The Reckoning Read online

  Morton prided himself on his straightforward application of the law. Late in life he wrote, ‘some people seem to think that I was anti-semitic, and others that I was anti-Arab. I wasn’t. I was merely anti-terrorist, whether they were Arab or Jew.’11

  In his new job he soon discovered that, although he might favour such an approach, the authorities were more circumspect. The Yishuv was far more politically sophisticated than the Arab community of Palestine. Jews in Britain and America wielded real power when it came to shaping policy and forming public opinion. British imperialists did not shrink from harsh, even brutal measures when faced with challenges to their rule. In the Jews of Palestine, though, they were facing a subtler and more sophisticated opposition than they were used to. For this reason British policy – even if apparently set in stone – had a habit of crumbling when it collided with the flinty resistance that local and international Zionists were adept at mounting. At the basic operational level, this meant that the signals emanating from headquarters had to be listened to carefully for shifts of tone and emphasis.

  Decisions taken from on high did not always filter down to those on the ground. In London the War Cabinet had decided in February 1940 that in order not to provoke Zionists and thus hamper the war effort, there would be no ‘drastic measures to obtain possession’ of illegal Jewish armouries.12 At exactly that time, Morton received information that a large arsenal was hidden in a synagogue in Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda Street. Against his natural instincts, he hesitated to race off and raid it. There were obvious religious and political sensitivities involved. Instead he reported the tip-off and asked Jerusalem for authority to conduct a search. ‘I never got it,’ he remembered, ‘nor indeed any reply to my report.’13 Cases like this confirmed his view that political considerations determined how the law in Palestine was applied. It grated on his most firmly held convictions. For Morton the law was not a malleable concept to be pulled and twisted by the dictates of expediency. It was a majestic construct, towering over the conduct of ordinary mortals. Whatever accusations might be made against him later, Morton truly believed in the virtue of his calling, something he shared with the man who was to become his great adversary.

  For the time being things were quiet. In Europe, Germany was still digesting the new territories swallowed by its victorious armies. No one expected the lull to last. The question of how to cope with a renewed Nazi onslaught preoccupied everyone in Palestine, including the remnants of the Irgun Zvai Leumi. As a result of the CID raid on the flat in Aharonovich Street on 31 August 1939, all the top commanders were now banged up. Avraham Stern, Hanoch Strelitz and Yaacov Levstein, along with two other Irgun men captured in the operation, had been interrogated by a team led by Tom Wilkin for ten days in an attempt to get them to confess to the killing of Cairns and Barker. Writing later of his experiences, Levstein made no claims of torture or beatings – though he attributed this restraint to his interrogators’ fear that they might suffer the same fate as Cairns and Barker. The captives lied and stonewalled. With no hard evidence to link them to the assassinations, they could only be detained under the emergency regulations brought in to combat the Arab rebellion, which allowed for their open-ended detention.

  The five were sent to the camp at Sarafand, a compound of huts set inside a large British military base close to Ramleh. There they were reunited with their former commander David Raziel, who had been arrested six months earlier. It soon became clear that his views now diverged sharply from those of the new arrivals. Raziel endorsed Jabotinsky’s view that in the current dire circumstances the Irgun should not be fighting the British but helping them. The Mandate authorities had already identified him as a man they might do business with and he received at least one visit from Giles Bey, to whom he had addressed the conciliatory letter at the end of 1938. All this was disturbing to the new arrivals. ‘Occasionally I would hear bits of conversation among the Irgun commanders which alluded to a disagreement between them and Raziel,’ wrote Levstein.14 This was putting it mildly. Relations between the command – and particularly Stern and Raziel – would deteriorate sharply, first into hostility and suspicion and then into something close to hatred.

  The inmates were treated as political prisoners and the regime was fairly relaxed. Stern spent his time in endless discussions and writing poems. Levstein the bomb-maker now took on the role of amanuensis to ‘Yair’. ‘I helped him copy the poems and look up words in his Bible Concordance and his dictionaries as he searched for rhymes,’ he remembered. It was in Sarafand camp that Stern wrote one of his best-known poems, ‘To Our Mothers’, which typifies the blend of grandiosity, triumphalism and romanticized violence that imbues much of his work.

