The Reckoning Page 22

  Faced with scrutiny from London, the perceived change of mood among the Yishuv and the realization that Stern’s followers were not going to be defeated by force alone, MacMichael and the security apparatus of Palestine settled for a policy of appeasement.

  The shift in approach was never openly acknowledged but it was apparent in many ways great and small, and Geoffrey Morton was alert to, and resentful of, all of them. He noticed a telling change in terminology in official correspondence. In the months leading up to the death of Stern his organization had been routinely referred to as the ‘Stern Gang’. Within a few weeks of the event this contemptuous phrase had disappeared and it became again, as it had been before, the more respectable-sounding ‘Stern Group’.

  Ten days before the attempt on his life, Morton had been angered by a memorandum he received from Superintendent Laurence Harrington, addressed to the officers in charge of the five divisions in the Lydda area under his command. It passed on an instruction from Jerusalem that henceforth ‘in all cases where it is intended to prosecute Jews who may be found contravening the Firearms Ordinance, the approval of the Inspector General [Alan Saunders] in writing must be obtained before referring the case to the Military Court under the Emergency Regulations’. Morton would later describe this as ‘the most disgraceful official document it was ever my misfortune to receive’.17 He pointed out that ‘at that time illegal possession of firearms could be punishable on conviction with the death penalty and during previous years many Arabs had been so charged, had been convicted and duly executed’.

  The new instruction meant that there would be one rule for Arabs and another for Jews: ‘Whereas Arabs could continue to be prosecuted at the discretion of local police without reference to anybody’, Jews could not be charged ‘without first submitting the case through the Assistant Inspector General CID in Jerusalem for onward transmission to the Inspector General himself, who had no doubt been instructed to refer such cases to the High Commissioner’.

  Morton was convinced that the edict originated in London. Whatever its origin, however, it was clear that the Mandate powers were now anxious to avoid anything that might inflame Jewish public opinion. On 6 March, Yehoshua Becker and Nissim Reuven, perpetrators of the wages snatch in Tel Aviv in January in which two Jewish passers-by had been shot dead, were convicted and sentenced at the Court of Criminal Assize in Jerusalem. Becker was condemned to death. Reuven got fourteen years’ imprisonment. Three weeks later the convictions were upheld and the sentences confirmed in the Court of Criminal Appeal. Morton and his colleagues ‘felt certain that Becker would pay the full penalty of the law for a clear case of murder, as many Arabs had done in the preceding years’.18 The Jews Morton spoke to, though, were ‘completely confident that he would not be executed’. Morton was sufficiently alarmed to raise the subject with Jerusalem, only to be told he was ‘talking nonsense’. The matter preyed on his mind. Writing an intelligence summary for his superiors he took the opportunity to point out that if Becker were reprieved, ‘any gangster cornered in possession of a firearm would have every incentive to try to shoot his way out’.19 This intervention made him ‘thoroughly unpopular’ in high places. In any case, ‘it made no difference – in due course Becker was reprieved without any official explanation as to why this was done, and those terrorists who were not already in the bag took on a new lease of life’.

  Such appeasing gestures from the authorities themselves were unlikely to have much effect. What was needed was a démarche that might result in a cessation of hostilities, such as the one that had been worked out between the security services and the Irgun. Stern, after all, was dead. Perhaps after a decent interval, his followers’ fury might start to abate to the point where an accommodation was possible. In May, MacMichael was informed that an offer to mediate between the Sternists and the authorities had been received from an unlikely quarter. Josiah Wedgwood informed ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne that he had been approached by Eri Jabotinsky, son of the late Ze’ev, with a proposal that he travel to Palestine to try to talk sense into the large number of Sternists behind the wire. Jabotinsky had come to know Stern well when they had both done time in Mazra’a.

