Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (1895-1948), was a Swedish nobleman (the grandson of King Gustav II) and diplomat who is credited with using his position as head of the Swedish Red Cross to negotiate the release of thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and, according to Yad Vashem, helped secure the release of 11,000 Jews between March and May 1945 alone. He is best known in Jewish history, however, as the Arab-Israel UN Security Council mediator after Israel’s War of Independence whose biased pro-Arab peace plan led to his assassination in Jerusalem by the underground organization LEHI – an acronym for Lochamei Cherut Yisrael (“Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) and also known as the Stern Gang – on September 17, 1948.
On May 14, 1948 – not coincidentally the day that Israel declared its independence – the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 186, which established the United Nations Mediator in Palestine with the responsibility to “promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation in Palestine.” Six days later, Bernadotte was unanimously appointed to the position, a questionable appointment given that he had no experience or expertise with Middle East politics. He quickly arranged a 30-day ceasefire three weeks later on June 11, 1948, which the Arabs accepted only because Israel was under an arms embargo and it gave the Arabs, who were not, the opportunity to reorganize their military and to rearm and extend their military attacks.
However, deciding that the UN Partition Plan could never work, he unilaterally concocted his own blatantly pro-Arab proposal for peace in the region, pursuant to which Arabs and Jews would form a “union” consisting of a small Jewish entity and an enlarged Transjordan and, among other things, Israel would lose Jerusalem, the Negev, and the right to unlimited Jewish immigration – while, at the same time, Arabs would have an unlimited “right of return.”
Bernadotte’s plan was essentially indistinguishable from the original arrangement proposed by King Abdullah of Jordan, and the fact that it rewarded Arab aggression, denied Jews their right of self-determination and, perhaps most outrageously given his position, nullified a UN resolution, was of no concern to this “impartial” mediator. His proposal succeeded in unifying Israel and the Arab world – but only with respect to summarily and angrily rejecting his plan. Warfare quickly resumed and, when Israel turned the tide against Arab forces, the UN snapped into action on July 18, 1948, and imposed a second cease-fire.
LEHI characterized Bernadotte as a British and Arab puppet who threatened the establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River and, after gathering intelligence about his schedule and movements, it decided to assassinate him en route to a meeting with Dov Joseph, the military governor of Jerusalem. Yehuda Cohen, who was chosen to lead the attack, began training his team in West Jerusalem in August 1948 with the weapons and tactics they would use in carrying out the assassination.
At 9:30 a.m. on September 17, Bernadotte boarded his plane for Jerusalem and, after rescheduling his appointment with Joseph for 6:30 p.m. that evening, he held several meetings with various officials before returning to Jerusalem in the last car of a three-car convoy flying the UN flag. The seating arrangement on the back seat of the large vehicle was Bernadotte at the right window; French Colonel Andre Seraut, Chief UN Observer in Jerusalem, sitting next to him in the middle; and Swedish Gener Bernadotte and Seraut al Åge Lundström, Bernadotte’s Chief of Staff and head of UN Truce Supervision in Palestine, seated at the rear right window. Ironically, Bernadotte had rejected Lundström’s urging that he take a detour to avoid snipers, and Seraut had specifically requested to be seated near Bernadotte to afford him the opportunity to personally thank Bernadotte for saving his wife’s life when he rescued her from Dachau in 1945.
Meanwhile, the LEHI team had become concerned when intelligence sources advised them that Bernadotte’s arrival had been delayed, but they quickly established that he would arrive at 5:00 p.m. and confirmed that he would be following the expected route. When Bernadotte’s convoy arrived at Palmach Street at 5:03 p.m., it found its path blocked by a jeep with four LEHI passengers: Cohen, driver Meshulam Makover, Yitzchak Ben Moshe (Markovitz), and Avraham Steinberg.
The group jumped out of their vehicle and Cohen sprayed the interior of the car with his Schmeisser submachine gun, killing Seraut and then Bernadotte while Ben Moshe and Steinberg shot out the tires of the other vehicles. In the immediate confusion, Seraut was mistaken for Ralph Bunche, then Bernadotte’s American aide (and later his successor); in fact, it was sheer serendipity that Bunche, who had originally planned to join Bernadotte at the meeting, was not in the vehicle because mechanical repairs delayed his flight. The four LEHI operatives escaped to Shaarei Pina, where they hid with sympathizers for a few days before fleeing to Tel Aviv in the back of a furniture truck a few days later.
Bernadotte and Seraut were transported to Hadassah Hospital on Har Hatzofim (Mt. Scopus), where the doctor advised that Bernadotte had taken six bullets to the chest, throat, and left arm at close range and that Seurat, who had been shot 18 times, had died almost instantly. General Lundström, who was unharmed in the attack, later described it as follows:
In the Katamon quarter, we were held up by a Jewish Army type jeep placed in a roadblock and filled with men in Jewish Army uniforms. At the same moment, I saw an armed man coming from this jeep. I took little notice of this because I merely thought it was another checkpoint. However, he put a Tommy gun through the open window on my side of the car and fired point blank at Count Bernadotte and Colonel Seraut. I also heard shots fired from other points, and there was considerable confusion. The Jewish liaison officer came running to our car and told Mr. Begley, who was at that time outside the car, to drive away as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the man was still firing.
