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A Death in Jerusalem
An account of the 1948 assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish U.N. mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict, discusses his murder by the Israeli Stern Gang, whose membership included Yitzhak Shamir, and the reasons for the killing.
- GenresHistory
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Kati Marton
17 books180 followersKati Marton is an award-winning former correspondent for NPR and ABC News. She is the author of eight books, the most recent of which is the New York Times-bestselling memoir Paris: A Love Story. Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other works include The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, Wallenberg, A Death in Jerusalem, and a novel, An American Woman. Marton lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 12, 2025
This book was a fairly good description of the murder of Swedish UN mediator Folke Bernadotte by Jewish terrorists. The constant lies and cover ups by the Jewish apartheid state are still as prevalent today whenever they murder people. It's quite sickening to read about the murderers bragging about their deed in front of a laughing studio audience on TV. It says quite a lot about the Israeli state and psyche.
It is important to note, however, that the book is written from a purely Zionist perspective, perhaps not surprising considering Marton's background. One example is the so-called White Paper issued by the British government, which Marton describes in the following way:
The White Paper is described as "reviled" and the thought of a colonial power limiting Jewish migration as absurd.
Meanwhile, the document which really lies at the heart of the Palestinian problem - the Balfour Declaration - where the colonial power hands out land which doesn't belong to them to a group of people who don't live there without consulting the people who actually already live there - is presented by Marton as a given. It's non-controversial, like a law of nature. Nakba isn't mentioned once.
Marton tries hard to set up a scenario with a bad guy and a good guy, and does so by casting terrorist Yitzhak Shamir in the former camp and Ben Gurion who is described as "moderate" and "pragmatic" in the latter. Which makes it possible for her to come up with this inane description of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (my emphasis):
Marton makes the ethnic cleansing of 800 000 people and 531 villages seem like a spontaneous event, something which happened in the heat of the battle. In fact the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a conscious policy decision drawn up by the "moderate" and "pragmatic" Ben Gurion in Plan Dalet (Plan D) which seeds were sown by Ben Gurion as early as the mid-1930's (see for example The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. As Ben Gurion put it himself to the Jewish Agency Executive in June of 1938:
Plan Dalet was well known at the time of Marton writing this book, and one can only wonder why she doesn't even mention it. But of course, pointing out that ethnic cleansing was a conscious policy decision at the highest political level and not spontaneous events would make it quite difficult for her to cast the Jews in their usual role of perpetual victimhood and Ben Gurion as the "moderate" and "pragmatic" great leader.
It is directly responsible for Palestinian refugees still living in limbo in either neighboring countries or under brutal occupation by the Jewish apartheid state in the West Bank and the world's largest concentration camp, Gaza. But of course Marton is careful to quote Yitzhak Rabin claiming that "Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action".
But then again, the Palestinians are of course relegated to the roles of extras in their own history. They're not even described as "Palestinians" but as "Arabs". This is following Zionist hasbara to the letter, where the Palestinians as a people are denied - they're Arab, meaning Jordanians. The only time Marton comes close is when she quotes the ignorant and naive fool Bernadotte:
Disregarding the fact that nationalism as a concept is a fairly new one, any chance she would have gotten a different answer from an actual Palestinian?
Instead Marton writes the following in the same paragraph (my emphasis):
One can only wonder why she neglects to mention the reason for this absence of Palestinian leadership. As Ilan Pappé explains in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (my emphasis):
So it was not that a Palestinian leadership hadn't "emerged", but that the leadership which did exist was exiled by the colonial power. But yet again her reasoning follows decades long Zionist hasbara very closely.
Since Marton apparently aspires to not only write a book about the murder of Bernadotte, but of 1940's history in Palestine, it's quite telling that not a single Palestinian has been interviewed. Any chance they would have a different view of the Balfour Declaration? If memory serves me right, she doesn't even quote any Palestinian.
She at least (very briefly) mentions the massacre at Deir Yassin (although careful not to mention how many actually were murdered by Jewish terrorists). All the sources she quotes (judging from her notes) are Jewish from whom she "learned about Deir Yassin", although there is also "relevant material on the subject" in O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, but careful not to mention the mass rape of old women and schoolgirls described in that very same book.
