A Death in Jerusalem.

• Author: Amiel, Barbara

In one of those coincidences that would have delighted Arthur Koestler, the only time I met Kati Marton, author of A Death in Jerusalem, was at a dinner about ten minutes before I was asked to review her book. "My book," she said immediately upon meeting me, "tells the truth about Shamir the assassin." I thought at the time there was a little too much happy enthusiasm about this dire assessment of a former prime minister.

This is Marton's third non-fiction book and its subject is, once more, a life cut short by murder (her previous books include studies of Raoul Wallenberg and the murdered American journalist George Polk). This time it is the assassination of UN Mediator Count Bernadotte by Jewish extremists in Jerusalem. The book, as reviewers like to say before getting their teeth into the author's wrist, does raise some intriguing questions. But in the case of A Death in Jerusalem, the questions are not only about the books subject but about the personality and motivation of its author.

The dust jacket comes studded with endorsements. Diane Sawyer enthuses about what she calls the "human pulse-point of history," while Jim Lehrer found himself unable to put it down. No author can be blamed for the remarks of admirers and anyway the essence of these plaudits is accurate. Miss Marton is a skilled journalist who writes well. The story of how a nephew of the king of Sweden, whose chief accomplishment in life was to discover a keen interest in boy scouting at age thirty-eight, came to be the UN Mediator in the Arab-Israeli dispute is intriguing. His death at the hands of members of the Jewish terrorist organization called Lehi, headed at the time by a triumvirate including former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, gave his name the sort of gravitas it never had in life. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who calls Miss Manon's book "fascinating," claims indeed that the assassination "has stained the politics of Israel ever since."

In the Palestine of the 1940s, as Marton documents, the majority of Jews in the British mandate supported the moderate Jewish Agency to which Israel's first prime minister, Ben Gurion, belonged. The Jewish terrorist underground was composed primarily of two groups, one being the Irgun, which Menachem Begin headed, and the other a splinter group from Irgun founded by Avraham Stern and known as the Lehi or the Stem Gang. When World War II broke out, Ben Gurion called all sides to a truce in the fight with the British. The truce was observed by the Irgun until 1944, but not by Lehi. Ben Gurion's Jewish Agency and later the Israeli Army, the Haganah, took the wrenching decision after the 1944 murder of Lord Moyne by the Irgun to turn Jewish terrorists over to the British -- an action which gave Ben Gurion's Jewish Agency the legitimacy of a governing class.

Immediately after the uN vote that created Israel, the Arab League declared war upon the new state. The UN's answer was to send the Swedish aristocrat, Count Volke Bernadotte, to find a solution. The Bernadotte plan, which leaned heavily on British input, envisioned an internationalized Jerusalem with a large chunk of the Negev given away to Transjordan. The plan was so misconceived that support for it could come from neither Jew nor Arab, but clearly it posed the greater danger to the fledging state of Israel.

Kati Marton's book sees a straight line from Bernadotte's assassination to the massacre of Arab worshippers by an Israeli West Bank settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994. This line, she writes "is all too tragically obvious." The purpose of her book, she continues, is to "help put in perspective the mad dance of violence in which Arabs and Jews have been locked." The purpose is noble but her ratiocination is weak. Technically one may draw a line from Bernadotte's assassination to the murders by Goldstein, but it is not the line Miss Marton sees. She is arguing that Lehi's political philosophy, as expressed in 1948, forms a continuum with the political philosophy of Baruch Goldstein. This is complete nonsense and comes perilously close to President Clinton's notion that there is a fine between anti-statist talk show hosts and the Oklahoma bombing.

The continuum or kinship that does exist is the one that joins those few hundred (or perhaps thousand) people in the world who find it justifiable to murder people for disparate ideologies. Most people can subscribe to anti-statism or oppose the peace process in Israel without committing monstrous crimes. Goldstein's extremism belongs to the realm of pathology. Lehi's assassination of Bernadotte was wrong, but it was not, alas, irrational.

As for the Bernadotte mission itself, Marton blames its tragic end on Bernadotte's optimistic naivete. What Marton misses is that it was not Bernadotte's naivete that led him to his death but rather the fact that he was quite dense. The...