A Death in Jerusalem [Paperback]

Kati Marton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 1996

An account of the 1948 assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish U.N. mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict, discusses his murder by the Israeli Stern Gang, whose membership included Yitzhak Shamir, and the reasons for the killing. 12,500 first printing.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In September 1948, Swedish humanitarian activist Count Folke Bernadotte, a United Nations-appointed mediator attempting to facilitate peace between Israelis and Arabs, was assassinated by members of Lehi (better known as the Stern Gang), a militant Zionist underground group. Stern Gang commander Yitzhak Shamir, the future Israeli prime minister, dispatched the death squad. Alarmed by Bernadotte's plan to designate Jerusalem an international city, Lehi extremists wanted an Israel of biblical proportions on both sides of the Jordan River; they viewed more moderate politicians like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir as traitors to the Zionist cause. Marton (Wallenberg) has written a dramatic, vivid account of Bernadotte's assassination, a compelling cautionary tale for those working to break the cycle of retribution and terror in the Middle East. Drawing on interviews with Shamir's former comrades, she details his key role in the conspiracy and in other assassinations. The conspirators went unpunished; trigger man Yehoshua Cohen became a kibbutznik; another conspirator, Israel Eldad, is today a supranationalist demagogue. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Marton, a former NPR and ABC correspondent, focuses here, as in two previous books, on dramatic true stories of international intrigue set in the turmoil of World War II and the early stages of the cold war. In Wallenberg (1982), she explored Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's rescue of 30,000 Hungarian Jews from the Third Reich; in The Polk Conspiracy (1990), she centered on the murder of American journalist George Polk in postwar Greece. Marton's subject this time is the 1948 assassination of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, then recently appointed United Nations mediator, by Lehi ("Stern Gang") terrorists under orders from future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir. Drawing on interviews with Bernadotte's family and aging Lehi veterans and on primary and secondary research, Marton offers minibiographies of Bernadotte and Shamir, vividly capturing the personal and historical trajectories that collided in this violent confrontation between the well-meaning and pragmatic, but politically and philosophically unsophisticated Swedish nobleman and the dour, zealous freedom fighter obsessed with a dream of Israel restored to its biblical proportions. A Death in Jerusalem tells a fascinating story whose insights remain relevant today. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1st Arcade ed edition (March 11, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559703520
• ISBN-13: 978-1559703529
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,891,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kati Marton, an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, is the author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, a New York Times bestseller, as well as Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy, A Death in Jerusalem, and a novel, An American Woman. Mother of a son and a daughter, she lives in New York with her husband, Richard Holbrooke.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book about a tragic place, March 2, 2001

By 

John Gault - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Death in Jerusalem (Paperback)

A lot of interesting and tragic history is presented in this book, including an excerpt from the now-infamous 1940 letter in which Lehi (the Stern Gang) sought help from Nazi Germany to fight their common enemy, the British.

Marton's book shows plenty of violence on both sides. For example, we are told of the destruction of the Arab village of Deir Yassim, where, Lehi commando Baruch Nadel recalled, "There were people killed in the most brutal way." And we get the violent Arab response, an attack on a convoy of cars carrying Jewish civilians: "Suddenly, brandishing rifles and hurling blazing gasoline-soaked rags, hundreds of Arab guerrillas swooped down on the convoy, turning its armor-plated cars into blazing steel-trap prisons."

The book's subject is Lehi's assassination of the first UN peace mediator to the Middle East, so of course the book focuses on the violent activities of Lehi and, to a lesser extent, the Irgun. That said, Marton makes clear that what motivated these people was not a love for violence, but a love for the state of Israel.

Marton's writing is sometimes a little awkward, sometimes a little breathless. And Count Folke Bernadotte is a far less interesting subject than Yitzhak Shamir. But the book does a good job of documenting an event that, as Arthur Schesinger wrote, "...has stained the politics of Israel ever since."

Depressingly, the obstacles to peace in 1948, such as the question of the right-of-return for Palestinian refugees, are still with us today.

