The Anniversary of the Assassination of Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg: September 17 1948

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Saturday September 18, 2004 02:40 by Lest We Forget The Righteous Peacekeepers

Count Folke Bernadotte, special UN Mediator to Mid East ...responsibile for saving 20,000 Jews from Himmler was assassinated this day, September 17 1948. The man directly responsible for his death, Nathan Friedman-Yellin was sentenced, pardoned after 5 months and was allowed to serve on Knesset

Bernadotte's plan called for the right of Palestinian refugees to return. In particular he claimed that it was unreasonable that Jews with no previous connection with Palestine could enter the country, while Palestinians who had just been forced to flee could not return to their villages.

He was assassinated, along with UN observer Colonel André Serot, on September 17th in Jerusalem by members of Lehi,* a Zionist extremist group also known as the "Stern Gang", after its founder.

Lehi was founded by Stern in 1940 as an offshoot from Irgun. It was initially named Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael (National Military Organization in Israel). Following Stern's death in 1942, and the arrest of many of its members, the group went into eclipse until it was reformed as "Lehi" under a triumvirate of Israel Eldad, Natan Yellin-Mor, and Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir became the Prime Minister



January 2, 1895 - September 17, 1948

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte

http://www.aqsa.org.uk/journals/vol1iss2/ampolicy.html

American Policy Towards the Palestinian Refugees Since 1948

A Special Report

The World’s oldest and most intractable refugee problem is that of the exiled Palestinians. Since 1948 more than half of the entire Palestinian population have lived outside of their ancestral land. The immediate cause of their dispersal was the 1947 UN decision to partition their land and grant 56% of it to Jewish immigrants mainly from Europe. Driven by an apparent sense of guilt for their own persecution of European Jews, the victorious allies led by the United States sought atonement by supporting large scale Jewish emigration to Palestine. When confronted with resistance from the indigenous people, the Zionist settlers in turn unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror which triggered an exodus of Palestinians that is continues until this day.