Eitan Altman
Was
Israeli government involved in the assassination of Kastner so as to
silence the debate on the collaboration of the zionist leadership with
the Nazis? See http://www.haaretz.com/news/
Declassified: Shin Bet knew Israel Kastner was targeted
Just-released 1956 cabinet minutes on assassination of journalist and public figure who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis only deepen the mystery surrounding one of stormiest affairs in country's history.
Israel Kastner, assassinated in 1957 by Lehi activists.
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By Tom Segev | Dec. 11, 2014 | 1:47 PM
By Dan Laor | Nov. 9, 2013 | 1:23 PM | 
6
Paragraph
380 of the minutes of the cabinet meeting of March 11, 1957 remain
classified to this day. Its heading: “Assassination of Dr. I. Kastner,”
could explain why. “Dr. Kastner’s assassins have been found and
confessed,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said at the start of the
meeting. “The individual who did the shooting carried out the work of
others. There is an organization that appointed him to shoot … he did
not do it of his own accord.”
Portions
of the 20 pages of minutes are being published here for the first time,
after the head of the State Archive, Dr. Ya’akov Lozowick, acceded to
Haaretz’s request to open them to the public, except for a few sentences
that are still censored.
A
look at the minutes only deepens the mystery surrounding one of the
stormiest affairs in Israel’s history, and could strengthen the
conjecture of some that the Shin Bet security service was involved in
the murder of Kastner, one of the most controversial figures in the
history of the state.
The
minutes raise difficult questions, such as why the head of the
intelligence services, Isser Harel, requested that the murderers be
pardoned before they had finished out their prison terms. Why was the
murder not stopped even though the Shin Bet knew the plan was afoot. Why
was the murderer not put on trial earlier, for distributing defamatory
leaflets?
Assassin's new book
In
conversation with Kastner’s daughter, Suzi Kastner, and from reading
the new book by the assassin, Ze’ev Eckstein, another question comes up:
Who was the other man who shot Kastner to confirm the kill?
Dr.
Israel Kastner, a journalist and public figure, was shot at the
entrance to his Tel Aviv home on March 4, 1957 and died of his wounds 11
days later. Two years earlier, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that
Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil,” collaborated with the Nazis
and indirectly contributed to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry in
return for the saving of some 1,700 “distinguished” Jews. Ten months
after the murder, the Supreme Court cleared his name, but determined
that he had assisted Nazis to escape their punishment after the war.
Harel
told the cabinet that the intelligence services knew of the plan to
kill Kastner and had arrested eight people who were “among potential
terrorists.” One of them, who was convicted of the murder and
imprisoned, was Eckstein. Harel told the cabinet that Eckstein had taken
part in a 1955 plan to assassinate Kastner that did not go forward.
Harel’s
statements to the cabinet do not conform to the version he related in
his book, “The Truth About the Kastner Murder,” published in Hebrew in
1985. There, the murder was presented as a surprise. “It was clear that
the assassination was planned in a small, very closed group and kept a
deep secret among the planners and those who carried out the plan,” he
wrote.
Dr.
Yitzhak Katzir, Kastner’s nephew, told Haaretz this week that he knew
of no concrete warning that his uncle would be murdered. However, he
said, “Friends warned him that he was a candidate for assassination,
along the lines of, ‘The bullet with your name on it is in the gun
barrel.’”
Kastner
was given a bodyguard by the Shin Bet, who “for some reason was pulled
off a few days before the murder,” Katzir said, adding that this fact
encouraged those who believed in a conspiracy theory involving the Shin
Bet.
And
a related, even more explosive question is whether the organization
itself was involved with various conspiracy theories promulgated over
the years. To understand them, it must be recalled that Eckstein, the
assassin, worked as an informant for the Shin Bet before the murder.
Harel
told the cabinet, according to the minutes, that ties with Eckstein
were cut off before the murder, once it was realized that he was a
double agent. “Two years ago, he called the police of his own accord and
proposed working against the underground,” Harel said at the time,
adding, “But later it became clear that this man came to the police with
bad intentions, that is, he was guided in this matter by the members of
the underground.”
