The revolution and pacts (57). The Bernadotte plan (IV). ‘Murder in Jerusalem'. During the fight for Jewish statehood, extremist military groups often resorted to the use of terrorist tactics. One such instance occurred in 1948 when members of the Jewish underground organisation LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) saw Bernadotte's efforts to modify the Palestine partition plan as a threat. The diehard organisation, which under the leadership of Yitzhak Shamir (who would decades later become Israeli Prime Minister), Dr. Israel Scheib and Nathan Friedman-Yellin, had waged a ‘campaign of personal terror' to force the British out of Palestine, called Bernadotte ‘a British agent who had co-operated with the Nazis in World War II'. The organisation considered his plan to be a threat to its goal of Israeli independence on both banks of the Jordan River. LEHI leaders thus decided to get rid of the UN mediator. 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 pm 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, 1948 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 armoured 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. As Bernadotte's appointment with Dov Joseph was rescheduled for 6:30 pm that day, he spent time at the official UN headquarters at the Young Men's Christian Association (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 centre 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 four assassins was dispatched to Palmeh Street in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Old Katamon. At 5:03 pm, 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 sympathisers for a few days before fleeing to Tel Aviv in the back of a furniture truck. Both Seraut and Bernadotte were taken 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. By way of camouflage, the Israeli government subsequently cracked down on LEHI, arresting many of its members and confiscating their arms. It also disbanded LEHI, largely due to world-wide condemnation. The next day, the United Nations Security Council condemned the killing of Bernadotte as ‘a cowardly act which appears to have been committed by a criminal group of terrorists in Jerusalem while the United Nations representative was fulfilling his peace-seeking mission in the Holy Land'. [email protected]
