Haim Arlosoroff - Assassination

Assassination

On 16 June 1933, just two days after his return from negotiations in Germany, Haim Arlosoroff was murdered. He was killed while walking with his wife Sima on a beach in Tel Aviv. Arlosoroff's funeral was the largest in the history of the British Mandate of Palestine, with an estimated assemblage of 70,000 to 100,000 mourners. The death of Arlosoroff greatly aggravated political relations within the Zionist movement.

Abba Ahimeir, the head of an activist group with fascist tendencies, the Brit HaBirionim, was charged by the Palestine Police Force with plotting the assassination. Ahimeir was also a leader of the nationalist Zionist Revisionist faction whose publication, "Hazit HaAm" continuously attacked the Labor movement and Zionist leaders, including Arlosoroff, calling him names and stating that the Jewish people "will know how to react to such villains". Two rank-and-file Revisionists, Abraham Stavsky and Ze'evi Rosenblatt, were arrested as the actual murderers and were identified by Arlosoroff's widow. All three vehemently denied the accusation.

The district court acquitted Ahimeir and Rosenblatt but convicted Stavsky, who, however, was eventually acquitted by the Supreme Court for lack of corroborating evidence, as the law then required. The defense accused the police of manipulating the widow’s testimony and other evidence for political reasons, and expounded the theory that the murder was connected to an intended sexual attack on Sima Arlosoroff by two young Arabs. Stavsky later rose within Irgun ranks and was responsible for the procurement of the Irgun arms vessel known as the "Altalena." He was killed in the altercation involving the control of the arms with the newly established Israel Defense Forces on the Beach of Tel Aviv.

In addition to the theories that people connected to the revisionist movement are the perpetrators of murder and that it was an intended sexual attack by two Arabs there are theories connecting it to the Soviet and Nazi regimes. One involves the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels: During the first world war, Magda Behrend, who later became the wife of Joseph Goebbels, met and became close friends with Lisa Arlosoroff, Haim Arlosoroff's sister. The nature of her relationship with Haim Arlosoroff is unknown. Magda married Goebbels on 19 December 1931, with Adolf Hitler as a witness. A year and a half later, Arlosoroff went to Germany to negotiate the Ha'avarah (transfer) agreement with high Nazi officials. The theory is that with Haim Arlosoroff's personal involvement in the negotiations, Goebbels took notice of his wife's former Jewish friend and sought to erase what might have been an embarrassment for the Goebbelses. Magda's former Jewish stepfather, Richard Friedländer, was arrested on Goebbels orders and died in the concentration camp in 1938. The Soviet connection was promoted by Shmuel Dothan in 1991 to counter what the Soviet considered as a global military plot against them.

For years figures belonging to the right-wing claimed to be wrongfully accused by Mapai of being responsible for Arlosoroff's death. About fifty years after the murder, following the publication of a book on the assassination by Shabtai Teveth in 1982, the Israeli government, now led by Menachem Begin, established a formal investigative committee. As the first Israeli Prime Minister elected from the Revisionist movement, Begin had taken offense at a suggestion in Teveth's book that a Revisionist acquitted in court for Arlosoroff's murder may have actually been responsible after all. The Judicial Commission of Enquiry was led by the former High court of Justice Judge David Bachor. Its purpose was to decide whether Rosenblatt and Stavsky were responsible for assassinating Arlosoroff, or not. The committee decided unanimously that Rosenblatt and Stavsky had nothing to do with the murder. The committee was inconclusive about the identity of the real murderers or whether or not the murder was politically motivated.