Colonel Seraut fell in the seat in back of me, and I saw at once that he was dead. Count Bernadotte bent forward, and I thought at the time he was trying to get cover. I asked him: ‘Are you wounded? He nodded and fell back. I helped him to lie down in the car. I now understood that he was severely wounded; there was a considerable amount of blood on his clothes, mainly around the heart. By this time, the Jewish liaison officer had got into the car, and was urging Begley to drive quickly to Hadassah Hospital, which was only a short distance away. I have the impression that the Jewish liaison officer did everything he possibly could to assist us to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. It could not have taken more than a couple of minutes to make the journey from the scene of the incident to the hospital.
When we arrived [at Hadassah Hospital], with the help of some other people, I carried the Count inside and laid him on the bed. We had sent for a medical officer, but while waiting for him to arrive, I took off the Count’s jacket and tore away his shirt and undervest. I saw that he was wounded around the heart and that there was also a considerable quantity of blood on his clothes about it.
When the doctor arrived, I asked if anything could be done, but he replied that it was too late. Major De Geer went in Dr. Facel’s car to fetch the Count’s personal physician, Dr. Ullmark. He stayed with the Count and was later joined by Major De Geer, Miss Wessel and Dr. Ullmark. I then left and went to see Colonel Seraut, who had been placed in another room. The doctor confirmed that he had died instantly.
After awhile, I went with a car to the YMCA. and tried to get in touch with Dr. Joseph and Colonel [Moshe] Dayan, military commander of Israel forces in Jerusalem. They arrived at the YMCA after a very short time. I said that I would not do anything that would create an impression of panic, but that I had to decide before sunset whether observers should stay at their posts during the night without danger. If in their opinion, there would be considerable danger for observers, they would recall them. They assured me that in their opinion, although of course they could make no guarantee, there was no added danger, and I decided that observers should remain at their posts. However, I asked Colonel Dayan for a guard to be placed around the YMCA, where it had been decided that the bodies of Count Bernadotte and Colonel Serut would lie in state.
The following day, LEHI sent a letter to the press stating that:
Although in our opinion all United Nations observers are members of foreign occupation forces, which have no right to be on our territory, the murder of the French Colonel Seraut was due to a fatal mistake; our men thought that the officer sitting beside Count Bernadotte was the British agent and antisemite, General Lundstrom.
Except for the operatives and their supporters, condemnation of Bernadotte’s assassination was swift and virtually universal. The UN Security Council condemned the killing 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,” and a group of America’s most prominent Jewish leaders, including Albert Einstein, published an open letter of protest in the New York Times.
The Israeli government declared LEHI to be a terrorist organization, disarmed its members, commenced a manhunt for the killers, and arrested hundreds of suspects, but nobody was ever charged with the murders. Believing that the murder had been orchestrated by the Israeli government and not by a radical sect, the Swedish government publicly challenged the competence of the Israel investigation and vigorously campaigned (unsuccessfully) to deny its admission to the UN as a member state. Even after Israeli attempts to appease the Swedes, including the planting of a Bernadotte Forest (which was dedicated on January 29, 1952) on JNF land at Neve Ilan near Jerusalem, and even after Sweden finally recognized Israel in 1950, relations between the two countries remained frosty.
Notwithstanding broad public condemnation of Israel, some Israeli leaders considered Bernadotte’s murder as no more than an unfortunate result of war which, in any event, Israel had not started. They argued that the assassination was a successful operation in that it removed the Arab-sympathizing mediator and effectively prevented the internationalization of Jerusalem.
Others argued that all the murder accomplished was to turn Bernadotte into a martyr and that, in any event, it was Israeli strategy and military successes on the battlefield, rather than the elimination of Bernadotte, that ultimately led to the rejection of his plan. Some analysts maintain that Bernadotte’s death dealt a severe blow to the Israeli right and that it was the reason why it took almost three decades before the Likud, led by Menachem Begin, won a general election in 1977.
Born the son of a farmer in Petach Tikva during the British Mandate, Yehoshua Cohen (1922-1986) joined LEHI at age sixteen and soon became a prominent fighter within the organization. After the murder of Yair Stern and the subsequent arrest and jailing of the LEHI High Command in 1942, he was among the few who remained at large and, taking command of the group at age 19, he recruited a new generation of members, trained himself as a sharpshooter, and escaped the British authorities notwithstanding a $3,000 bounty (well over $50,000 in today’s dollars) on his head. He became recognized as LEHI’s premier fighter by helping its leader, Yitzhak Shamir (later Israel’s eighth prime minister in 1983), escape prison in September 1942 by smuggling Polish Army uniforms to him and another prisoner, who disguised themselves in the uniforms and crawled under the barbed wire to freedom.
In 1944, Cohen was selected by Shamir to train LEHI members in guerilla warfare tactics. He taught them to build bombs and land mines, and he became a living legend by training the two assassins who successfully killed Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State for the Middle East. Once again, the British put a price on his head and offered a reward for his capture.
