An Unreasonable Man

Pinchas Rutenberg was the man who electrified Palestine in more ways than one. A Russian revolutionary and an assassin who plotted the murder of Lenin and Trotsky, he escaped the Bolsheviks, finishing up at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. There he persuaded British leaders to grant him the concession to set up a hydro-electric plant on the Jordan River in Palestine. Described as a mixture of a whirl-wind and a steam-roller, he blustered his way past determined opposition in the British ...