Yehoshua Cohen - Assassination of Bernadotte

Assassination of Bernadotte

In 1948, the Lehi leadership decided that Folke Bernadotte, a United Nations mediator, "deserved a bullet", for his efforts to negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Lehi leadership approved of the assassination, and Yehoshua Zeitler began to make plans for it. Cohen was chosen to lead the actual attack on Bernadotte and picked two other long-time members: Yitzhak Ben Moshe and Avraham Steinberg, to join him.

Cohen began training his team in West Jerusalem in August, practicing with the weapons and tactics they would use in the assassination. During the planning stage, Zetler and Cohen chose to ambush Bernadotte on a narrow road in the Katamon neighborhood, blocking his vehicle with a Jeep across the road and then attacking.

On September 17, 1948, Cohen and his team put their plan into action. As planned, they placed a Jeep across the road to stop Bernadotte's convoy at around 5:00 PM. Moshe and Steinberg then opened fire on the tires of Bernadotte's vehicle, while Cohen fired inside the car with a MP40 machine gun, killing Bernadotte and his aide, Andre Serot.

After the attack, the identity of the assassins remained unclear for some time. Various nations accused each other of complicity in the attack, but eventually it became clear that Lehi was responsible. Although it was an open secret within Lehi and other groups that Cohen was behind the killing, his role was not made public for over forty years.