declared on July 18, this
time with no time limit and a threat of economic sanctions against
any country that broke it.
One organization that saw Bernadotte’s efforts
as a threat was LEHI, a
Jewish underground group that, under the leadership of Yitzhak
Shamir, Dr. Israel Scheib and Nathan Friedman-Yellin, had waged a
campaign of “personal terror” to force the British out of
Palestine. LEHI called
Bernadotte a British agent who had cooperated with the Nazis in World
War II. The organization considered his plan to be a threat to its
goal of Israeli independence on both banks of the Jordan River.
Commander Yehoshua Zeitler of the Jerusalem branch of LEHI started
training four men to kill Bernadotte, and solicited information from
two sympathetic journalists about his schedule. LEHI leaders decided
to assassinate Bernadotte while he was on his way to a meeting with
Dov Joseph, military governor of Jerusalem’s New City, which was scheduled for either 4:30 p.m. on September 17 or
sometime on September 18 (the exact date is disputed).
On September 16, Bernadotte flew to Beirut and
spent the day there. At 9:30 a.m. on Friday, September 17, he boarded
his UN Dakota plane for the 45 minute flight to Jerusalem.
After arriving in Palestine, Bernadotte’s day started with a shot
hitting an armored car in his convoy while he was visiting Ramallah.
No one was hurt and, according to army liaison officer Moshe Hillman,
Bernadotte was proud of the bullet hole and showed Hillman the UN
flag that had saved him.
Bernadotte’s appointment with Joseph was
rescheduled for 6:30 p.m. that day. Bernadotte spent time at the
official UN headquarters at the YMCA and at Government House, a
potential headquarters for a UN mission. He visited the Jerusalem
Agricultural School where he picked up French UN observer Andre
Seraut who took the center seat in the UN car, immediately to
Bernadotte’s left. The three car convoy then headed back to the
YMCA to pick up a copy of the truce regulations before the meeting
with Joseph.
Meanwhile, LEHI terrorists adapted their plans to the new meeting time and an Israeli
military jeep carrying a driver named Meshulam Makover and four
assassins was dispatched to Palmeh Street in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Old Katamon. At 5:03 p.m., the UN convoy drove up and
found the jeep blocking its path. The terrorists, wearing khaki
shorts and peaked caps, left their jeep, found Bernadotte in the
second car of the convoy and one man, later discovered to be Yehoshua
Cohen, fired a Schmeisser automatic pistol into the car, spraying the
interior with bullets and killing Seraut and then Bernadotte. The
other LEHI members shot the
tires of the rest of the convoy and all the terrorists escaped to the
religious community of Sha’arei Pina where they hid with haredi
(ultra-religious) LEHI sympathizers for a few days before fleeing to Tel Aviv in the back of
a furniture truck.
Both Seraut and Bernadotte were transported to
Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, but were found to have died
instantly. Bernadotte had been hit six times. On September 18, his
body was flown to Haifa and then to Sweden, where he was buried on
his wife’s birthday. The Israeli government subsequently cracked
down on LEHI, arresting many
of its members and confiscating their arms. LEHI disbanded, largely due to public condemnation.
While the world mourned for Bernadotte, some in
Israel, such as former Tehiya Member of Knesset and former LEHI radio
announcer Geula Cohen, saw it as just another death in war, no more
immoral than other killings committed during the long Arab-Israeli
conflict. Cohen considers the assassination to have been an effective
measure “because we prevented the internationalization of Jerusalem.”
Others, however, such as Hebrew University professor Joseph Heller,
argue that the killing actually provoked support for the Bernadotte
plan by making its author into a martyr. The plan was never
implemented, but whether its failure was due to the assassination or
simply because of Israeli military strength and other outside factors
is pure speculation.
Yitzhak
Shamir reputedly played a role in planning the assassination;
however, he was never tried and years later was elected as Israel's eighth Prime Minister.
Sources: Bell, J. Bowyer. Terror
Out Of Zion. NJ: Transaction, 1996; “A bullet for the count.” Jerusalem Post International
Edition . October 10, 1998, p. 16-18; Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre. O
Jerusalem! NY: Simon and Schuster, 1972 (Amazon.com
paperback, Distribooks, 1994); Sachar, Howard. A
History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. NY:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. |