A Death in Jerusalem: The Assassination by Jewish Extremists of the First Arab/Israeli

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.

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.