ABSTRACT
On May 19, 1948, Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte was appointed United Nations mediator. The next day, Lie asked Bunche to join the Count and serve as his personal representative in his entourage. For Bunche, the proposal came as “a great shock,”1 but Lie promised that the assignment would be over soon and made it clear that there was no getting out of it. Bunche accepted the job with evident reluctance. Lie, who had told him to leave “tomorrow,” acceded to Bunche’s request to take a few days to get organized.2 He again recruited Reedman, Stavropoulos, Mohn, and Vigier to join him. On May 24, when he met Bernadotte in Paris, he discovered that the United Nations had once again chosen someone totally ignorant about the Palestine issue for this critical and complex mission. Bunche began by giving his new boss a comprehensive briefing on the problem. From then on and until Bernadotte’s assassination, Bunche was the Count’s main source of information on Palestine. Despite the marked differences in the two men’s personalities and their different points of departure for this joint mission, they respected each other. Bernadotte, authoritarian, charismatic, and optimistic by nature, came to the mission eager to succeed, while Bunche, who lacked these characteristics, spent its first stages in a sense of total despair about the Palestine issue, pessimistic about the mediator’s prospects for success.3 Bunche’s analysis was sober. The Arab armies’ invasion of Palestine on May 15 marked a new nadir for the UN: The conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jewish Yishuv had turned into a war between the State of Israel and a military coalition of Arab countries. Although the deterioration in the situation was neither sudden nor unexpected, the UN and its various organs proved unable to forestall the disaster, even though they had been involved in the events since the previous December. Even when the Security Council convened on May 15 to discuss the Egyptian government’s announcement that its army had invaded Palestine to “restore order,” its handling of the crisis was slow and disappointing. The Council’s members argued about the wording of the call for a halt to the fighting in Palestine. The Soviets demanded that the Arabs be labeled the “aggressors” and threatened with sanctions, while the British refused to do so and warned they would employ their veto if a resolution of that kind were drafted. In an urgent telegram to the permanent members of the Council, Lie
stressed that this was the first time since the UN’s establishment that member countries were conducting military operations outside their own territory, and that the action ran counter to the UN’s decisions about the Palestine issue (the respite that the Truce Commission was trying to achieve and the decision to appoint a mediator), whose goal was to bring peace to Palestine. Lie expected the Council to act quickly and resolutely. But the Arabs rejected the Council’s May 22 call for a four-week halt in the fighting. A more insistent appeal on May 29 was also ignored. Nevertheless, it formed the basis for the mediator’s subsequent activity.4 The Security Council essentially preferred to drop the task of achieving a truce in Bernadotte’s lap. Its calls for a cease-fire did not go into any details of the terms and how it would be implemented. It soon became clear that the Security Council was not an appropriate setting for rapid and clear decisions because of its internal divisions and its distance from the center of events and the representatives of the warring sides. This situation was also reflected in the mediator’s broad and ambiguous commission, which included roles that were a product of the vacuum left after the British withdrawal and authorized him to promote “a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine.” This rather general clause essentially authorized the mediator to act in Palestine as he saw fit.5 Who was Bernadotte? What were his qualifications for such an important position? The answers to these questions are not unequivocal. During the Second World War, when he served as deputy head of the Swedish Red Cross, Bernadotte helped secure the release of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. In the last days of the war, Bernadotte represented Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi extermination operation, in the latter’s attempt to arrange for a German surrender to the United States and Great Britain (but not to the Soviet Union).6 Soon after the war, the Count published a book that described his rescue of thousands of persons from the Nazis, including many Jews, as his own personal triumph. The book gave Bernadotte an international reputation and put on him on the fast track to the position of United Nations mediator. After his death, however, serious questions were raised about his actions during the Second World War. Felix Karsten, Himmler’s personal physician and the moving spirit behind the release of the concentration camp prisoners, asserted that not only had Bernadotte described the events from a biased perspective, appropriating all the credit to himself and ignoring others who had made more important contributions to the rescue enterprise, but that he had also stubbornly refused to include Jewish prisoners in the deals to release prisoners from the camps and was in fact anti-Semitic. The bitter controversy set off by Karsten has not yet been resolved. Some accept the position that Bernadotte refused to accept Jewish prisoners and did so only after this had been forced on him,7 while others believe that these charges are groundless.8 Bunche, who was not shy about noting which UN staff members and representatives struck him as anti-Semitic, did not expressly assign Bernadotte to this category. It does seem, though, that the Count had his prejudices about the Jews
and a negative opinion of the intention to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. From the very outset, he averred his opposition to the Partition Plan. Within a short while his relationship with the leaders of Israel ran aground. Bunche remarked that the Count “prefers [to] confer with A[rabs] to J[ews]” and noted that he made unflattering gestures “implying shylocks.”9 Bernadotte did not become a reviled and hated figure in the Israeli press and street until the beginning of July, after the details of his plan became clear, but harbingers of this were evident from his first days in Israel. In early June, Ben-Gurion suspected that someone in the mediator’s party was conveying intelligence reports to the Arabs that made it possible for them to bomb his house and headquarters. The press began criticizing him frequently. Yehoshua Zettler, the Lehi commander in Jerusalem who ultimately directed the Lehi squad that assassinated the Count, got the impression that he treated Israeli leaders in a vulgar and arrogant manner.10 Bernadotte got no comfort from the Arab side, either. From the minute he set foot in the Middle East, the Arabs consistently accused him of being “proJewish” and claimed that his family was related through marriage with Jews and was well known for its support of Zionism.11 Given the situation in which he began his work, it is difficult to say that the attitude towards him was unexpected. Both sides felt that the UN had betrayed and abandoned them. Bernadotte had landed too late to put out the fire and could not avoid being scorched by the flames. This makes it all the more surprising that Bunche was cordially received by all. With the Israelis, he had his good record from UNSCOP. (Bunche tried to polish it at the beginning of his mission by sharing with the Israelis, “in strictest confidence,” his assessment of the situation of the Arab armies, as mentioned at a meeting of the provisional government.12) But the Arabs, too, who placed such great hopes in the fighting that the mediator and his staff were trying to bring to an end, did not treat him coldly. Bunche was amazed at this. “Arabs cordial to me despite UNSCOP,” he noted in his diary.13 Until the tragic end of Bernadotte’s mission, Bunche’s status among the Arabs kept improving. Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British ambassador in Amman, reported that Bunche had greater influence in Arab circles than Bernadotte did. There was something paradoxical here. As time passed, it turned out that Bernadotte had pro-Arab inclinations, whereas Bunche was occasionally criticized by the Arabs for just the opposite.14
