50-year-old file holds secrets of a murder that still haunts Israelis

Press, 1 July 1983, Page 13

50-year-old file holds secrets of a murder that still haunts Israelis

COLIN SMITH,

of the London “Observer,”

reports on the deadly division in Jewish politics that 50 years ago led to the death of a man who might have become Prime Minister, and which still splits modern Israel.

Secret evidence in a murder case which has haunted Israeli politics for half a century might be revealed next January when 50-year-old police files from the days of British rule in Palestine are due to be made public. Colonial Office files No. 733/266 relate to the killing in 1933 of Dr Haim Arlosoroff, the brilliant, young, Left-wing political director of the World Zionist Congress. Veteran supporters of the Israeli Labour Party consider Arlosoroff certain to have risen to office in Israel, perhaps even to have succeeded Ben Gurion as Prime Minister, and blame his death on the Revisionist Zionists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Abraham Stavsky, a young Jabotinskyite from Menachem Begin’s home town in Poland, who later became one of the heroes of Begin’s Irgun terrorist gang against the British, was sentenced to death for the murder. A month later the appeal court in Jerusalem acquitted him for lack of corroborative evidence, although Mr Justice MacDonald made it clear that he considered Stavsky had escaped the gallows on a legal technicality. Today there are Arlosoroff streets in almost every Israeli town although few of the people living in them, especially the Oriental Jews who now make up the majority of Israel’s population, know why. Yet Arlosoroff’s murder on a warm summer evening 50 years ago was a shot fired in a Zionist civil war which, as the murder of a Peace Now demonstrator last February proved, smoulders to this day. In 1975, Golda Meir wrote in her memoirs: “With Arlosoroff’s murder, what had been a growing friction between the Left and Right wings of the Zionist movement turned into a breach that in some respects has not healed ... and perhaps will never heal entirely.”

Until his death Ben Gurion and other founding figures of the Mapai, the forerunner of the Labour

party which governed Israel for the first 29 years of its existence, were as convinced of Stavsky’s guilt as Mr Justice MacDonald. It was a British law peculiar to Palestine which saved Stavsky. The law demanded at least two witnesses to a murder and was introduced because of the blood feuds

endemic among the country’s Arabs. Over the years Begin has reacted with predictable fury at this besmirching of the honour of a fellow Polish Jew from Brest Litovsk, a man who later became a Jewish Scarlet Pimpernel and smuggled thousands of illegal immigrants into Palestine. He has never accepted that Stavsky got off on a technicality. At one point he described the allegations against him as “a blood libel which has left

an open wound in my heart.” Last year, as Prime Minister, Begin succeeded in doing something he had campaigned for during all his long years in opposition. He appointed a state commission of inquiry into the Arlosoroff affair which sat for the second time last month. During that session the retired Supreme Court judge who heads the commission was told by Professor Joseph Nedava, a lecturer in political science at Haifa University, that the secret British files would certainty throw new light on the case. After the hearing Professor Nedava, a member of the Jabotinskyite youth movement at the time of the killing, explained that he was convinced the files would not have remained classified for so long if they simply upheld the status quo. “The whole thing has been a cover-up,” said the professor, who lias remained firmly on the Right in Israeli politics. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the Zionist Right-wing had decided that the best way to combat the Nazis was to impose a Jewish economic boycott which would bring Germany to its knees. Ben Gupion’s dominant Mapai faction in the World Zionist Congress disagreed. They thought that deals could be made with the Nazis which would not only save Jewish lives but also Jewish property. Arlosoroff, a Russian Jew and, at 34, considered very much the rising star of the Mapai, was sent to Berlin to negotiate the transfer of Jewish property to Palestine. In many ways he was a natural choice. His parents had moved to

Berlin to escape the Ukraine pogroms of 1905 and Arlosoroff had attended university there. According to legend he is supposed to have had a student love affair with a Gentile girl called Magda, who later became the wife of Dr Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief.

The story goes that Magda Goebbels was supposed to provide an entree to the Nazi hierarchy, but this has never been proved. In any event, he was partly successful in his task. The fruit of his labours was seen two years after his death with a wave of German Jewish emigration to Palestine, a development which did much to fuel growing Arab fears of a Jewish take-over. When Arlosoroff returned to Tel Aviv he was castigated by the opposition revisionist Press, who accused him of rank treachery. Years later, in a parliamentary debate on the Arlosoroff affair, Golda Meir recalled: “Any reasonable person could only conclude that young people, persuaded by those articles ... could have resorted to violence.”

