Meir Tobianski | |
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מאיר טוביאנסקי | |
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| Born | Meir Tobianski (1904-05-20)20 May 1904 |
| Died | 30 June 1948(1948-06-30) (aged 44) |
| Cause of death | Execution by firing squad |
| Occupation | Soldier |
Meir Tobianski (Hebrew:מאיר טוביאנסקי, alsoTubianski; 20 May 1904 – 30 June 1948) was an officer in theIsrael Defense Forces (IDF) who was executed as a traitor on circumstantial evidence on the orders ofIsser Be'eri, the first director of the IDF'sintelligence branch. A year after the execution, Tobianski was exonerated of all charges.
Tobianski was born inLithuania and served as a major in the British Army during theSecond World War, then a captain in theHaganah, and was later sworn into the IDF on 28 June 1948, during the1948 Arab-Israeli War.[1] He was also the former commander ofCamp Schneller, a military base inJerusalem.[2] In June 1948 Tobianski had been transferred to command of Jerusalem airstrips.[3] He was an employee of the British-run Jerusalem Electric Corporation. Suspected of passing information on targets for Jordanian artillery, he was taken into custody and sentenced to death byfiring squad.
Tobianski was born in Kovno (nowKaunas), Lithuania, then part of theRussian Empire, to a Jewish family in 1904. He grew up in Kovno andBratislava and graduated from the Kovno Hebrew Gymnasium in 1920. He served in theLithuanian Army and studied engineering in Russia and Lithuania. Tobianski immigrated toMandatory Palestine in 1925. Initially, he worked in physical labor, including agricultural activities in the fields ofBinyamina. After contracting fever while digging a well, he abandoned physical labor and enlisted in thePalestine Police Force. He also joined theHaganah. DuringWorld War II, he enlisted in theBritish Army. He served in theRoyal Engineers and reached the rank of Major. After the war, he worked as an engineer with the British-ownedJerusalem Electric Corporation. He was sworn into theIsrael Defense Forces on 28 June 1948.[4]
Tobianski was married to Chaya and had a son named Ya'akov.
Even prior to the 1948 war, the Haganah had a policy of executing spies and collaborators. In the summer of 1947,Moshe Kelman commanded a Haganah squad which executed a Jew accused of collaborating with the British. The execution took place at KibbutzDafna.[5][6] During thesiege of Jerusalem, the reports and fears of spies abounded.Lehi alone had executed 4 "spies" in Jerusalem includingVera Ducas, a 36-year-old female Austrian Jew who was shot on 29 March.[7] In June, there was a report that "nine Jewish girls are being held by the [Israeli] Army under suspicion of contacts with the enemy."[8] The apparent accuracy of Jordanian shelling of strategic targets led to suspicions that a spy was responsible. Those suspicions were focused on the Jerusalem Electric Corporation.
On 8 July 1948, theIrgun arrested five British officials of the Jerusalem Electric Corporation.[9] One of the men was Michael Bryant, to whom Tobianski had been accused of passing information. A month later, they were transferred to the Israeli authorities and on 12 August brought to trial. Three, including Bryant, were released due to lack of evidence.[10] The remaining two men, George Hawkins and Fredrick Sylvester, faced a second trial on 16 September. Hawkins, who was charged with passing information to the Arabs, was released on 30 September. Sylvester, who was married to an Israeli and had been a member of the Palestine Police, was charged with espionage and complicity in theBen Yehuda Street bombing. On 6 October, he was found guilty of three charges of espionage and sentenced to seven years in prison. The verdict rested on his possession of a radio with which he had been communicating with the British Consul in the Old City.[11] In November 1948, he was acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court and released.[12]
During the1948 Arab-Israeli War, Tobianski worked for the Jerusalem Electric Corporation and had knowledge of the exact location of several arms manufacturers inJerusalem. These factories had received direct hits from Jordanian artillery.[13]
After arriving atTel Aviv on 30 June 1948, Tobianski was taken into custody byShmuel Granizi in the Carmel market. Contrary to the Chief Military Prosecutor's order to arrest and interrogate Tobianski for 10 days,[2] Tobianski was driven fromTel Aviv toHulda and then onto a deserted school building between the depopulated former Palestinian Arab villages ofBayt Susin andBayt Jiz, where he was subject to adrumhead court-martial.[13] During the court martial, Tobianski was interrogated byIsser Be'eri,David Kron,Binyamin Gibli andAvraham Kidron.[13] He admitted to showing a list of the consumers to Michael Bryant, British manager of the Jewish section of the Jerusalem Electric Corporation, although the list 'vanished'.[13]
Be'eri, who was late for the trial, had already prepared a firing squad of six soldiers from thePalmachYiftach Brigade, which was in control of the Jerusalem corridor zone.
