Late writer Amos Kenan resurfaces as 1952 murder suspect

Fifty-seven years have passed since the day when Baruch Gross, then a 31-year-old attorney, was told that someone had tried to assassinate his uncle, transportation minister David Zvi Pinkas. The would-be assassins were never caught.

Now, Gross is demanding the establishment of a state commission of inquiry, based on new information that recently came to light about the chief suspect, the late author Amos Kenan.

Pinkas was one of the leaders of the religious Zionist Mizrahi movement, and served on the board of its newspaper, Hatzofeh.

In October 1951, when he became transportation minister, Israel was suffering a severe gasoline shortage. He therefore declared that every car would have to be idle two days a week - on Shabbat, and on another day of the driver's choice. This decree caused a huge outcry.

A few months later, on the night of Friday, June 20, 1952, a bomb was thrown at the balcony of his Tel Aviv house.

It failed to explode, but the subsequent round-the-clock police protection he was given did not prevent another bomb from being planted on his doorstep a day later. That bomb did explode, causing property damage but no casualties.

The bomb went off just as two policemen were moving to intercept Kenan and another man, Shaltiel Ben-Yair, whom they had spotted entering Pinkas' apartment building. Kenan and Ben-Yair were arrested. At his trial, Kenan said he had been at the Haaretz office that night and received a tip that something was going to happen at the minister's house at 1:30 A.M.

He and Ben-Yair went to the house, but when nothing happened, they left - and as they were leaving, the bomb exploded.

The Tel Aviv District Court cleared the two men completely, saying it did not find the policemen's testimony credible. The Supreme Court later upheld the acquittal due to reasonable doubt.

Two months after the bombing, however, Pinkas, then 57, died of a heart attack. His widow claimed the attack was brought on by the assassination attempts.

The case rested until last year, when Kenan's wife, Nurit Gertz, published a biography of him in which she wrote that he had obtained the explosives from Yaakov Heruti. In a subsequent interview with Haaretz's Yossi Melman, she confirmed this account.

Kenan himself died this past August. But Gertz's revelation led Pinkas' surviving relatives to demand the establishment of a commission of inquiry into the assassination attempt, just as in 1982, then-prime minister Menachem Begin ordered a state commission of inquiry into the 1933 assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff, a leading politician from Mapai (the precursor of the Labor Party).

In a letter to President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, which is representing Pinkas' family, argued that the incident was of great historical importance, as it was the first attempted political assassination in the annals of the newly established state (Arlosoroff's murder took place 15 years before Israel achieved statehood).

Now, the emergence of new facts may have made it possible to discover the identities of the hitherto unknown assailants, thereby "enabling the late minister's relatives and all seekers of historical truth to find peace," the letter said.

Gross added that he sees a direct line between the attempt on Pinkas' life and the 1995 assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

"What did Rabin do? His political views upset the murderer," Gross said. "This is the same thing."