David Raziel

David Rozenson (later Raziel) was born in Smarhon’ (now in Grodno Region, Belarus), Vilnius in the Russian Empire. In 1914, when he was three, his family immigrated to Ottoman Palestine, where his father taught 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.

After graduation from Tachkemoni, he studied for several years at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem. He was a regular study partner of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, son and ideological successor to the Rosh Yeshiva and Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.[2]

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.

His sister, Esther Raziel-Naor, became a member of the Knesset for Herut, the party founded by Irgun leader Menachem Begin.

When the Irgun was established, he was one of its first members. 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 marked by violence against Arabs, including a sequence of marketplace bombings.[3] Most of those attacks were in response to Arab violence.[4] 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[5] 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.[6][7] 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.

Ramat Raziel, 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.[8]

• Daniel Levine: The Birth of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House Ltd., 1991. ISBN 965-229-071-8.