Until recently, the West has pledged in the name of a two-state model in the partitioned Israel/Palestine. But it has been replaced by a unitary state that is decreasingly secular and democratic. In retrospect, the two-state solution died in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948.
After World War II, the UN Partition Plan and Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence, a Swedish diplomat and aristocrat, Count Folke Bernadotte, was appointed the UN Security Council mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was the first official mediation in the UN’s history.
In contrast to rumors about the Swede’s “antisemitic bias,” Bernadotte had during the war years negotiated the release of about 450 Danish Jews and more than 30,000 non-Jewish prisoners from Theresienstadt, the Nazi concentration camp.
On the Arab side, reverse rumors faded with the Count’s actions. After achieving an initial truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Bernadotte used it to lay the groundwork for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Ever since then, UNRWA has been a lifeline to generations of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the adjacent Arab countries.
Nonetheless, despite his commitment and caution, the Swede walked into a minefield.
Navigating in a nightmare
Bernadotte knew his job was dangerous and wrote his will before arriving in Palestine. He understood the challenges of a mediator having to navigate among conflicting expectations. “In putting forward any proposal for the solution of the Palestine problem,” he wrote in his diary, “one must bear in mind the aspirations of the Jews, the political difficulties and differences of opinion of the Arab leaders, the strategic interests of Great Britain, the financial commitment of the United States and the Soviet Union, the outcome of the war, and finally the authority and prestige of the United Nations.”
The first Bernadotte plan was submitted in secret to both sides of the conflict in late June, whereas the second Bernadotte plan was published in mid-September 1948. Moscow had recognized the state of Israel both de facto and de jure a year before. During these critical months, the new Israelis saw the Soviets as their prime partner, whereas the U.S. predicted the Jewish state would slide Palestine into a vicious cycle of conflicts.
The secret maneuverings of Israel courting US support, while importing surplus weapons from Eastern Europe were exposed later in October 1948, just days before the U.S. presidential elections, embarrassing President Harry Truman. Yet, for reasons of domestic politics, he made a strongly pro-Zionist declaration, which set the stage for the defeat of the Bernadotte plan in the UN. Meanwhile, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled or fled from their homes in the 1948-1949 war.
Sunset by the Hill of Evil Counsel
On September 17, after submitting his second report, Bernadotte was on his way to Jerusalem. Following a visit to Ramallah, the convoy headed back to Jerusalem. Sitting in the back seat, he was between his Chief of Staff, General Åge Lundström, and French Colonel André Sérot. Sérot had swapped places in the motorcade to join Bernadotte and thank him personally for having saved his wife’s life in a German concentration camp.
The men were used to disruptions. Just weeks earlier, they had encountered an anti-Bernadotte demonstration by the Stern Group, an ultra-nationalist and -violent Jewish gang that blocked the way to the Belgian consulate.
Folke Bernadotte (second from the right) walking with Israeli liaison officer, Moshe Hillman (right), at the entrance to the Belgian Consulate in Talbiah, Jerusalem. They are followed by US General William E. Riley (left) and French Colonel André Sérot (second from left)
The big Chrysler, the last of the three-car convoy, began its final ascent up the narrow road through the Jewish-occupied district of Katamon towards Rehavia and Jerusalem’s military governor. Two years before, Katamon had been a prosperous, mainly Palestinian Christian neighborhood. During the 1947–1948 hostilities, the local population fled the intense fighting in the area. When they tried to return to their homes, the latter had been taken over by the new Israeli state. Katamon would be repopulated by Jewish refugees.
As the cars passed a road barrier, they arrived at the foot of the Hill of Evil Counsel. When the UN convoy began to slow down, they saw an Israeli army jeep beside an abandoned roadblock. Three Israeli soldiers in khaki shorts asked them to stop. Carrying Sten guns, the men strode along the stationary cars. Sitting in the leading UN vehicle, Moshe Hillman, the motorcade’s Israeli liaison officer, called out in Hebrew to let them through. “Let us pass. It’s the UN mediator,” he said. But he was ignored.
One of the Israelis ran to the Chrysler, pushed the barrel of his sub-machine gun through the opened rear window, and pumped six bullets into Bernadotte’s chest, throat and left arm and another 18 into the French colonel next to him. Rushing out of the first car, Hillman ran back to the Chrysler. When he saw the profusely bleeding bodies, he jumped in beside the driver. As they speeded or the hospital, Colonel Sérot was dead and Bernadotte bent forward. His rows of decorations were torn by the bullets, but he was still alive. As soon as they arrived at Hadassah, Bernadotte was carried inside. But when the doctor began to examine Bernadotte, the Swede stopped breathing.
It was 5 pm and the Old City bathed in a beautiful sunset.
The Stern assassins
To Stern, Bernadotte was “the enemy of all those who – regarded a pro-Soviet policy as the only guarantee of Israel’s survival.” After all, Stalin had recognized the Israeli state de jure; Truman hadn’t.
A day after the assassination, General Åge Lundström, Bernadotte’s chief of staff, assessed that it was “a deliberate and carefully planned assassination.” Lundström was right. But the path to the assassination had been paved a month before, when Stern members protested against Bernadotte during his meeting with Israel’s first foreign minister, Moshe Sharett. The Sternists were waving placards declaring: “Stockholm is Yours; Jerusalem is Ours!”