  Since his release he had been living in New York where he watched events in Palestine with dismay. Stern, he wrote to Wedgwood, had been a ‘personal friend’. He stressed the purity of his motives and defended him from the charge of collusion with the enemy. As Jabotinsky saw it, ‘Stern was slain in battle with the Police at Tel Aviv and thus became a hero and martyr for large sections of Jewish youth, even for those who in former times had been violently opposed to him’. He went on: ‘The slaying of Stern is a personal affront to many hundreds or even thousands of Jews, and I am convinced that the actions of the Palestine Administration can only result in the fanning of a vendetta which may last for years and spread far outside the limits of Palestine.’ Jabotinsky was offering to ‘fly to Palestine in order to try and use my influence to negotiate [a] truce’, and sought only ‘airplane priority’ and a guarantee that he wouldn’t be arrested.

  The overture was rejected by Cranborne. There ‘could be no question of a truce with people who adopt such methods’.20 Yet within a few weeks of Jabotinsky being told to mind his own business, two senior policemen set off on a mission that looked remarkably like an attempt to organize some sort of ceasefire. On the morning of 15 June Giles Bey arrived at Mazra’a camp accompanied by another officer called Ballantine. There, about a hundred Stern group members had been assembled in a hut to listen to a proposal being put forward by the visitors. It was delivered by Ballantine, a shadowy figure whose precise identity is unclear: there is no mention of him in the Palestine Police Force records, though he may have been a senior figure in the Nigerian colonial police on a temporary secondment.21

  Ballantine left an account in a document marked ‘secret’ which described how he ‘informed the persons present that I was new to this country and believed in making personal contacts with as many sections of the community as possible with the idea of (1) getting acquainted and (2) conveying to them the objects and purpose of a police force’. The gist of his message was that the Palestine Police had a job to do and were determined to do it, with the use of force if necessary. He flattered his audience by saying that he ‘did not doubt members of the Group would be prepared to sacrifice their lives’ to achieve their aims but the same applied to the police. This resulted in an inevitable ‘exchange of lives’ which was ‘very foolish, childish and unnecessary’. He suggested that ‘any lawful objects the group might have in mind would be at least equally worth pursuing by lawful and manly methods’.22 The inference seemed to be that if they renounced violence they would be released.

  Ballantine believed his address had gone down well. He was told by representatives from the audience that they wanted ten minutes to discuss the overture. Some then met him in the camp office and asked whether he would agree to allow an envoy safe passage to report his words to other members of the group. Ballantine replied that he didn’t have the authority to grant the request and that he or Giles would pass it up the line.

  Among those listening was Yitzhak Shamir. He later claimed that he had proposed that six Stern group members should be brought from detention in Acre to meet the Mazra’a detainees. This was done and they sat down to ‘thrash out the pros and cons of the British proposal’.23 Shamir’s view was that ‘we must do nothing, give nothing, exchange nothing – unless the British were prepared now, to pledge the post war creation of a Jewish state’. Instead they produced a set of counter-proposals, including the demand that the British hand over immigration control to the Jews, that were designed to be unacceptable. ‘[Ballantine’s] spokesmen thanked us coldly and broke off further negotiations.’ The encounter had taught them something that cheered them greatly: ‘The Mandatory Government, at last, was becoming worried about’ the Stern group.

  This was a fair assessment. Ballantine’s olive branch was indeed an indication of Britain’s deepening con
cern about its situation in the Middle East. In the high summer of 1942, alarm was mounting among Palestine’s rulers who were now extremely anxious to win whatever support and cooperation they could from their charges. On 26 May, after a lull of several months, Rommel’s advance across the Western Desert resumed. A few weeks later the Germans were in Tobruk and on 23 June they crossed the Egyptian border, stopping, a week later, at El Alamein. In the Caucasus in late July, Hitler launched Operation Edelweiss. The objective was to seize the oilfields of the region, but beyond them a bigger prize beckoned. Success could force Turkey into the war on Germany’s side, creating a vast new menace to Britain’s Middle Eastern possessions.