  A mother’s tear, wailing for her Isaac

  God in his fury will avenge, in His mercy redeem;

  And Jacob will wrestle with man and God,

  And Israel will rise over Edom and Arabia

  His foot on their neck – kings and rulers

  Between the three seas and the two rivers

  Egypt the foundation and Assyria the roof;

  David’s kingdom will be established in blood

  And the entire nation will be saying as one, Amen, Amen!15

  Stern frequently used biblical images in his poetry. His upbringing had not been particularly religious but in adulthood he had come to observe the Sabbath and the High Holy Days and Roni had been instructed to keep a kosher kitchen. His Judaism, though, seems primarily to have been not a guide to how life should be lived but a source of political revelation offering the example of divinely inspired warriors who slaughtered their enemies and carved out kingdoms.

  Towards the end of October, Raziel was taken away from the camp. The Irgun contingent were alarmed. According to Levstein they ‘thought they were taking him to the CID headquarters in Jerusalem to question him and perhaps even torture him and put him on trial’. There was talk of a hunger strike. It was not necessary. The following day Raziel was back. He was not being put on trial. He was being set free. Before he left, the British allowed him to meet Stern and the rest of the Irgun command in a special room, under their surveillance. ‘The discussion was long,’ wrote Levstein, ‘and apparently very heated.’16

  The heat was surely generated by Raziel’s revelation of the terms of his release. On leaving Sarafand he had been taken to Jerusalem to meet Pinhas Rutenberg, one of the founders of the Haganah and the man he had been on his way to see when he was arrested in May. Rutenberg carried a proposal from the British. If Raziel – who was still officially the Irgun commander – ordered his men to cease operations against them and assisted the war effort, they would let him go. There were further inducements, in the form of cash payments to the Irgun and a promise not to interfere with its propaganda activities. In addition, they would be granted a quarter of the immigration certificates to bring in whom they wished. Raziel accepted knowing very well that this would put him on a collision course with Stern. Although just as dedicated as Stern to the Irgun’s ultimate aims, he had always shown greater tactical flexibility, staying loyal to Jabotinsky’s overall leadership and retaining the hope that some sort of modus vivendi could be established with Palestine’s rulers. Stern was convinced that this was a delusion. While Raziel was talking about joining forces with the empire, Stern was adamantly opposed to any Jews putting on British uniform.

  Raziel left prison on 24 October. The stage was now set for another split. In time the Irgun’s 2000 or so members would have to make up their minds on a crucial question that had both a strategic and a moral dimension. Did they lay aside their quarrel with the British and, with Raziel, link up with them to fight the bigger enemy of Nazi Germany? Or did they stick to the course set by Stern and Strelitz and concentrate on driving the imperial occupiers from Palestine?

  Three months after Raziel’s departure, the remaining Irgun leaders were moved to a new prison at Mazra’a (Mizra, to the Jewish inmates), near Acre. There, pro-Nazi Arabs and Jewish undesirables were locked up
in separate camps. The detainees included Jabotinsky’s son Eri, captured aboard an immigrant ship he was bringing in from Romania which was intercepted by a Royal Navy destroyer on the high seas. Life in Mazra’a was good. There were no squalid dungeons where light never penetrated of the sort that featured in Stern’s poetry. ‘We must once again thank God for our living conditions,’ he wrote to Roni.17 ‘Every day meat, milk, tasty bread. Once a week we go to the sea. Hot water twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. It’s almost paradise. Only the basic by-the-way thing is missing: a bit of freedom. But, like we say, this too is “a question of time”.’ Roni was able to visit him regularly. Even in jail he was preoccupied with his appearance and there were several requests for a favourite blue shirt, a pin-stripe suit and stiffeners for his shirt collars.