Deir Yassin is, like My Lai in the Vietnam War, presented as an anomaly. A horrible but singular event, completely ignoring the policy of massacres by the Jewish terrorists like in Bassa, Tantura or al-Lydd, just to mention a few.
As a description of the murder of a UN diplomat this book is fairly good. But as a description of the overarching historical process it's woefully inadequate.
It is important to note, however, that the book is written from a purely Zionist perspective, perhaps not surprising considering Marton's background. One example is the so-called White Paper issued by the British government, which Marton describes in the following way:
The document, issued on May 17, 1939, commonly known as “the White Paper on Palestine,” provided for the establishment of an Arab state within ten years’ time, in which the Jews were not to exceed one-third of the population.
One of history’s most despised documents, the White Paper would have condemned the Jews to remain a permanent minority in Palestine.
The White Paper is described as "reviled" and the thought of a colonial power limiting Jewish migration as absurd.
Meanwhile, the document which really lies at the heart of the Palestinian problem - the Balfour Declaration - where the colonial power hands out land which doesn't belong to them to a group of people who don't live there without consulting the people who actually already live there - is presented by Marton as a given. It's non-controversial, like a law of nature. Nakba isn't mentioned once.
Marton tries hard to set up a scenario with a bad guy and a good guy, and does so by casting terrorist Yitzhak Shamir in the former camp and Ben Gurion who is described as "moderate" and "pragmatic" in the latter. Which makes it possible for her to come up with this inane description of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (my emphasis):
An equally dramatic development for Israel was the flight since April of 300,000 Arabs from Palestine. “The most spectacular event in the contemporary history of Palestine,” Shertok called it in mid-June, “more spectacular than the creation of the Jewish state . . . is the wholesale evacuation of its Arab population . . . after which revision of the status quo ante is unthinkable. It opens up a lasting radical solution of the most vexing problem of the Jewish state.”
This “spectacular event,” whereby hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became wards of established Arab states, was sometimes actively encouraged by Israel.
Marton makes the ethnic cleansing of 800 000 people and 531 villages seem like a spontaneous event, something which happened in the heat of the battle. In fact the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was a conscious policy decision drawn up by the "moderate" and "pragmatic" Ben Gurion in Plan Dalet (Plan D) which seeds were sown by Ben Gurion as early as the mid-1930's (see for example The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. As Ben Gurion put it himself to the Jewish Agency Executive in June of 1938:
I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.
Plan Dalet was well known at the time of Marton writing this book, and one can only wonder why she doesn't even mention it. But of course, pointing out that ethnic cleansing was a conscious policy decision at the highest political level and not spontaneous events would make it quite difficult for her to cast the Jews in their usual role of perpetual victimhood and Ben Gurion as the "moderate" and "pragmatic" great leader.
It is directly responsible for Palestinian refugees still living in limbo in either neighboring countries or under brutal occupation by the Jewish apartheid state in the West Bank and the world's largest concentration camp, Gaza. But of course Marton is careful to quote Yitzhak Rabin claiming that "Great suffering was inflicted upon the men taking part in the eviction action".
But then again, the Palestinians are of course relegated to the roles of extras in their own history. They're not even described as "Palestinians" but as "Arabs". This is following Zionist hasbara to the letter, where the Palestinians as a people are denied - they're Arab, meaning Jordanians. The only time Marton comes close is when she quotes the ignorant and naive fool Bernadotte:
The Palestine Arabs have at present no will of their own. Neither have they ever developed any specifically Palestinian nationalism.
Disregarding the fact that nationalism as a concept is a fairly new one, any chance she would have gotten a different answer from an actual Palestinian?
Instead Marton writes the following in the same paragraph (my emphasis):
Bernadotte’s conclusion, astonishing in light of subsequent events, was nonetheless borne out by the fact that no cohesive Palestinian leadership had emerged to fill a void King Abdullah was only too eager to fill himself.
