Eternally Secret

By Steve Rodan

Nadav Kaplan should have been the poster child of the State of Israel. His life and career have been devoted to serving the Zionist leadership -- whether as a colonel in the air force or a successful international businessman. He was trusted by the regime to be appointed to the board of directors of four state-owned companies. But late in life Kaplan, born in 1945, became a historian, a tricky profession in a state where virtually everything is secret.

In 2018, Kaplan was researching material for a book on Rudolf Kastner, the Zionist leader who worked with Germany to kill nearly 500,000 Jews in Hungary in 1944. Eleven years later, an Israeli judge branded Kastner a collaborator of the Nazis and susceptible to prosecution under Israeli law. In March 1957, just before the Supreme Court was to decide on an appeal of the Israeli trial, Kastner was assassinated by a squad that included an agent of the secret police, known as the General Security Services.

After more than 60 years, Kaplan saw little problem in obtaining the GSS file on Kastner. Israeli law stipulated a maximum waiting period of 50 years for the release of state documents. Kastner had long been buried and those convicted of killing him were either dead or close to 90.

No reply

The office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, responsible for the GSS, didn't reply. In correspondence that became absurd, Kaplan would request one thing and the premier's office would respond on another matter. He turned to an attorney who specialized in releasing official information. After more than a year, the Israel State Archives issued a decision: the release of the Kastner file would involve too much manpower. In addition, the documents could harm national security.

Kaplan appealed to the Supreme Court, regarded as the bastion of law and liberal thought in the state. The GSS and archives repeatedly delayed their response to the court. Nearly another year passed and finally the state repeated to the court what it had told Kaplan in 2019 -- the request was too much trouble and endangered national security.

'Bad man'

When his day in court came, Kaplan became completely marginal. The GSS representative refused to speak in open court. Kaplan was told to leave, and the proceedings resumed without the plaintiff. After an hour, he was summoned, and the judges merely said they had asked the state a few questions and would await a reply. Nothing more.

"I felt that I represent to them the 'bad man,' that disturbed their peace of mind with my request to them to reveal documents that conceal a certain truth that they are trying to hide," Kaplan referring to the state attorneys, recalled, "I felt that in their eyes I am committing the treason of harming national security." [1]

Kaplan never made headway in his appeal to the Supreme Court, which accepted the arguments of the state. His efforts had confronted decades of an Israeli policy to lock any documents that even hinted at controversy, corruption or graft. Over the last 20 years, the state archives, with an estimated 500 million documents, underwent reclassification that ensured that material available in the 1980s would never see the light of day until most of today's researchers would long be dead.

"Israel has not handled its archival material in a manner expected from a democratic country," chief archivist Yaacov Lozowick wrote in his report in December 2017. "The overwhelming majority of archival material is closed and will never be opened. The minority that has been opened has been opened under unreasonable restrictions. There is no public supervision on the implementation of release and no transparency." [2]

The big secrets

The military and security services have played the leading role in concealing Israel's past. The two most important secrets have been Zionist activity in Europe during World War II and the 1948 war of independence. For the regime, both subjects could make or break Israel. Documents that told of expulsions of Arabs by the new Israeli military could be used by their descendants as part of a massive compensation claim in Western courts.

But the Holocaust marks an even bigger danger. Obtaining documents of Zionist collusion with Nazi Germany could generate a blowback that would delegitimize the State of Israel among Jews and demand reparations far greater than that given by West Germany. The documents would have paid lie to the state narrative that the Zionist leadership sought to rescue Jews during the war. The result could be the collapse of Jewish support in the Diaspora, particularly the United States, which provides nearly $4 billion in annual aid.

Despite the absence of a smoking gun, Kaplan, a lecturer at Haifa University, gathered available evidence and concluded that Kastner was killed by GSS. In his 2024 book Why Was Kastner Eliminated? Kaplan asserted that the Mapai politician was killed to prevent him from exposing the Zionist leadership's alliance with the SS, particularly in Hungary. As he awaited the state's appeal to the Supreme Court, Kastner was urged by senior Mapai members to emigrate or at least leave Tel Aviv. He refused and vowed to clear his name.