On June 15, 1933, shortly after his return, Arlosoroff decided to spend the Shabat week-end with his wife Sima at a Tel Aviv beach hotel called the Kaete Dan. The next evening, at about 10 p.m. when the air was losing its sticky heat, the couple took an afterdinner stroll along the shore. They walked north towards the Yargon River. Two men passed them, moving quickly, then paused so that the Arlosoroffs caught up with them, then overtook them again. The couple turned round and so did the two men who passed them once more and then waited, standing together for Arlosoroff and his wife to come up with them. One of the men, the taller of the two, asked in Hebrew: “Do you have the time?” “Even a Jew can’t see in the dark,” snapped Arlosoroff. “I’ve got a light,” said the tall

man’s companion and shone it in Arlosorff’s face. As he did so a leak in the side of the torch illuminated the features of the tall man who said “Betach!” which is Hebrew for “Certainly.” Then he shot Arlosoroff once in the lower abdomen with a Russian automatic pistol and both men sprinted down the beach.

Haim Arlosoroff died about an hour and a half later in Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv. Professor Nadava thinks that with modern surgery he would almost certainty have survived the wound.

A few days later Abraham Stavsky was arrested at Haifa trying to board a ship with false papers. He answered Sima Arlosoroff’s description of the man who had shot her husband and she later picked him out at an identity parade at Jaffa police station. The investigation was conducted by Captain Harry Patrick Rice, head of the Civil Investigation Department in Jerusalem. Before he died in Cape Town a few years ago the retired policeman gave his son, a novelist who writes under the name of Desmond Meiring, at least 30 hours of taped interviews

on the case in which he remained adamant that Stavsky was guilty as charged. At first Meiring used the material in a novel based on the affair called “The Wall of Glass.” Last year he used some of it again in a non-fiction book on the Middle East entitled “Fire of Islam.” In it he gives a description of the identity parade: “He (Stavsky) was in the yard at Jaffa police station with 10 or 11 others of his height, build, and complexion. He chose his place. Then my father brought Mrs Arlosoroff in. “When she got to Stavsky she went white, raised her hand to point, said “That is the man!” and fainted. It was categoric. My father charged Stavsky for the murder.” Two other men were charged with Stavsky. One, Abba Ahimier, said to have been the organiser, was acquitted at the preliminary hearing. The other, Zvi Rosenblatt, the man alleged to have held the torch who is now reported to be terminally ill in a Tel Aviv hospital, was acquitted at the criminal assize court in Jerusalem because

Mrs Arlosoroff could not identify him.

In the course of these hearings a 17-year-old Arab youth called Abdul Mejid, who had been accused with his elder brother of murdering another Arab in a family vendetta, confessed to killing Arlosoroff. However, the police claimed that Stavsky, who met Mejid when they were in Jaffa jail together, had been able to bribe the Arab to do this because he was too young to hang and was already going to serve a long sentence for the blood debt murder. Mejid later retracted his confession. The revisionists say this was because the police threatened to prove he was 18 and hangable by X-raying him and showing that his bones were fully developed. Most of the people with any knowledge of the case are now in their sixties and seventies. Last month, a lawyer for Haim Arlosoroff’s children at the hearing had to point out to one witness that a conversation he claimed to have had with Mr Begin in 1935 was impossible because the Prime Minister did not arrive in the country until 1942.

A friend of Arlosoroff, a veteran

kibbutznik now in his late seventies, described the commission as grotesque. "Stavsky does not require any posthumous rehabilitation because the court did not find him guilty. What the commission is all about is clearing the revisionist movement of the blame for Arlosoroff’s death."

Abraham Stavsky died during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 but he was not killed by an Arab bullet. Together with Mr Begin he was on board the converted landing craft Allalena which was crammed with arms Irgun was trying to bring ashore despite a United Nations-negotiated cease-fire in which both sides were forbidden to re-equip. Ben Gurion, anxious to maintain the credibility of his new State, ordered the Altalena not to land.

When Irgun tried to beach the craft at Tel Aviv, the Israeli Army shelled it and set it on fire. There were several casualties. Stavsky, dying of wounds, was brought ashore in a small boat. It landed near the Kaete Dan hotel, a few yards from the spot where Arlosoroff had told his killer, “Even a Jew can’t see in the dark.” Copyright — London Observer Service.