1948: Meir Tobiansky, by summary judgment
June 30th, 2016 Headsman
On this date in 1948, an alleged spy was extrajudicially executed by the Israeli Defense Forces.
This execution occurred during a short truce punctuating Israel’s War of Independence, but prior to the ceasefire the nascent IDF had become suspicious at Jordan’s gift for accurately targeting critical infrastructure in Jerusalem.
Suspicions came to settle on Meir Tobianski a Lithuania-born former British officer who had become a captain in the Jewish militia Haganah: as an employee of the Jerusalem Electric Corporation, he would have made a great informant for enemy artillerymen.
On June 30, 1948, Tobianski was kidnapped and driven to a depopulated Arab village (present-day Harel, Israel), where four intelligence officers demanded to know if Tobianski had given any information to his British colleagues at the utility (he had), and then declared him condemned as a spy. (Efficiently, they had already prepared the firing squad ahead of time.)
The chief of these four, Isser Be’eri, was later charged with manslaughter for the affair, receiving a symbolic one-day sentence. His subordinates, who were never charged, had long careers in Israeli intelligence; one of them, Binyamin Gibli would go on to help cook up a subsequent espionage debacle, the Lavon Affair.
Tobianski has been officially rehabilitated by Israel. Despite the irregularity of the proceeding against him, he’s sometimes described as the first of only two executions in Israeli history, alongside the much more procedurally defensible hanging of Adolf Eichmann.
On this day..
- 2004: David Harris, Errol Morris subject - 2020
- 1685: Archibald Campbell - 2019
- 1797: Richard Parker, for the Nore mutiny - 2018
- 1893: A day in the death penalty around the U.S. - 2017
- 1921: Richard and Abraham Pearson, the Coolacrease killings - 2015
- 1794: Rosalie Lubomirska, mother of Balzac's antagonist - 2014
- 1278: Pierre de La Brosse, "out of spite and envy" - 2013
- 1680: A Madrid auto de fe - 2012
- 1934: Night of the Long Knives - 2011
- 1704: John Quelch, pirate - 2010
- 1962: Georges Kageorgis, assassin - 2009
- 1882: Charles Guiteau, James Garfield's colorful assassin - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Espionage,Execution,History,Israel,Jews,Occupation and Colonialism,Posthumous Exonerations,Shot,Spies,Summary Executions,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1948, arab-israeli war, binyamin gibli, isser be'eri, june 30, lavon affair, meir tobianski
