Assassination of UN Peace Negotiator

Zionist gunmen shot dead the UN's peace negotiator for Palestine.

The day before, he finished a report saying Palestinian

refugees had

a right to go home.

No one was ever charged with his murder.

One of the men named as ordering it became Israel's prime minister.

His name was Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish count.

By September, three hundred and sixty thousand Palestinians

were refugees.

Almost every Palestinian in the land Israel held had fled or been

driven out.

Many had nothing left but the clothes they stood in.

In his report, he wrote,

quote, "It would be an offense 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."

The next afternoon in Jerusalem, a Jeep blocked his car in a

neighborhood called Katamon.

A gunman came up and fired through the window.

He was killed with the French officer sitting beside him.

Katamon was a Palestinian neighborhood.

By then, its families were gone and Jewish families were moving into their

empty houses.

He was shot among the homes of the refugees he had spoken for.

The killers came from Lehi, a Zionist militia.

Israel arrested hundreds of its members.

Within five months, every one of them was free.

Israel told the United Nations it had not found enough evidence to charge anyone

with the murder. It said the case was still open.

No one was ever charged with killing him.

Lehi had three leaders.

One of them was Yitzhak Shamir. A historian and a journalist name

him among the men who ordered the killing. He was never charged with it.

Decades later, he became Israel's prime minister.

Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that on the refugee question,

the murder worked to Israel's advantage.

Bernadotte had made the refugees' right to return his personal cause.

The UN man who replaced him pushed for it far less.

Almost none of the refugees he spoke for were ever allowed to go home.