  In between the games of dominoes and the painting and gardening sessions there was plenty of time to think. The soothing rhythms of prison life had not subdued him. On the eve of their sixth wedding anniversary he wrote Roni a strange letter in which, while declaring his love, he gave her the option of cutting her losses and leaving him. It was the old problem. She sought only peace and normality as the wife of Avraham Stern. But Stern was now ‘Yair’ and had consciously rejected domestic calm for a life of perpetual struggle and risk. For her ‘silence is happiness’.18 He, however (borrowing the lines from the Russian Romantic writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov), was ‘a rebel eager for the storm/as if in it prevails tranquillity’.

  He went on: ‘My gentle one, know that if you feel it is all too much, that you must leave me, I will understand you and love you as I love you now: with gentleness, sincerity and faithfulness. I was happy with you, you are my joy, my tranquillity, my rest. With you I am secure, it is warm, light.’

  Beyond the barbed wire, Europe was in the grip of a mighty convulsion as transformative as a new geological epoch. Stern’s imagination was fired with grandiose visions that self-consciously defied the commonsense judgements of Raziel, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist mainstream. He was edging towards a conclusion that even he was reluctant to acknowledge in public. His new concept, which he cautiously tested on his fellow inmates, was that the Irgun should take their hostility to Britain to its logical conclusion. Instead of joining forces with the empire, as Raziel argued, they should team up with its enemies. It was true that Nazi Germany embodied anti-Semitism, but the Polish government had been anti-Semitic and he had successfully done business with it. Why not try the same approach with the Axis powers and forge a deal whereby they would send the Irgun their unwanted Jews and the Irgun would fight on their behalf in Palestine?

  These views were not known to the Revisionist chief in Palestine, Dr Aryeh Altman, much less to the British, when he persuaded the authorities to let Stern and his companions go with an undertaking that the movement would ensure they stayed out of trouble. They were released on 18 June 1940. The war had just entered a new and terrible phase. The Germans had smashed through France’s defences and the country had surrendered. The Italians, who had hovered, jackal-like, at the edges until the kill was assured, declared war on Hitler’s remaining enemy, Britain. Palestine was now directly threatened from two sides. In the north, Vichy collaborationist forces were in possession of Lebanon and Syria. To the south and west, Italian troops would soon be advancing on Egypt as Italian warplanes launched raids on Haifa and Tel Aviv.

  These developments only strengthened Stern’s belief that the British were heading for defeat and the interests of the Jews were best served by a deal with the devil. The day after their release, Stern and Strelitz met Raziel with some others of the command. Inevitably it was a rough encounter. Stern and Raziel disagreed about everything. Raziel had known for some time that he had lost the confidence of the Irgun leaders inside and outside prison and since his release he had failed to reimpose his authority on the rank and file. At the meeting he repeated the decision he had already taken to resign as commander-in-chief. This triggered some form of election that resulted in Stern being installed in his place.

  The matter did not end there. Stern’s elevation was not welcomed by Jabotinsky, who persuaded Raziel that he must fight back. In the power struggle that followed, both Stern and Raziel sought the endorsement of Jabotinsky, now living in New York. Stern might have long since parted ideological company with the patriarch, but Jabotinsky was still the Irgun’s ‘supreme commander’. In order to cling on to his new position, Stern needed his support, and he fired off a long letter accusing Raziel of numerous abuses of authority. Raziel in turn made his own appeal to the chief. It consisted of a viciously eloquent dissection of his old friend’s character.

