1. Yehoshua Cohen was a leading member of Lehi, a Zionist militant group, who assassinated United Nations envoys Folke Bernadotte and Andre Serot on September 17,1948.
16 Facts About Yehoshua Cohen
1. 2.
Yehoshua Cohen was born in Petah Tikva in 1922, the son of a farmer.
3.
Yehoshua Cohen was one of two sons born to Yaakov and Bluma Cohen.
4.
Yehoshua Cohen joined the Lehi at age sixteen, and soon became a prominent fighter within the organization.
5.
In 1942, after the arrest of a number of Lehi members, Yehoshua Cohen was "among the few who remained at large and recruited a new generation" of members.
6.
In September 1942, Yehoshua Cohen helped Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir escape from a British prison.
7.
Yehoshua Cohen smuggled two Polish Army uniforms to Shamir and another prisoner, Eliahu Gilaldi, who disguised themselves in the uniforms and then crawled under the barbed wire surrounding the prison.
8.
Yehoshua Cohen trained members in the tactics of guerilla warfare, and taught them how to build bombs and land mines.
9.
Yehoshua Cohen was picked to train the two assassins for their mission, and traveled from Tel Aviv to spend several weeks training them in Jerusalem.
10.
Shortly thereafter, Yehoshua Cohen was apprehended by the British and sent to a detention centre in Africa.
11.
The Lehi leadership approved the assassination, and Yehoshua Cohen Zeitler began to make plans for it.
12.
Yehoshua Cohen was chosen to lead the actual attack on Bernadotte and picked two other long-time members: Yitzhak Ben Moshe and Avraham Steinberg, to join him.
13.
Moshe and Steinberg then opened fire on the tires of Bernadotte's vehicle, while Yehoshua Cohen fired inside the car with a MP40 machine gun, killing Bernadotte and his aide, Andre Serot.
14.
At Sde Boker, Yehoshua Cohen became Ben-Gurion's unofficial bodyguard and confidant, and the two grew very close.
15.
Yehoshua Cohen was married and had two children, a son and daughter.
16.
Historian Michael Bar-Zohar claimed for a number of years that Yehoshua Cohen had privately confessed in his role in the attack to Ben-Gurion, but Yehoshua Cohen never responded to these claims publicly.