Goldfoot Stanley, a Jewish immigrant from South Africa, had settled in Jerusalem and worked as a foreign correspondent for several Western dailies, including France Soir and the New York Times. His connections and sources were invaluable to the underground. Contributing to several Stern operations, Stanley had participated in the infamous Deir Yassin massacre in which more than 100 Arab villagers, including women and children, were massacred.
In mid-September, Stern leaders got his hint on Bernadotte’s itinerary in Jerusalem. The assassination was planned in his apartment. Bernadotte’s assassination was approved by Stern’s leadership: Yitzhak Yezernitsky (later known as Yitzhak Shamir, Begin’s successor as Israel’s PM and Benjamin Netanyahu’s onetime mentor), Nathan Friedmann (Natan Yellin-Mor) and Yisrael Eldad. The plan was crafted by Yehoshua Zettler, Stern’s operations chief in Jerusalem, and the actual shooter was Yehoshua Cohen.
The attribution of the assassination to Stern was disputed for 60 years. Nor did the assassins pay for their crime. The Netanyahu cabinets regard them as heroes. When Eldad, Stern’s far-right ideologue and oracle of Israel’s far-right, passed away in 1996, the burial was attended by both Netanyahu and the his PM predecessor Yitzhak Shamir, the ex-Stern leader.
Although Yehoshua Cohen’s involvement was an open secret within Stern and other groups, he was never charged, and his role was not made public for over 40 years until it was uncovered by David Ben-Gurion’s biographer. The two became close friends. Cohen was one of the founders of the Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev Desert, where David Ben-Gurion later retired and where he became BG’s bodyguard and close confidant.
A few years later, Trygve Lie, the UN’s first Secretary General who had appointed Bernadotte to his post, met Ben-Gurion in the kibbutz. To Lie’s great surprise, the meeting was attended by Cohen, Bernadotte’s assassin. The Norwegian hated every minute of it and swore he would never return to Sde Boker. Cohen couldn’t have cared less. He died peacefully in 1986.
False Flag operation?
Today, the identities of the Bernadotte assassins are known. What is less clear is who gave the assignment. Though fully informed of threats against Bernadotte’s life, Israeli authorities had sent no escort. Following their operations, the Stern group habitually disclosed its role publicly. So, why didn’t it claim credit for one of its most successful high-profile operations?
Subsequently, many Stern members were disarmed and arrested, but nobody was charged with the killings, and the case, which was barely investigated, was closed. Stern suspects were detained after the assassination, but they were not treated like other prisoners. As Time magazine reported, these prisoners at Jaffa made their own rules, ripped bars from the windows and tore down the steel doors connecting their cells: “The Sternists threw open the door of the jail, disarmed the guards, directed traffic in the square where a great crowd had gathered. Some prisoners strolled off to the beach for a swim. Others relaxed with prison guards over coffee in a nearby café.”
Shortly after the assassination, the U.S. and UK intelligence learned that the Czechoslovak Consulate in Jerusalem had issued visas for the day of the murder to fly the actual assassins to Prague on a Czech aircraft with false passports and false names.
The odd story got another twist in 2005, when the British declassified files featured a 1949 letter from the then Belgium Consul General, Jean Niewenhuys. It referred to a “reliable source” who acknowledged that the assassins were from Stern, but working for Israel. The files suggested the real architect of the assassination was Reuven Shiloah, subsequently Mossad’s first director, who had been involved in the ceasefire talks.
After the assassination, the Swedish government thought that Bernadotte had been assassinated by Israeli government agents.
Israel’s PM Ben-Gurion noted in his personal diary that Yehoshua Cohen, then his close confidant, was involved in the assassination. But he chose not to arrest the killers and put them on trial.
The inconvenient truth
At the time, Col. Moshe Dayan, Ben-Gurion’s key military protégé, served as Israel’s commander in Jerusalem. In close cooperation with BG, Dayan would soon plot for border wars to escalate a “second round” of open conflict with Arab countries, in order to expand Israel’s boundaries. These paved the way to the failed Sinai Campaign in 1956 and the successful Six-Day War in 1967, which led up to 300,000 Palestinians to lose their homes in the West Bank and Gaza.
After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Egypt signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. But as the peace process did not take off and Israel refused to give up the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, President Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and the stage was set for the rise of the Messianic far-right in Israel and successive wars, including the long-lasting Lebanese War, Palestinian Uprisings, Israel’s brutal counter-insurgency operations in Gaza and the West Bank, a peace process undermined by PM Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and several wars against Gaza and its residents.
Yet, the dream of the two-state solution continued to be sustained by Israel’s Western allies until that became untenable, thanks to the Biden and Trump administrations’ tacit complicity. As Gaza has been obliterated and ethnic expulsions occur in daylight in the West Bank, a unitary Jewish state is a matter of time.
What was the sin that doomed Bernadotte’s life prematurely? Having witnessed the horrible outcome of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and hoping to avert a catastrophe in Palestine, he proposed that the UN should establish a Palestine conciliation commission, while Arab refugees would have a full right to return to their homes in Jewish-controlled territory.
It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.
Here’s the inconvenient truth in a nutshell: The two-state model died with the last breath of the UN’s first mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948.
Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/.
This commentary draws from Dr. Steinbock’s The Fall of Israel (Clarity Press, 2025) focusing on the transformation of Israel, ethnic cleansing and genocidal atrocities, the Gaza War and regional escalation.