  ‘Concerning [Stern], this delicate playboy, hovering over this base, earthly world in holy piety, almost not touching the impurity of this world with his angel’s wings, careful not to speak against a person so as not to dirty this overspreading sanctity – this charming boy has been revealed as an expert in intrigue.’ Stern was a master of dissimulation with a fine appreciation of timing. ‘One sees nothing before the decisive hour. When the time comes to show one’s cards, the job is nice and clean, a delicate ivory statue wearing a tie in good taste and smart suit with the trousers precisely creased. In short, an unscrupulous intelligent person, who so distorts the facts that the borders of reality mean nothing to him … Where did he learn this pleasant skill? The devil only knows. Actually, I think it’s not new to him. This is the way he has been from the start …’19

  The tussle would go back and forth for several weeks. In that time both men vied for the loyalty of the organization, making their case in person or through their supporters in numerous clandestine meetings in flats and schools under cover of darkness. Among the listeners was Uri Avnery, the young German immigrant whose assertion on joining that he did not hate the ‘English’ had caused consternation among his superiors. To the rank and file like him the schism came as a surprise and a shock. ‘When you live in the underground it completely absorbs you,’ he said many years later. ‘The organization was everything, and then suddenly there is this rift. It’s terrible! The whole world is breaking apart. Everything you believed in suddenly becomes doubtful … Stern says of Raziel that he’s a British agent. Raziel says of Stern that he’s a Nazi collaborator.’ Avnery recalls that the pro-Stern advocates were quite open about the proposal for some sort of alliance with the Axis. As someone who knew the realities of Nazi oppression first hand, he ‘refused to accept the idea’ and eventually went with the Irgun.20 The power struggle ended in defeat for the ‘delicate playboy’. Raziel was reappointed as commander-in-chief and he ordered Stern to knuckle under. The bad blood between the two men made the idea of submission impossible. On 17 July 1940, Stern announced the formation of a new body, the Irgun Zvai Leumi B’Yisrael (the National Military Organization in Israel). His beliefs had now crystallized into a creed in which might and will determined everything, the weak overcame the strong and the life of one nation was built on the debris of another.21

  Stern set out his aims in an inaugural proclamation. ‘We take upon ourselves three tasks: To unite all those loyal, proud and fighting … in the ranks of the Hebrew liberation movement; to appear before the world as the single representative of the Jewish fighters and institute a policy of eliminating the Diaspora; to become as quickly as possible a force capable of taking control of the country by force of arms.’22

  In the desperate circumstances of the time it seemed a wild dream. No more than a hundred Irgun members followed Stern into the wilderness. The split was overshadowed by a completely unforeseen event. On 4 August, while visiting a Betar camp at Hunter, a village in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, Ze’ev Jabotinsky suffered a heart attack and died. He was fifty-nine. His death removed from the Revisionist movement its inspiration and its prophet. With his passing, Stern lost a father figure but one whose authority he had come to resent and to challenge. His sorrow was therefore mingled with a sense of liberation. Despite their differences, Jabotinsky could not be
ignored and even from afar he was capable of exercising some moderating influence on Stern’s thoughts and deeds. Now he was gone there was nothing to restrain him.

  * Now Lod. I have stuck with the spellings of place names as they were used by the Mandate authorities.

  SIX

  ‘In the Underground’

  Stern’s stand had left him high and dry. He could take some comfort from the fact that he was now undisputed boss of a band of dedicated followers – albeit a very small one. On the other hand, his defection had cut him off from the Revisionist movement’s considerable resources. He and his followers were virtually friendless and without money. Before he went to jail, Stern had lived a comfortable life, travelling widely and mixing often with rich and powerful people who were impressed by his intelligence, his charm and the romantic aura generated by his burning sense of purpose. His prison stint had been no great ordeal. Indeed his experience of hardship was almost entirely imaginary, distilled in his concept of the ‘anonymous soldier’ – alone, hunted, certain only of the inevitable rendezvous with death. From now on, these fantasies would become increasingly real.

  A glimpse of the dismal circumstances in which the Stern faithful lived was provided by Yaacov Polani. Polani was born in Slonim in Poland and from childhood ‘had adventurous inclinations’.1 The Jews of the town were assimilationists who ‘put my back up and I always wanted to annoy them’. He emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1922. His father bought a farm in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv. Yaacov got a job packing oranges. Some fellow workers were in the Irgun and talked him into joining. He attended a basic training course at nearby Kfar Saba, run by Hanoch Strelitz, and was later sent to Poland to one of the training camps overseen by Stern.