Also recommended, Avi Shlaim's THE IRON WALL.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an excellent book, July 8, 2005

By 

Ante Stern (Democracy USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Death in Jerusalem (Paperback)

This book is about the assassination of the UN mediator in Palestine: Count Folke Bernadotte. He was killed by a terrorist organization known as the Stern Gang which at that time was an proudly fascist group discredited and disowned by all mainstream Zionist groups including the founders of the state of Israel.

The Stern Gang is infamous for its pointless acts of murder and, as detailed in the book, its attempts in 1940/1941 to offer their services to Nazi Germany against the British. While some attempt to rewrite the history of those events, the letters speak for themselves. The men of the Stern Gang hated the Israeli state created in 1948 and considered the men who built it like David Ben-Gurion to be traitors.

The book is good in showing how Bernadotte was a good man who tried to make peace only to find out that there were many forces at the time who so feared peace that they would kill to stop it happening. Kati Marton also does an excellent job of showing the madness of those involved such as Israel Eldad who even at the time the book was written was still fighting for a Israel to be transformed into a Fascist state (or religous kingdom if preferred).

The interviews clearly show that what the Stern Gang feared wasn't anything that Bernedotte had specifically done, they feared that his peace proposals might be accepted by Israel's true leaders such as Ben-Gurion. He had to die because a proposal of peace in itself was a threat to what they wanted to accomplish.

The book raises a profound moral question that has haunted Israel since its founding. Suppose the majority in a democratic state makes a decision that a minority consider an unacceptable danger to the state. In such a situation, are assassination and terrorism valid means of bringing about political change?

The deeper unsettled political question is what sort of state Israel should be or should have been. David Ben-Gurion's vision of a secular democratic state initially won the political battle, but since the 1970s the other "stream" in Israeli politics - undemocratic, religious, expansionist - as historically representated by the Stern Gang has been a growing force in the political life of the country.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars NPR reporter does it again, December 7, 2000

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Death in Jerusalem (Paperback)

On the very first page of this book, the author's attitude becomes plain--as she sets out to prove the defense of Jewish interests and people as evil "aggression" and Arabs as weak victims. The facts, however, defy these descriptions.

During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s a series of Arab pogroms against Jewish towns and people resulted in the massacres of hundreds if not thousands of Jews. This followed a pattern of abuse and discrimination which dominated much of the Arab world for 1,000 years. Both sets of historical facts have been obfuscated today by reporters like Marton. The thousands of Jews who stayed in Palestine during two millenia after its Roman conquest were always subject to oppression--just like Jews who had fled to Arab lands.

There, Jews remained a minority and were often (though not always) oppressed--subject to periodic massacres, rapes, dispersion and other horrors. This is well documented in many sources, perhaps best in From Time Immemorial, by former journalist and peace negotiator Joan Peters, who conducted an exhaustive seven-year inquiry in more than 1,800 Turkish, British, Arab, American, French and other sources, as well as first hand interviews.

Marton, on the other hand, revises history, accepting the false thesis that Palestinians were peace-loving victims of Jewish aggressors, while ignoring voluminous Arab hate and propaganda-- like that still emanating from Palestinian Authority-controlled media and mosques. One October, 2000, Gaza sermon for example exhorted Muslims to "kill the Jews"... "where ever you find them." A December 1 Al Aksa sermon similarly proclaimed that Israel had offered only 10% of the West Bank to the Palestinians--of which Israel in fact offered 90%--and also exhorted Muslims to "liberate Palestine" from Jewish "infidels." Was it really worth sending children to fight for the rest? Marton would undoubtedly not bother to ask this question.

Arafat does not want peace, according to Saudi-educated Shaykh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi. "[After] Oslo the tone of the PNA media has never changed," according to Palazzi, "the number of yearly victims of [Arab] terrorism is not decreased, Arafat [el-Husseini] has not refrained from declaring it is a temporary truce, and PNA officials have not even amended their charter [which still calls to Israel's destruction]."

Marton would have us believe this is all the fault of evil Jews. If only they had been less aggressive, none of this would have happened. But defense is not aggression. And Israeli defense, though sometimes at fault, has never come close to that of her Arab enemies. Marton should eliminate her sermonizing and stick to the facts.

---Alyssa A. Lappen