On the night of June 16, 1933, Dr. Haim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency was shot while strolling along a Tel Aviv beach with his wife. Speculation was rife concerning the identity of the murderers: was this a sexual assault or robbery attempt or was this a political assassination? If the latter, were these Arab nationalists who had targeted a Zionist leader or were these anti-British communist operatives? Were these perhaps German agents who acted on the behest of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, whose wife had allegedly had a romantic encounter with Arlosoroff?
Given the high profile of the case, the murder investigation was overseen directly by the newly appointed head of the Palestine Police Criminal Investigation Department, Harry Rice. No forensic innovation was spared in determining the identity of the killers: from Bedouin trackers to ballistic and fabric analysis conducted by some of the most prominent forensic scientists of the time, Sydney Smith and Alfred Lucas. Ultimately, those prosecuted were members of Arlosoroff’s political rival, the Zionist Revisionist Party. Though the court found the two guilty beyond reasonable doubt, the two were acquitted on what amounted to a peculiar procedural technicality in Palestine law. I analyze the political considerations that led the court to exonerate on the one hand yet attribute the acquittal to a technicality rather than to the inherent weakness of the forensic evidence.
