Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
17 September
ZIONISTS ASSASSINATE UN MEDIATOR
On this day in 1948, Folke Bernadotte, United Nations Mediator in Palestine, was assassinated by the Zionist LEHI terrorist group, an attack approved by future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Bernadotte was a Swedish diplomat who had negotiated the release of over 30,000 prisoners from German concentration camps, including 450 Danish Jews from Theresienstadt. Bernadotte was killed after four months in his role under harsh criticism from the Israelis, who opposed his peace proposals.
الصهاينة يغتالون وسيط الأمم المتحدة
سبتمبر17
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1948، تم اغتيال فولك برنادوت، وسيط الأمم المتحدة في فلسطين من قبل مجموعة ليهي الإرهابية الصهيونية، وهو هجوم وافق عليه رئيس الوزراء المستقبلي إسحاق شامير. برنادوت كان دبلوماسيًا سويديًا تفاوض على إطلاق سراح أكثر من 30.000 سجين من معسكرات الاعتقال الألمانية، بما في ذلك 450 يهوديًا دنماركيًا من تيريزينشتات. قتل برنادوت بعد أربعة أشهر في مهمته تحت انتقادات شديدة من الإسرائيليين، الذين عارضوا مقترحاته للسلام.
The murder was perpetrated by the Stern Gang, ordered by a three-man leadership which included the future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir...Bernadotte had most incensed Israeli opinion by recommending first that the city [Jerusalem] should be in Arab territory, and then, in a report heavily influenced by Britain and the US and submitted to the UN Security Council the very day before his death, that it should be under international supervision.
Bernadotte had written that "It is ...undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine...It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine."
Stern Gang (LEHI) supporters later used a forged document by an aide to Himmler, Felix Kersten, to discredit Bernadotte as an anti-semite. Despite these attempts to use the discredited, accusation as a retrospective means of justifying his assassination, historical analysis has left his reputation intact on on the matter.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, has refused to include Bernadotte among the 22,000 non-Jews it lists as having saved Jews from the Holocaust despite Bernadotte having rescued over a thousand Jews and many others from Nazi concentration camps in the closing months of WWII.
It was not until 1995 that Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, officially expressed a vague "regret that he was killed in a terrorist way".
LEHI, the Stern Gang, was a nationalist-fascistic outfit, which called for the establishment of a “Hebrew kingdom from the Euphrates to the Nile.”
No one was ever charged for the murders, although those ultimately responsible were well known. Natan Yellin-Mor and Mattityahu Shmuelevitz, Stern Gang leaders, were charged with belonging to a terrorist organization. Found guilty, they were immediately released and pardoned - Yellin-Mor had meanwhile been elected to the Israeli parliament. Shamir was never tried for his role in the killing.
The actual assassin of Bernadotte, Yehoshua Cohen, went on to become a bodyguard for Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The first public admission of the Stern Gang’s role in the murder was not made until 1977.
In 1950 "the Representative of Israel...expressed to the President of the Security Council the Government's profound sense of abhorrence at this brutal murder of a servant of the United Nations who initiated the beneficient process of mediation and conciliation which, a few months later, was to show such impressive results". It added " The Jewish people has every cause to be grateful to Count Bernadotte for his manifold activities during the Second World War on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution." Israel paid $54,628.00 in reparations. UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie expressed to Israel his "appreciation for the prompt and candid fashion in which your Government has responded to this claim. I am also appreciative of the tribute which you paid to the late Count Bernadotte.
The UN and Israel closed the matter.
4-minute video: the assassination of UN mediator Bernadotte