  In Palestine, the British rulers and the Yishuv establishment needed each other as never before. Jewish paramilitary organizations now represented a significant military resource, and none more so than the Haganah. The Mandate’s security staffs spent much time calculating their strengths. In early July an intelligence report assessed the Haganah as being capable of mustering 41,600 men and women, excluding their members in the British Army and police. An earlier report had calculated that just over 24,407 rifles, handguns and machine guns were in Jewish hands. Thus, despite their numbers, the Haganah were still badly under-equipped. The need for the Jews to be able to defend themselves could not be more acute. They faced a war of extermination on two fronts – from the Arabs, who might choose to exploit Britain’s difficulties to rise up against them, and from the Germans should they break the British in Egypt. It was inevitable that they should seek to acquire weapons by whatever means available, including stealing them from the army.

  The authorities’ attitude towards illegal arms had havered with the prevailing political situation, and the mailed fist alternated with the blind eye. In August 1942, the British knew that if the worst came to the worst, Jewish support would be most welcome and assumed that it would be forthcoming. This, surely, was a time for official myopia.

  Geoffrey Morton’s nature had always rebelled against the notion of selective justice. He was an intelligent man who recognized the complexities of the Palestinian situation. For him, though, the law was far more than a mere set of rules, to be bent or ignored as circumstances directed. It was the essence of everything he believed in, the bedrock of the society he risked his life to defend. His opposition to those who sought to undermine it – Arab or Jew, left or right – was unequivocal. By seeking to arm themselves the Jews were not only breaking the law, they were harming the British war effort. He freely admitted that he ‘enjoyed pitting my wits against these illegal organisations, which, for their own selfish ends, were prepared to go to any lengths to undermine the war potential of the Allies at a most critical stage in the fighting’.24

  Early in August, Morton received a tip-off which held the prospect of just the sort of police work he relished. The Special Investigation Branch of the RAF told him that a locally recruited Jew, Leading Aircraftman Zaks, had approached an RAF driver at a local ammunition dump with a proposal. He was offering big money for any rifles, machine guns and aerial bombs he could lay his hands on. Up to a thousand pounds was available for the right stuff. Leading Aircraftman Watts reported the approach straightaway. Morton and his men now set about organizing a sting operation.

  On 11 August, Watts told Zaks that he was detailed to drive a truck-load of ammunition from a dump near Ramleh to an RAF landing field near Gaza the following day. He was prepared to let him have ten boxes from his load in return for payment. Zaks was delighted and disappeared to Tel Aviv to ‘make the necessary arrangements’.25

  The following morning Watts set off in his lorry with fifty cases of ammunition on board. A short way down the road he saw a parked ‘touring car’ and opposite a man, who signalled him to stop. He then jumped in and they drove on, followed by the car. A few minutes later he was ordered to stop, just short of a track on the right that led to a kibbutz called Givat Brenner, a stronghold of the Haganah. The ‘touring car’ checked the road ahead. Several men from the kibbutz, who appeared at the junction, carried out a foot patrol at the same time. ‘Both the occupants of the touring car and the scouts paid particular attention to an Arab taxi which had stopped a few yards from the Givat Brenner junction,’ wrote Morton in his report. ‘But after a thorough inspection of its occupants, which consisted of two veiled Moslem women, accompanied by baskets, suitcases and other paraphernalia, an Arab driver and fellah consuming bread and olives, they were apparently satisfied that there were no police in the vicinity.’ They waved the lorry through some big iron gates into an orange grove alongside the track which belonged to the kibbutz.

  The operation was watched closely by the two ‘Moslem women’ in the taxi. Sweating under their heavily embroidered dresses and veils were two of Morton’s men, Sergeants Kenneth Hutchens and Ken ‘Busty’ Woodward. The driver drove slowly away. Down the road Morton, Tom Wilkin and several more officers were waiting. They drove back to the turning, meeting Watts and his lorry on the way. When the party arrived at the orange grove the gates were chained and padlocked. Woodward and Hutchens cut through the wire fence and raced through the trees in time to catch two men trying to hide the boxes in previously dug holes. Seven men were arrested and the car, which belonged to the kibbutz, impounded.