The primary evidence pointed to the direct involvement of GSS in the shooting of Kastner outside his home on March 4, 1957. The shooter was identified as Zev Eckstein, a GSS agent assigned to infiltrate nationalist circles, particularly those that contained former members of the Jewish underground during the British Mandate. Later, Eckstein said he did not strike Kastner, rather a mysterious assassin emerged from the shadows and pumped a bullet in his back. Kastner died under mysterious circumstances in a Tel Aviv hospital 11 days later. In his book, Kaplan quoted a hospital worker who said Kastner was killed after the doctors had pronounced that he was no longer in danger.

Four days before Kastner died, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion convened his Cabinet for a briefing by GSS chief Isser Harel. Harel said Kastner had been targeted by a right-wing Jewish terrorist group responsible for numerous attacks and demanded that the Cabinet impose martial law. He acknowledged that the secret police knew of the plot to kill Kastner.

Then, Harel ended the briefing by asking that the suspects, arrested on the night of the shooting, to be released from prison. Eckstein and the others were portrayed by Harel as good boys gone astray.

"If we can release the young men on bail by the time the trial ends and they behave all right, the judge will make his ruling, but they can be pardoned later," Harel said. [3]

Life of Riley

And that is exactly what happened. In 1958, Eckstein and his two accomplices were sentenced to life. In prison, they enjoyed privileges given no other felon. Eckstein was allowed to entertain women in his cell, dine on fine cuisine and smoke expensive cigarettes. He could walk freely throughout the facility. One of his co-defendants, Dan Shemer, was allowed to leave prison to perform in the theater.

In February 1963, some five years after their conviction, the three inmates were pardoned by Ben-Gurion. He had held at least nine meetings on the subject. Just before the pardon, the prime minister visited the Kastner family and urged them to understand his decision. Years later, Kastner's only child, a daughter named Zsuzsi, recalled the meeting as a "farce," meant to hide the truth of her father's death.

But the State of Israel did not forget Kastner. In the 1980s, he was hailed in the state media as a misunderstood hero and deemed a savior of Jews by Yad Vashem. Zsuzsi was helped by the state to travel the world to lecture on her father. Her daughter became a Cabinet minister and head of Mapai.

Kaplan provided evidence that the assassination of Kastner was hatched in the ruling Mapai Party. The author cited a meeting of the Mapai Secretariat in June 1955, after Kastner was deemed by Judge Binyamin Halevy as a collaborator of the SS. The meeting focused on how the Kastner trial would influence the forthcoming Knesset elections.  One of the speakers was Yoel Palgi, a prosecution witness in the libel trial brought by Kastner and the state against a journalist who had exposed the Hungarian's Nazi past. Palgi quoted Attorney General Haim Cohen, who prosecuted the case, that if "Kastner was found guilty, there is but one sentence -- death." Palgi said this three times during the Mapai meeting. 

The Mapai leadership decided to cut Kastner loose. Mapai had conducted a poll that 60 percent of Hungarian-speaking Jews in Israel, who numbered up to 120,000, accepted the verdict that Kastner was a collaborator of the Third Reich. To counter this, Ben-Gurion's top aide, Teddy Kollek, recommended secretly funding studies by Yad Vashem that would support Kastner.

At the end of his book, Kaplan could do little more than plead to the State of Israel to show some concern for democracy. He concluded that every free state must own up to its mistakes, and that concealment only worsens the crimes.

It is worthy that the Israeli collective memory will also be based on the recognition of the painful truth and not on the mendacious narrative.

Notes

1. The article is based on Why Was Kastner Eliminated? Nadav Kaplan. Steimatzky, 2024

2. "The Report of the Archivist on the Subject of Release of Archival Material." Dr. Yaacov Lozowick.

3. Transcript of Cabinet meeting on the assassination of Dr. Y. Kastner. March 11, 1957.

Below: Nadav Kaplan lectures at Haifa University.