OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Yehoshua Zettler

Yehoshua Zettler, 91, one of the founders of Israel’s LEHI movement, also known as the Stern Gang, and the mastermind of the assassination of a top United Nations envoy in 1948, died May 20 in Israel after a suffering a stroke.

Zettler spent seven years in prison for his role in a bank robbery. He was most famous, however, for planning the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in September 1948.

Bernadotte was a member of the Swedish royal family and, as the U.N. envoy, was responsible for mediating between Jews and Arabs to try to stop the war that followed Israel’s creation. Bernadotte angered LEHI members by suggesting that the boundaries of the 1947 partition plan be revised to put Jerusalem under U.N. control and hand Israel’s Negev desert to Jordan.

As head of the Swedish Red Cross during World War II, he negotiated with top Nazi Heinrich Himmler to save thousands of Jews from concentration camps. LEHI commanders, however, considered him a British agent who cooperated with the Nazis. Zettler planned and supervised the assassination, and the killing was carried out by Yehoshua Cohen.

Zettler was born in Palestine on July 15, 1917, at Kfar Saba, a settlement north of Tel Aviv. After the war of independence, he settled in Tel Aviv, where he owned a gas station.