Count Bernadotte Street 1, Gaza

I wonder if the marble street sign still hangs on the wall, or has it fallen like so many of the children and mothers of Gaza?

Folke Bernadotte was a Swedish nobleman (cousin to the king) and highly respected diplomat. He had, in his capacity of vice chairman for the Swedish Red Cross, succeeded in transporting 11 000 people from Nazi concentration camps to Sweden in the last period of WWII.

When the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out on the heels of Israel’s unilateral Declaration of Independence, the United Nations appointed Folke as their official mediator (the first ever). He quickly established a truce. Unfortunately his proposal for maintaining the truce was a relatively fair one.

An Israeli military jeep blocked his car traveling through Jerusalem. One of the four men who got out of the jeep, walked up to the car and shot Bernadotte to death along with the French colonel André Serot sitting next to him.

The assassins went on to make careers in the Israeli government. Yitzhak Shamir, one of the group’s leaders, would eventually become the Prime Minister of Israel.

The character of the Zionists was exposed. That was 1948. The beast was just getting started.