One can only wonder why she neglects to mention the reason for this absence of Palestinian leadership. As Ilan Pappé explains in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (my emphasis):
After the 1929 uprising, the Labour government in London appeared inclined to embrace the Palestinian demands, but the Zionist lobby succeeded in reorienting the British government comfortably back onto the Balfourian track. This made another uprising inevitable. It duly erupted in 1936 in the form of a popular rebellion fought with such determination that it forced the British government to station more troops in Palestine than there were in the Indian subcontinent. After three years, with brutal and ruthless attacks on the Palestinian countryside, the British military subdued the revolt. The Palestinian leadership was exiled, and the paramilitary units that had sustained the guerilla warfare against the Mandatory forces were disbanded. During this process many of the villagers involved were arrested, wounded or killed. The absence of most of the Palestinian leadership and of viable Palestinian fighting units gave the Jewish forces in 1947 an easy ride into the Palestinian countryside.
So it was not that a Palestinian leadership hadn't "emerged", but that the leadership which did exist was exiled by the colonial power. But yet again her reasoning follows decades long Zionist hasbara very closely.
Since Marton apparently aspires to not only write a book about the murder of Bernadotte, but of 1940's history in Palestine, it's quite telling that not a single Palestinian has been interviewed. Any chance they would have a different view of the Balfour Declaration? If memory serves me right, she doesn't even quote any Palestinian.
She at least (very briefly) mentions the massacre at Deir Yassin (although careful not to mention how many actually were murdered by Jewish terrorists). All the sources she quotes (judging from her notes) are Jewish from whom she "learned about Deir Yassin", although there is also "relevant material on the subject" in O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, but careful not to mention the mass rape of old women and schoolgirls described in that very same book.
Deir Yassin is, like My Lai in the Vietnam War, presented as an anomaly. A horrible but singular event, completely ignoring the policy of massacres by the Jewish terrorists like in Bassa, Tantura or al-Lydd, just to mention a few.
As a description of the murder of a UN diplomat this book is fairly good. But as a description of the overarching historical process it's woefully inadequate.
September 18, 2018
Kati Marton has done an excellent job reporting objectively on the 1948 assassination of the first UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, in the Palestine/Israel partition plan. As the US has recently removed support financially and politically from UNRWA, it is now more relevant than ever that one look back at the earliest days of the partition and re-discover the vital importance of UN humanitarian efforts in one of the longest running world conflicts. Bernadotte's challenges, remain the same challenges all mediators after him faced; the inability to ward off extremism on both sides that forever scuttle any opportunity to compromise.
Though many thought Bernadotte naive and well beyond his depths in Middle East diplomacy, in hindsight, he predicted quite rightly, that the Palestinians driven from their homeland by the armed forces of the new Israeli State, would if not allowed to return, become a refugee crisis of untold proportions. An indeed, that has played out, with 3 generations now in exile. He also predicted that the question of Jerusalem, would keep both Muslims, Jews and Christians forever in a state of crisis if the ancient city was not internationalized.
Though Bernadotte was murdered by extremist (Stern Gang) factions led by Yitzhak Shamir, it is more than clear from Marton's reporting, that everyone from PM Ben Gurion to shopkeepers and children on the street covered up and helped the assassins get away with this horrific crime. It is a stain on the the State of Israel that in its earliest days it employed the tactics of terrorism that it so decries (and rightly so) when it is aimed at its own innocent civilians.
Though many thought Bernadotte naive and well beyond his depths in Middle East diplomacy, in hindsight, he predicted quite rightly, that the Palestinians driven from their homeland by the armed forces of the new Israeli State, would if not allowed to return, become a refugee crisis of untold proportions. An indeed, that has played out, with 3 generations now in exile. He also predicted that the question of Jerusalem, would keep both Muslims, Jews and Christians forever in a state of crisis if the ancient city was not internationalized.
Though Bernadotte was murdered by extremist (Stern Gang) factions led by Yitzhak Shamir, it is more than clear from Marton's reporting, that everyone from PM Ben Gurion to shopkeepers and children on the street covered up and helped the assassins get away with this horrific crime. It is a stain on the the State of Israel that in its earliest days it employed the tactics of terrorism that it so decries (and rightly so) when it is aimed at its own innocent civilians.