Killer: 'Woe is me'
Eckstein,
now 81, confirms these statements in his recent book “Smichat Tla’im”
(“Quilt Blanket”) (Carmel Publishing House, 2014). “Little by little,
without feeling how the change was taking place in my thoughts, in my
opinions – and finally in my desires as well – the understanding grew
stronger in me that when I spy and inform for ‘ours’ against ‘them,’ I
am lying in my soul,” Eckstein wrote. He described how he became
entranced with the underground against whom he was sent to spy. “They
knew they were surrounded by agents and provocateurs, and I understood
that if I wanted to be part of them, I had to bring them a suitable
‘dowry’ and thus – woe is me – I became the servant of two masters.”
Harel
told the cabinet about Eckstein’s arrest for handing out leaflets
defaming Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Moshe Peretz, who was about
to find Kastner innocent of perjury in his trial.
Harel
told the ministers that the reason Eckstein was not tried was a lack of
evidence, and because the justice minister feared people would say he
was a provocateur.
But
in his book, Harel tells it differently. “The unfortunate decision not
to try the people who initiated and distributed the leaflet … was what
doubtless gave rise to the diabolical idea that Kastner’s murder would
be carried out by Eckstein, … the man who could claim if arrested that
he had carried out the despicable act on orders of the security
service.” In this way, Harel wrote, the planners of the murder hoped to
kill two birds with one stone – kill Kastner, whom they hated … and pin
it on the political and government establishment.
Eckstein,
in his book, alludes to another person’s involvement in the murder.
“Another shot thundered at the very instant of my third shot, followed
by agonizing cries. Apparently someone was there, in any event, carried
out confirmation of the kill and, as a true professional, did not miss
even in the dark.”
Kastner’s
daughter told a similar story this week. She says she remembers clearly
“a torn piece of paper, a small note,” on which the family took down
Kastner’s words as he was taken to the hospital, which spoke of another
person who was involved in the shooting. That person was never arrested.
“My
father got out of the car. Eckstein tried to shoot him and it didn’t
work. My father fled, ran into the building, but somebody prevented him
from going in. He ran out again, and took a bullet in the back,” Suzi
Kastner says, recalling her father’s words, adding, “Regretfully, I do
not remember today where I laid that piece of paper.”
Suzi
Kastner says she believes the mysterious other man, who confirmed the
kill, was a Shin Bet agent, and that a senior Shin Bet official was
behind the murder, to take revenge on Kastner for not saving his family
in the Holocaust.
Still
censored in the cabinet minutes are statements by Police Minister
Shalom Sheetrit, to which Harel responded: “There is proof that they
assassinated Kastner.” Did Sheetrit doubt that Eckstein and his
accomplices, Dan Shemer and Yosef Menkes, were the actual murderers, and
raise the possibility that the Shin Bet had assassinated Kastner?
Harel
made a surprising suggestion to the cabinet: “If we can release the
young men on bail by the time the trial ends and they behave all right,
the judge will make his ruling, but they can be pardoned later.”
Indeed,
in 1963, only six years after the murder, the three were pardoned and
released. According to Prof. Yehiam Weitz, in a 1997 book about the
Kastner trial, there was no conspiracy here. Rather, the pardon was
pushed forward by a former Lehi underground member, Yehoshua Cohen, a
member of Kibbutz Sde Boker who was very close to Ben-Gurion.
“Many
questions, and eventually a great many questions, have been gathered in
the reservoir on questions-not-asked, and if they were asked, they were
not answered,” Eckstein wrote in his book.
‘Grand show’
In
February of 1963, when Ben-Gurion met with the family to inform them he
had decided to pardon the murderers, he said: “The daughter is
completely at peace with the release.” But Suzi Kastner is still not at
peace. “Everything was a farce. …Even while in the midst of talking to
him I had all kinds of doubts,” she said this week, referring to
Ben-Gurion. About 17 at the time of her father’s murder, she says, “I
went to the army, I got married, the years went by.” Today she is sure
that the conversation with Ben-Gurion was part of a grand show to hide
the truth of her father’s murder.
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