The UN calls for a cease-fire on May 20 and appoints Swedish soldier, humanitarian, and diplomat Folke, Count Bernadotte, as mediator.

A nephew of King Gustav V of Sweden, Bernadotte, commissioned in the Swedish Army in 1918, had become an official of the Boy Scout movement and during the Second World War had headed the Swedish Red Cross, securing the exchange of many prisoners of war and being credited with saving some twenty thousand inmates of German concentration camps.

His excellent reputation among all the combatant nations in Europe had led the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler to employ him to transmit a fruitless offer (April 24, 1945) that Germany surrender unconditionally to the United Kingdom and the United States but not to the Soviet Union.

Small numbers of Israeli forces are able to keep Egyptian, Iraqi, and Transjordanian units from entering Tel Aviv and cutting off Jerusalem from the rest of the newly founded country during the crucial first month of the war.

Count Bernadotte obtains the grudging acceptance by the Arab states and Israel of a UN cease-fire order, effective June 11.

The nearly exhausted Israelis re-equip themselves, sometimes from secret sources.

Notable is the clandestine effort by Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, which offers Israel both arms and an airfield—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin has decided that the Jewish state might be a useful thorn in the side of Britain and the United States, his Cold War enemies.

Folke Bernadotte soon makes enemies by his proposal that Arab refugees be allowed to return to their homes in what has become the nation of Israel; all sides reject his peace plan.

Fierce fighting resumes in early July; during which a ten-day Israeli offensive destroys the Arab armies as an offensive force, at the cost of eight hundred and thirty-eight Israeli lives.

Lehi extremists murder Bernadotte, together with André-Pierre Serot, a French Air Force colonel and UN observer, on September 17, 1948, following a number of threats against his life, by firing gunshots at point-blank range through the window of his official car.

Yitzhak Shamir, who had returned from France to resume command of the Lehi, is one of those who planned the murder (according to Nahum Barnea and Danny Rubinstein, Davar, March 19, 1982).

Afterward, the Stern Gang, which has always been condemned by moderate leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, is suppressed, some of its units being incorporated in the Israeli defense forces.

Unlike the Irgun, the Stern Gang leaves no political party to carry on its political programs.