Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit

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Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit
Alignment
Personal details
Born1895
Tiberias, Ottoman Empire
Died28 January 1967

Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit (

Minister of Police from independence in 1948 until shortly before his death in 1967, making him the longest-serving cabinet member
in the same portfolio to date.

Biography

Sheetrit was born in

heder, Alliance school and a yeshiva. After school he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
where he was certified as a lawyer.

He became involved in Zionist activities as a youth, and was a founder of the Tehiya Zionist association in his home town. He also joined Hapoel Hatzair after being influenced by kibbutz Degania.

During World War I he held the position of

Kinneret and organised local police until the British Army
entered the area.

Following the war he held several positions in the police, including Commander of the Lower Galilee area (where he helped organised the Jewish Mounted Police) and deputy commander of the police academy in Jerusalem. Sheetrit was the prosecutor in the Haim Arlosoroff assassination case. After being made a District Judge in 1935, he served as head district judge in Lod between 1945 and 1948.

A prominent member of the

Minister of Minority Affairs (a new position) in David Ben-Gurion's provisional government.[3]

Although Sheetrit held doubts about the loyalty to the new state of

Israeli Arabs, as a native speaker of Palestinian Arabic he was popular with the Arab community. However, following disagreements with the Ministry of Religions and the Military government (which controlled most Arab areas after the war had ended), the Ministry of Minority Affairs was closed in 1949.[2][4]

After the

first Knesset elections in 1949, in which it won four seats under his leadership, the party rejoined Ben-Gurion's government and Sheetrit remained Minister of Police. Prior to the 1951 elections, Sheetrit defected to Ben-Gurion's Mapai
, and was reappointed to his ministerial post after winning a seat for his new party in the elections.

Re-elected in 1955, 1959, 1961 and 1965 (by which time Mapai had merged into the

Labour Alignment), Sheetrit retained his cabinet post under new prime ministers Moshe Sharett and Levi Eshkol. He stood down as Minister of Police on 2 January 1967 after more than 18 years as a minister and serving in fourteen different governments.[5]
He died 26 days later.

References

  1. ^ For this reason we congregated Archived 13 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine Iton Tel Aviv, 23 April 2004 (in Hebrew)
  2. ^ a b Dowty, Alan (1988) The Jewish State : A Century Later University of California Press
  3. ^ The Signatories of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel Jewish Virtual Library
  4. ^ Peled, Alisa Rubin (2002) The Other Side of 1948: The Forgotten Benevolence of Bechor Shalom Shitrit and the Ministry of Minority Affairs Israel Affairs, Vol.8, No.3, pp 84–103
  5. ^ Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit: Government Activity Knesset

External links

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