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Shmuel Tamir

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Summary

Shmuel Tamir, in Lahav’s account: the lawyer for Gruenvald in the Kasztner Trial who turned a libel defense into a national indictment of Rudolf Kasztner, of MAPAI and of the Yishuv leadership, on the frame that Jews under Nazism had only two ways — the Judenrat way of collaboration or the resistance way of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1471-1732).

Details

  • Younger than Attorney General Cohn and relatively unknown, Tamir burned with hostility toward Ben-Gurion and MAPAI, which he called the “regime of darkness”; his deal with Gruenvald gave him a free hand in trial strategy, and he immediately understood the trial’s scandalous potential (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1485-1540).
  • Tamir (the name means tall in Hebrew and replaced Katznelson) was a sabra adherent of Jabotinsky’s Hadar who had organised sabotage against the British in the 1940s and been deported to a detention camp in Kenya; his fluent Hebrew cross-examination exploited Kasztner’s broken Hebrew and Hungarian accent (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1495-1530).
  • His larger targets were Ben-Gurion, Sharett and the Jewish Agency, accused of loyalty to the British that silenced Holocaust news and withheld rescue; right-wing Tamir found a staunch ally in left-wing MAPAM’s glorification of resistance (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1696-1760).
  • On appeal he urged the Court to sustain Halevy’s judgment and to treat the case as technically a civil libel suit; after the judgment was reversed, a member of his legal team said of the 1958 Wales match and the opinion: “Two defeats,” … “but both well reasoned.” (Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, lines 1550-1760).

Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Kasztner Trial, Rudolf Kasztner, Haim Cohn, Benjamin Halevy

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