March 19, 2020
Journalist Kati Marton's 1994 book opens with a description of the massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron early that year by a far-right Jewish terrorist named Baruch Goldstein. Had her book appeared a year later, a far better opening would have been a description of the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin was killed by a far-right Jewish terrorist who was convinced that he was saving Israel by doing so. And such were the motives of the four young men, members of the Stern Gang (Lehi), who carried out the assassination of UN peace mediator Count Folk Bernadotte in September 1948. Marton's book is an excellent introduction to the subject, and she was able to interview a number of key players, including members of the Lehi hit squad. It is a balanced account, which while obviously unsympathetic to the murderers does attempt to understand why the Swedish diplomat Bernadotte provoked such hatred among some of the Jews of Palestine. One of the stranger parts of this very strange tale is the friendship, many years later, between Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the Lehi assassin who fired the shots into the unarmed and defenceless Bernadotte. As Marton discovered, Ben Gurion knew that his friend and 'bodyguard' had played a role in the murder, which Ben Gurion condemned at the time. But it is not clear if the two men ever discussed what happened. A well-written and gripping tale of a horrific crime for which no one was ever punished.
January 21, 2024
En viktig bok om israelernas egen skuld i mordet på en naiv fredsförhandlare.
July 30, 2021
Valós tényeken, történelmi kutatáson alapuló könyv.
Ami érdekes és jó benne, hogy segít megérteni az 1948-as izraeli-arab konfliktusnak ezt az epizódját, hiszen sokan még csak nem is hallottunk békéltetési kísérletről, sem a vöröskeresztes Folke Bernadotte-ról.
A történetben kifejezetten dühített – a leírás szerint–, a gróf hihetetlen naivitása, tudatlansága, a háborús környezet nem ismerete, ami csak sikertelenségre vezethetett.
Ugyancsak érdekes a leírás az ENSZ tudatos, vagy tudattalan tehetetlenségéről, érdektelenségéről, mint ahogy Anglia szégyenletes szerepéről a konfliktus kirobbantásában.
Ami nagyon nem tetszett, hogy az író (vagy a fordító?) kifejezetten és többször gyilkosságnak minősíti az esetet, amire talán megfelelőbb lenne a merénylet szó, mivel politikai megfontolásból történő kivégzésről van szó. Ezen túl sosincs kimondva "sem ellene, sem mellette" semmi, mégis érezhető, hogy az író nem tudja az eseményeket a saját véleménye nélkül bemutatni, ezért ez sem nem tudományos, sem regénynek nem nevezhető, de fontos és élvezhető könyv.
Ami érdekes és jó benne, hogy segít megérteni az 1948-as izraeli-arab konfliktusnak ezt az epizódját, hiszen sokan még csak nem is hallottunk békéltetési kísérletről, sem a vöröskeresztes Folke Bernadotte-ról.
A történetben kifejezetten dühített – a leírás szerint–, a gróf hihetetlen naivitása, tudatlansága, a háborús környezet nem ismerete, ami csak sikertelenségre vezethetett.
Ugyancsak érdekes a leírás az ENSZ tudatos, vagy tudattalan tehetetlenségéről, érdektelenségéről, mint ahogy Anglia szégyenletes szerepéről a konfliktus kirobbantásában.
Ami nagyon nem tetszett, hogy az író (vagy a fordító?) kifejezetten és többször gyilkosságnak minősíti az esetet, amire talán megfelelőbb lenne a merénylet szó, mivel politikai megfontolásból történő kivégzésről van szó. Ezen túl sosincs kimondva "sem ellene, sem mellette" semmi, mégis érezhető, hogy az író nem tudja az eseményeket a saját véleménye nélkül bemutatni, ezért ez sem nem tudományos, sem regénynek nem nevezhető, de fontos és élvezhető könyv.
January 14, 2013
Kati Marton has written another interesting and thought provoking book. It's well researched and I believe it gives a balanced look at a subject surrounded by emotion. Count Folke Bernadotte was a Swedish nobleman, the uncle and godfather of the king of Sweden. He was the first person who attempted to mediate between the Arabs and Jews regarding Israel. He was asassinated by the Israeli underground, one member who later became prime minister. Even though he represented the UN, that was not enough to keep him safe. Those responsible for the crime never spent a day in jail and his work was mainly forgotten. Little effort was made to solve the crime. I recommend this book to those interested in little known people who strived to make a difference against great odds.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews