The New York Times · New York, New York · 23 January 1996

CP-1996-025

Israel Eldad, 86, a Top Leader In Palestine Jewish Underground

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JERUSALEM, Jan. 22 (Reuters) — Israel Eldad, a leader of the Jewish underground before Israel became a nation and for 50 years one of the most influential figures of the Israeli right wing, died today, his family said. He was 86. Mr.

Eldad, born in Ukraine, immigrated to Palestine when it was under the British Mandate in 1941 and, along with Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Israeli’s Prime Minister, was a leader of Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, the most militant of the Jewish underground groups fighting for independence. After the state of Israel was founded in 1948, Mr.

Eldad taught humanities at Israeli universities and established various ultranationalist political groups. The groups advocated taking biblical Jewish land from neighboring Arab countries. “Eldad was a highly educated, extremely literate man,” Mr. Shamir wrote in a 1994 autobiography. He also wrote that Mr.

Eldad was “a believer in the Messianic aspects of the liberation of the Land and profoundly opposed to the return of any part of it to the Arabs.” Mr. Eldad bitterly opposed the effort for peace between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization that was pursued by the Government of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated last November.

During Israel’s troop withdrawal from the West Bank last month under the terms of its peace deals with the P.L.O., Mr. Eldad wrote in his weekly column in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper: “Whoever does not feel the loss and the destruction does not understand that this is the most dangerous assassination of all — the daily cutting away of the body and the soul.”

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