Tobianski was found guilty and executed in Bayt Jiz, where his body was buried. He had received neither a lawyer nor the right to appeal, and his case was not reviewed by a higher court.[13]
Several months later, anIsraeli Arab by the name of Ali Qasim, who had spied for Israeli intelligence, was found dead in a forest nearHaifa. Be'eri was suspected of ordering his execution, on suspicion of being adouble agent. Be'eri admitted to the charges in court and was dismissed from his service in the Israel Defense Forces. Due to the efforts of Tobianski's widow, theMilitary Advocate General ordered Tobianski's case to be reviewed byMilitary Advocate GeneralAharon Hoter-Yishai; Tobianski was exonerated by the inquiry.[14][15]
Among the interrogated was Avraham Gorali, the chief military prosecutor at the time, who claimed that the execution was done without his knowledge. However, the chiefmilitary police officer, Danny Magen, stated that Gorali contacted him by phone one day before the execution and asked about the possibility of the Military Police Corps carrying out the punishment, which Magen refused. Gorali admitted to such a call, but the investigation's report stated that this was likely an attempt to assess the possibility of carrying out a death sentence in the IDF, and did not imply knowledge of the outcome of the trial.[16]
On 1 July 1949, a year after Tobianski's wrongful execution, the Israeli government informed his widow of Tobianski's posthumous acquittal and reinstatement to rank. On 5 July,Prime Minister Ben-Gurion publicly exonerated Tobianski. On 7 July, his body was reburied in the IDF's burial grounds onMount Herzl with full military honors. High-ranking Israeli military officers attended the funeral, and the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel,Benzion Uziel, delivered the eulogy.[17][18] On his military gravestone is written, "killed by mistake". Ben-Gurion excused Be'eri's actions: "perhaps because the underground laws were still dominant in the army".[19]
Nathan Alterman wrote a protest poem called "The traitor's widow", commemorating Tobianski's widow's successful demand to review his wrongful court martial and damning the oxymoron of "quick trial". American novelistZelda Popkin made Tobianski's execution and posthumous rehabilitation a central episode in her novel,Quiet Street, the first fictional account of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, published in 1951. In the novel, he appears as "Yora Levine."[citation needed]
In November 1949 Isser Be'eri was tried and found guilty ofmanslaughter by the Tel Aviv District Court. The examining magistrate, Eliezer Malchi, who conducted the preliminary inquiry, said there were grounds for arraigning Colonel Be'eri on a murder charge but this would not be done.[20] The civilian court found that, as there was a ceasefire in effect at the time, any information supposedly passed by Tobianski could not have served the Jordanian artillery.[19] Due to his extensive service to the country, Be'eri received a symbolic punishment of one day of prison, "from sunrise to sunset, 30 days after sentencing", before which he was pardoned by the president,Chaim Weizmann.
Be'eri's three fellow interrogators, David Kron,Binyamin Gibli and Avraham Kidron, who also had condemned Tobianski as his judges in the afternoon drumhead court-martial, themselves were not charged and tried in court. They reached high military and civilian positions. In his memoir David Kron wrote that despite the official investigation, he was convinced that Tobianski had been guilty and that Be'eri had the full authority to act the way he had. LaterShabtai Teveth placed the fault with Gibli's overbearing ambitions and manipulation, personal traits that led to theLavon affair.[21]
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