Customer Reviews

A Death in Jerusalem

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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

A critical reading of this book is helpful to understand the origines of Middle East racism and increasing violence.

This book has plenty of useful material about the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte. And it raises some interesting questions about the morality of this deed.

Still, I'm deducting four stars from what would otherwise have been the rating I'd give it. Why? Because it overlooks the human rights aspects of the murder in favor of the religious ones. It states up front that the Stern Gang was primarily driven by religious extremism, and not by a desire to promote simple human rights for human beings, including Jews. And I think that is a very big mistake.

Other than that, there's plenty of good stuff about who did what. And even about how Bernadotte became so hated by almost all Israelis, even the most moderate and liberal ones.

The moral question it raises is simple enough. Suppose there is a person such as Bernadotte who threatens the lives and human rights of tens of thousands of people or more. What can one do about it? Suppose that one can't arrest him or her because to do so would start a war. Suppose that person is a representative of a big nation, or of the United Nations? The alternatives eventually come down to letting that person stay around, demanding her or his expulsion from your land, or murder.

And that appears to be the question Israel was faced with. Bernadotte was, as the author admits, considered to be a serious threat. The following quote of Samuel Merlin from the book, sums it up. The murder "was an incredible feat. I was never an extremist, but this deed was more important than defeating a whole division of the British Army. Israel was very frail then, and he proposed giving the Negev to the Arabs and demilitarizing Jerusalem and making it international, including the Jewish City. Bernadotte was a danger to Israel."

Whether or not this was the intent, I think the book does show that Bernadotte wound up siding with Arab fascists and in effect endorsing Arab murders over Jewish self-defence. But did this cause or justify the murder of Bernadotte?

I think it did cause it. The murder of Bernadotte was by no means inevitable. After all, Arafat, a major terrorist, was not murdered. But those who cause the deaths of huge numbers of people are not immune from violent attack.

On the other hand, I see no way to justify such extrajudicial killings. Bernadotte was unarmed. He was unlikely to personally murder anyone. In the long run, such killings set several bad precedents. Among them are killings of all sorts of people on the basis of any excuses one might find. In addition, there's the problem of making the cause of human rights, for which I think Bernadotte actually was killed, look suspect. And they reduce one's flexibility in dealing with armed terrorists. Perhaps one reason that Arafat was permitted to stay alive and do so much harm to our species was a reaction to the killing of Bernadotte. Marton does not get into any of these issues, but I think she should have.

This book made me think quite a bit. It almost got that elusive second star from me.