Was Shin Bet deterred by a murderer?

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“After in-depth consideration of all the arguments … it seems to us that there is room to recommend to the president to reduce the punishments of the three convicts.” Thus the Shin Bet security service summarized its controversial recommendation to cut down the sentence of the murderer of Dr. Rudolph (Israel) Kastner, which paved the way for his release shortly afterward, after serving only six years of his life sentence.

Nearly 60 years have passed since then, but it was only recently, under pressure from the High Court of Justice, that the Shin Bet permitted the publication of some documents connected to the murder that shocked the country in 1957. The victim himself was controversial; some decried his actions and considered him a Nazi collaborator, while others praised him as one of the great rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

In 2019, the historian Nadav Kaplan filed a petition to the High Court to release documents he needed to complete his research about Kastner’s murder. In February of the following year, the court’s justices ordered the Shin Bet to explain why it objected to releasing archival material relating to that case. The state claimed that doing so would undermine state security, but the Shin Bet subsequently released a few of the documents and claimed it had thus fulfilled its obligation. It asked the court to deny the petition, but hearings in the case are ongoing.

The documents, which were uploaded to the website of the Israel State Archives without any accompanying announcement, conceal more than they reveal. While they do provide a limited glimpse into the organization’s methods during its early years, they also indicate that the Shin Bet is continuing to hide documents of historical importance by using the argument of “state security,” whose validity is questionable.

One of the documents is a 22-page summary of the Kastner murder, with sections that remain redacted. Another is a memorandum regarding the murderers’ requests for clemency.

In 1955, a court accused Kastner of having “sold his soul to Satan” for collaborating with the Nazis in a manner that paved the way for the murder of Hungarian Jewry. It was the price for saving the lives of about 1,700 Jews with “connections,” including a number of Kastner’s relatives and friends. In an appeal to the Supreme Court, he was acquitted of this serious charge, but the court said that he did try to save the life of a Nazi criminal after the war when he testified on his behalf.

Kastner was shot two years later, at the entrance to his Tel Aviv home, in early March 1957 by a cell of three assassins: right-wing members of underground groups. He was wounded and taken to the hospital, where he died a few days later.

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The summary of the murder, which does not bear the name or position of the Shin Bet employee who wrote it, states: “On 4.3.57, at almost 1 A.M., someone from service headquarters called me to tell me about the hit on Kastner, and asked me, in the name of the head of the service, to make a list of people who had recently been active in matters of the underground.” The immediate suspicion fell on an underground group headed by Lehi member Yaakov Heruti. “In the past, some of these people were connected to plans against Kastner,” the Shin Bet member wrote. “This clandestine group had discussed murder in the past,” they added.

Later, the document recounts instances when the Shin Bet guarded Kastner because it feared for his life. In 1955 and 1956, until a year before his death, “security was arranged for Kastner” for some seven months. Why was it stopped? According to the document, “The matter was difficult and complicated, and its effectiveness was not assured. When there were no reports of plans to harm him, the guards were removed.”

The writer described the murder as “a complete surprise,” since during the previous months, “There were no signs of interest in Kastner by the underground.” The investigation led to the arrest of three suspects, among them the man who had pulled the trigger: Ze’ev Eckstein.

Israel Kastner broadcasts on the Voice of Israel radio station, in the 1950s.

One of the recently released documents is a Shin Bet profile of Eckstein. Three pages of it are totally redacted. What’s left portrays him as a man of weak character, easily swayed and subject to foreign influences. “Ze’ev was excited and believed that he had gotten into the right club, where he’d learn to do the right things,” the document reads about his membership in the underground. “Feelings of nationalism and romance are mixed in his mind.”

The writer added that the leaders of the underground “influenced him with a wealth of patriotic rhetoric, and in the name of patriotism argued that an active underground must arise that would purify the state from the ‘ruling gang.’ The people in power and all those who support them are not true patriots and need to be eliminated. There’s a need to prepare weapons.”

Then one day, not long before the Sinai Campaign broke out in October 1956, one of the underground commanders, Yosef Menkes, “spoke to him about a specific person who had to be ‘dealt with.’ He didn’t use the word ‘murder.’ The ‘dealt with’ had a nicer ring to it,” the report says.

The war put off the plan to assassinate Kastner. Eckstein served as a driver in the paratroopers, where he made a negative impression for his poor driving skills and for firing his gun in a tent full of soldiers. After the war, he continued to meet with his handlers in the underground. He was given a pistol and an order to “deal with that man.”

According to the document, Eckstein “Got more and more entangled in the net into which he’d entered with innocence and passionate faith.” His commanders threatened to kill him if he failed to obey the order, telling him that that is the fate of “a traitor to the underground.”

During his interrogation, he initially denied the allegations against him. But when Shin Bet men took him on a drive past Kastner’s house, he confessed. He detailed “how he approached the victim, asked his name, fired the first shot (which missed), fired the second shot, hit him, got scared, forgot to toss the gun and fled.” When asked for his motive, Eckstein replied, “It would cause a tragedy if I talk, a real tragedy.” According to the transcript, the detective did not try to find out what he meant, but simply silenced him. “Stop with the tragedies,” he was told.

In another document, the Shin Bet outlines the contributing factors of the murder. The first was “an attempt to destabilize the legal and democratic rule of Israel and possibly even to defeat it by underground and provocative activities.” The organization added, “There is also room to assume that the choice of [Kastner] as a target was supposed to serve specific interests, possibly even personal ones.” It did not elaborate further.

In December 1962, the Shin Bet recommended freeing Eckstein from prison. A document prepared in that regard stated that he had served as a Shin Bet informant in the past. In 1955, it said, he called a police officer on his own accord, admitted that he was a member of the underground, and offered his help in the fight against it. It states that he acted as an agent of the organization within clandestine groups.

It did not say what kind of information Eckstein had provided or of what quality, but it stated that contact with him was cut off following suspicions that he was an operative for the underground that was working against the Shin Bet. He was also arrested on suspicion of spreading slander against the judge in Kastner’s case. In questioning, Eckstein threatened that if he were brought to trial, he would claim that he printed out the libelous posters on the instruction of the Shin Bet.

Another document, prepared following Eckstein’s arrest on suspicion of killing Kastner, states that a Shin Bet source had a conversation with Eckstein that included a similar threat. The source discovered, it said, that if during his trial it seems that the prosecution is inclined to seek a maximum sentence for Eckstein, “he would try to turn things around and say that he had been sent to assassinate Kastner by the Shin Bet.”

As a result, one can only wonder why the Shin Bet ultimately recommended releasing Eckstein after he had already been sentenced to life in prison. Did it fear or give into threats by Eckstein? And did it have anything to do with Eckstein’s work as a Shin Bet informant before the murder? It’s possible that the answers are contained in documents that the Shin Bet is still concealing, or in redacted portions of the little that has been made public.

For its part, the security service explained that it recommended that Eckstein be released because of changes that purportedly took place in his personality. “Since sitting in prison, there has been an apparent serious change in his personality and his worldview. His behavior in prison is exemplary, and there is no doubt that he has come to his senses from his immoral political views,” a report written just prior to his release states. “There is no reason for concern that his release would result in renewed underground activity.”