Dov Béla Gruner (Hebrew: דב בלה גרונר; December 6, 1912 – April 16, 1947) was a Hungarian-born Zionist activist in Mandatory Palestine and a member of the pre-state Jewish underground Irgun.

He is honored as one of the Olei Hagardom, the twelve Jewish pre-independence fighters who were executed by British and Egyptian authorities.

In 1938, after studying engineering in Brno,[1] he joined the Zionist youth movement Betar, which arranged his passage to Palestine in 1940 aboard the immigrant ship S.S. Skaria.

In 1941, he joined the British Army to fight the Nazis, and together with his comrades in the Jewish Brigade came to the aid of Holocaust survivors in Europe.

Ten days later, he participated in his second and final operation on behalf of the Irgun—an arms raid against a Ramat Gan police station.

When a gunfight in which two Irgun men and an Arab constable were killed broke out, Gruner and his team continued working under fire.

Among the correspondence between Gruner and headquarters were: His refusal of Irgun assistance with legal counsel (owing to his principled stand regarding non-cooperation with the British court system in Eretz Yisrael), his query whether he should commit suicide in order to make a political statement (the Irgun leadership quickly responded against the initiative) and his final letter, written shortly before he was hanged.

Addressed to the Commander in Chief of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, it read: Sir, From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the encouragement which you have given me during these fateful days.

I could have written in high-sounding phrases something like the old Roman "Dulce est pro patria mori", but words are cheap, and sceptics can say 'After all, he had no choice'.

The only way that seems, to my mind, to be right, is the way of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the way of courage and daring without renouncing a single inch of our homeland.

This is not a moment at which I can lie, and I swear that if I had to begin my life anew I would have chosen the exact same path, regardless of the consequences for myself.

Claims that Gruner was a prisoner of war and was thus entitled to special rights were rejected by General Evelyn Barker, the commander of the British forces in Palestine.

In an interview decades later, Barker said Gruner was a murderer and a terrorist, rejecting the notion that the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine constituted a war.

The monument also bears a plaque commemorates all Olei Hagardom, Jewish pre-independence fighters executed by Ottoman and British authorities.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, this nephew, Sergeant Dov Gruner of the IDF Paratroopers Brigade, became the first Israeli soldier to reach the Western Wall.