David Raziel


David Raziel was a leader of the Zionist underground in British Mandatory Palestine and one of the founders of the Irgun.

Biography

Born David Rozenson in Smarhon’, Vilnius in the Russian Empire, Raziel immigrated with his family in 1914 at the age of three to Ottoman Palestine, when his father was invited to teach at Tachkemoni, a religious school in Tel Aviv. During World War I, the family was exiled to Egypt by the Turks due to their Russian citizenship. They returned to Mandatory Palestine in 1923.
In 1928, Raziel completed studies at the Tachkemoni high school, and studied for several years at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem. He was regular study partner with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son and ideological successor to the Rosh Yeshiva and Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.
When the 1929 Hebron massacre broke out, he joined the Haganah in Jerusalem, where he was studying philosophy and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. When the Irgun was established, he was one of its first members, and displayed outstanding military skills.
In 1937 he was appointed by the Irgun as the first Commander of Jerusalem District and a year later, Commander in Chief of the Irgun. His term as leader was especially marked by violence against Arabs, including a sequence of marketplace bombings. Most of those attacks were in response to Arab violence. Raziel worked with Avraham Stern and Efraim Ilin.
On 17 May 1941 he was sent, with three of his comrades, including Ya'akov Meridor, to Iraq on behalf of the British army to help defeat the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani pro-Axis revolt in the Anglo-Iraqi War. On 20 May a Luftwaffe plane strafed the car in which he was travelling near Habbaniyah, killing him and a British officer. Meridor returned to Palestine and took over command of the Irgun.
In 1955 his remains were exhumed and transferred to Cyprus, and again in 1961 to Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery. His sister, Esther Raziel-Naor, was later a member of the Knesset for Herut, the party founded by Irgun leader Menachem Begin.

Commemoration

, a moshav in the Judaean Mountains, is named after Raziel, as well as many streets in Israel bearing his name in commemoration. The Israel postal service issued a stamp in his honor. There is a high-school in Herzliya named after him.