David Raziel

In 1955 his remains were exhumed and transferred to Cyprus, and again in 1961 to Jerusalem's Mount Herzl military cemetery.

On 17 May 1941 he was sent to Iraq with three of his comrades, including Ya'akov Meridor and Jacob Sika Aharoni, 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. Meridor returned to Palestine and took over command of the Irgun, while Jacob Sika Aharoni commanded the life-risking mission that lead to the British entry to Iraq and the saving of the Jewish community during the Farhud.

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. Most of those attacks were in response to Arab violence. Raziel worked with Avraham Stern, Hanoch Kalai, and Efraim Ilin.

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.

David Rozenson (later Raziel) was born in Smarhon’ 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.

David Raziel (Hebrew: דוד רזיאל‎; 19 November 1910 – 20 May 1941) was a leader of the Zionist underground in British Mandatory Palestine and one of the founders of the Irgun.