  All but one of the prisoners were Givat Brenner residents. The other lived at a kibbutz nearby. When Morton sent a few policemen to search the kibbutz they were refused entry. An angry crowd gathered, a shot was fired, then the search party retreated, one of them nursing a badly bitten hand. A stronger force returned later and completed the task.

  Before Morton could organize a search of the Givat Brenner prisoners’ homes, however, he received ‘urgent instructions from Jerusalem’ to desist. This was despite the fact that one of those held was found in possession of notes listing a cache of 119 rifles along with a mass of other military equipment. Morton was not one to let the matter pass. ‘In view of the notes found … it is probable that the results of these searches would have been helpful in the investigation of the case,’ he recorded plaintively in his official report.

  It had been a classic Morton operation involving cunning, slick planning and psychological manipulation. The use of policemen in drag provided a touch of humour guaranteed to raise a laugh in messes the length and breadth of Palestine for years to come. The Givat Brenner caper, though, was to be Morton’s last hurrah. The prisoners were sent for trial and most were convicted, and Zaks court-martialled and put away. All of were members of the Haganah.

  Alan Saunders had appeared to appreciate Morton’s ruse. ‘Your arrangements for the trap into which the accused fell were based on the best detective novel background,’ he enthused.26 Yet within a few days of this success, Morton received a very different missive from Saunders. ‘The blow fell,’ he wrote. He was ‘informed that it had been decided that I had been working too hard and that for the sake of my health my wife and I were to be sent home on leave by air immediately.’27 Morton was sickened by the news. ‘The war was at its height; we had our backs to the wall in the Western Desert … things had never looked blacker and we were to pack up and go home to England for an indefinite period with no indication as to what my future was to be.’ He ‘argued to the point of insubordination’. His resistance produced a meagre result. ‘The only concession I could obtain was that I would certainly be allowed to return to Palestine when I had had a good rest.’

  Why had Saunders decided he could do without the services of one of his most effective officers at a time when Palestine was in such danger? There is nothing in the files that provides an answer. The strong suspicion must be that, with the Givat Brenner raid, Morton had overstepped the mark. Throughout his career he had bridled at the notion that political expediency should be allowed to restrain the pursuit of the guilty. He recognized the trait in himself and made no apology for it. ‘As a policeman I doubtless took an oversimplified view of matters,’ he wrote fifteen years after these events. ‘To me a thing (in theory anyway
) was either right or wrong, legal or illegal; if it was illegal, my job was to do all in my power to bring to justice the person responsible for it: it was equally my job to see that a man would be able to do without hindrance that which he was legally entitled to do.’28

  This attitude had been more than apparent in a furious protest he directed to his bosses shortly before the Givat Brenner episode. A memo had crossed his desk revealing a plan by Saunders to release five low-level Stern group detainees. According to the Inspector General, they were now ‘definitely hostile to the group’s policy and have made known their change of front to their fellow internees’. He judged that their release ‘would react considerably on the die-hards of the group without public security suffering in any way’. Morton and other senior officers had been asked if they had any arguments against the proposal. ‘The most reasonable argument I can offer is the number of dead policemen for which these gangsters have been responsible,’ fumed Morton in his reply. ‘I would point out that it was exactly this policy applied to Messrs Stern, Levstein and Co which secured their release from internment following the double assassination of Inspectors Barker and Cairns in Jerusalem and which proved to be the death warrant of Messrs Schiff, Turton, Goldman, Soffiof …’ The ‘blow’ to the organization Saunders envisaged would ‘prove to be a boomerang’, he predicted.29 He had already heard that Eliyahu Moldovan, whose arrest had resulted in the assassination of Soffiof, was also due for release. The news led him to send an anguished letter to his immediate boss, Superintendent Harrington. Despite his proven toughness and considerable pride, Morton did not hide his fears for his personal safety. ‘As you know full well it is war to the end between the Stern gang and the Police in general, not to mention me in particular, and I am most apprehensive of retaliatory action which may be taken if Moldovan and other members of the gang are released,’ he wrote.30