P6 - Your comment reminded me of a political assassination that took place in Palestine in 1948, which was the killing of the former head of the Swiss Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte. One little footnote about this incident that is seldom mentioned in stories about this notorious event is that Dr. Ralph Bunche was actually scheduled and had planned to be in the automobile in which Count Bernadotte was shot to death. Dr. Bunche became quite ill several days before the trip and canceled his plans to accompany Count Bernadotte. There is no doubt that Dr. Bunche would have been murdered too if he had been in the vehicle.

The Assassination of Count Bernadotte

By Shira Schoenberg

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 (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) 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 went on to become Prime Minister of Israel.

That's a bit of history that's new to me.

A lot of Israel's leaders...like Sharon, if I recall correctly...would be justifiably classed as ex-terrorists by the Arab nations. That fact is fundamental in Israel's refusal to deal with Arafat all those years.

...and in our government's refusal to deal with Arafat too. I really consider the Clinton and Bush Administrations' ceaseless efforts to demonize and marginalize Arafat quite shameful. In addition, the self-serving intentional lies that Bill Clinton (and Dennis Ross) began to spread after Arafat's entirely justified rejection of the so-called fair and even-handed Camp David accords that Clinton and Ehud Barack attempted to foist on the Palestenian people is a shameful episode in American diplomacy. All of this behavior and worse was justified on the grounds that Arafat and his supporters were terrorists and didn't deserve more. Zionists engage in terror and they get a country. The people who owned the land the Zionists got are labled as sub-humans. Go figure.

History is full of stories of successful terrorists. It's why they do it.

History is also full of stories of unsuccessful terrorists.

When selecting a reaction to terror, it might be instructive to examine which kind of reactions worked, and which didn't. Summary: rewarding terrorism, or allowing terrorists a plausible claim of partial success breeds more terrorists.

I think Bush overplays some morality card with respect to terrorism. Are all causes supported by terror bad causes? Probably not. Is terror immoral? Who knows. It's defined not by the cause, but by being out of political power. Is it a threat to ordinary Americans? You bet.

Near as I can tell, we've never seen the suicide nail bomber in America. If it is ever widely believed that Palestinians benefitted politically from such bombings, we can expect to see every nut cause in America take up the same tactic.

I would not label any effort used by indigenous people to overthrow a colonial occupying power as terrorism. The Mau-Mau in colonial Kenya, for example, were labeled as terrorists by the British when in fact it was the Brits who engaged in acts of terrorism that were closely akin to the behavior of the Nazis. Despite Robert Mugabe's dismal record on human rights in Zimbabwe, he would have to rule another 50 years and act with even less regard for the rights of people there to equal what went on when that country was still called Rhodesia.

Once a military superior nation has invaded another country and established a colonial structure then those who have been impressed into this system have a right to use any means at their disposal to resist. Colonial powers cannot legitimately claim to have suffered the loss of any innocent victims as the French (and even the great Albert Camus) did in Algeria.

Palestinians are not "nuts" and linking their cause with people in this country like Timothy McVeigh, the Ku Klux Klan and other garden variety native white supremicists who bombed black people's churches, homes and businesses is absurd in the extreme. I am an ordinary American and I do not feel that Muslim or Arab terrorists are a threat to my safety. I'm more worried about people like McVeigh.

DW, I agree with everything you said, except I don't think we'll ever see an American suicide bomber. Americans are fundamentally selfish.

Palestinians are not "nuts" and linking their cause with people in this country like Timothy McVeigh, the Ku Klux Klan and other garden variety native white supremicists who bombed black people's churches, homes and businesses is absurd in the extreme. I am an ordinary American and I do not feel that Muslim or Arab terrorists are a threat to my safety. I'm more worried about people like McVeigh.

I'm worried about all of them.

Personally, I define terrorism as politically motivated violence directed against civilians who are at most indirectly involved. McVeigh qualifies. So do the black church bombers. And the Palestinian bombers who infiltrate wedding dinners. And 911. This technique must be opposed at all costs.

But we're going to agree, PT. Resisting the military might of an occupier is something different.

If the Palestinians restricted their opposition to such resistance, they'd seem less a threat. If McVeigh had blown up a military base, he'd have been recorded differently by history.