Undeterred, Cohen was next involved in planning an attack on Harold MacMichael who, after being appointed as British High Commissioner of Palestine in 1934, became one of the great villains of Jewish history and earned the name “Haman” from the Jews of the Yishuv. His most heinous act, which earned him everlasting infamy, was refusing to permit 768 Jewish refugees aboard the ship Struma from entering Eretz Yisrael and being responsible for their deaths when, on the morning of February 24, 1942, the Struma was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine, the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II.
However, the attack against MacMichael failed. Cohen was apprehended by the British and exiled to a detention center in Africa, but he was released in July 1948 following Israel’s independence – just in time for the Bernadotte operation.
In this rare and historic 23 Cheshvan [October 30] 1945 correspondence from the British prison in Prison, Cohen writes:
At the time of writing this letter to you, I don’t know if I will still remain in Jerusalem next week and, as such, before you send your response, please confirm exactly which jail I will be in.
Certainly, you must want to know how I am in jail. Hard to believe, but it is difficult for me to complain about the situation regarding cleanliness, food, and health. The condition with respect to these areas is not altogether bad. We sleep on beds, there are enough blankets, and there are opportunities to wash with hot water. Even the food isn’t bad.
I want to write to you about an event that will also make you very happy. This event takes place with me and my prisoner friends once a week. This cannot be explicated with the power of the pen, but this is a deep Jewish feeling. This is the only time when Jewish prisoners are considered Observant, political prisoners as well as criminals gather together in a corner near the Aron Kodesh and are immersed in the seas of pleasure and mutual Jewish sentiment. Here, the prisoner hears from the Rabbi reading the Torah the verse “I gave this land to your children.” Here, the person who is praying hears the cantor intone “And may our eyes witness your return to Zion with compassion” and hear the Birkat Kohanim from their prisoner brothers.
I still hope that, as time passes, I will be able to meet with you more than once and tell you about my life here in more detail. But at this time, I have a special request.
Although I know they will be a bit difficult for you, therefore if you are unable to fulfill this request all at once, do it bit by bit at different opportunities. It’s a substantive request: Winter is coming, and I still don’t know if it will be difficult or easy, but I want to prepare for it, and for that I need two pairs of long or short wool socks, a pair of long khaki pants, two undershirts with long sleeves, two sets of underpants, two winter shirts, a sweater with long sleeves, and pajamas. This is certainly a somewhat audacious request, but while if I was outside, I would be able to get these things one way or another, in jail it’s a little more difficult. There are no millionaires here.
After such a long period of time with no contact, you would certainly like for me to write to you further and I hope to do so in the future.
After the Bernadotte assassination, Cohen became one of the founders of Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev (established 1952), which later became Ben-Gurion’s retirement home. Serving as head of security for the kibbutz, he became Ben Gurion’s unofficial bodyguard, confidant, and closest companion. When Dag Hammarskjöld traveled to Israel in 1958 and visited Ben-Gurion at his Negev home, the prime minister did not exercise the best judgment when he seated his friend Cohen next to the UN Secretary-General, who was incensed and is said to have announced “I will never come here again.”
Cohen never confirmed or denied killing Bernadotte but, through his entire life, he remained proud of the operation that resulted in his death. For example, notwithstanding his close relationship with Ben-Gurion, he refused to accept the prime minister’s gift of an inscribed copy of his pictorial anthology because it included a photograph of the Altalena, the Irgun ship that was bringing weapons, Jewish fighters, and Holocaust survivors to Eretz Yisrael which Ben-Gurion had ordered fired upon and which sank in June 1948. As another example, before he died, an unrepentant Cohen said, “With the Bernadotte action, Ben-Gurion was able to kill two flies with one swat; he got rid of Bernadotte and us (LEHI).”
For decades after the assassination, the identity of the murderers remained unclear, but it eventually became obvious that LEHI was responsible. Although it was an open secret within LEHI and other groups that Cohen was behind the killing, his role as the shooter was publicly uncovered for the first time by Michael Bar Zohar, Ben-Gurion’s biographer. The first public admission of LEHI’s role in the assassination was made in 1971 on the 29th anniversary of Bernadotte’s murder and, two years after Cohen’s death in 1986, two LEHI members appeared on Israeli television, publicly confessed their roles in the killing, and confirmed that Cohen was the assassin. Meshulam Makover admitted that he had led the assassination squad, and Yehoshua Zeitler acknowledged that, as LEHI chief in Jerusalem, he had directed the entire operation. Zeitler added that he had made the ultimate decision to assassinate Bernadotte along with the three joint leaders of LEHI, Israel Aldad, Nathan Yellin-More and Yitzhak Shamir.
Nonetheless, some analysts still maintain that the triggerman could not have been Cohen. They argue that, first, as the ambush commander, he would only have used his own weapon if the initial assassination attempt by his subordinates had failed. Second, it defies credulity that a cool and experienced commander like Cohen would have acted in such an amateurish fashion and blown the mission, the purpose of which was always to kill Bernadotte only, by spraying the interior of the car with a fusillade of bullets, killing the innocent Seraut, putting others at mortal risk, and further muddying Israel’s image in the world.
