The Reckoning Read online

  ‘Between us,’ wrote Morton, ‘we represented every conceivable stratum of life in the British Isles, from the heir of an impoverished Earl, products of exclusive public schools and graduates of famous universities to professional bruisers, coalminers, regular soldiers and really tough Tyneside Geordies who played a better game of football in their bare feet than they did with boots on.’11

  The PPF had been set up as a gendarmerie, whose main function was as shock troops ready to bash the heads of unruly locals at times of unrest. The British element kept to themselves, treated their Palestinian colleagues with a condescension bordering on contempt and were not required to have any knowledge of either Arabic or Hebrew. Morton noted that ‘the policeman of any rank who took the trouble to learn even a smattering of everyday language in the vernacular was looked upon … with scorn, only very slightly tinged with respect or envy.’12

  It would take Morton some time to settle into his calling. By the time of MacMichael’s arrival he was an up and coming young officer, winning the attention of his superiors with his efforts on the front line in the fight to suppress the Arab revolt. As the spring advanced it was clear that violence was not only intensifying. It was no longer an Arab monopoly.

  On the hot afternoon of Monday, 11 April 1938, a crowded train stood ready to depart from the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline terminal in Haifa Bay where oil from the Iraq fields ended its journey across the desert. There were several hundred passengers on board, most of them Arab workers who were returning home at the end of their shifts. Just before 4 p.m. an Arab sergeant of the Palestine Police was patrolling nearby when someone pointed out two suspicious-looking packages on board the train. He told the driver to delay departure while he removed the parcels. They were placed next to a guardhouse where one of them exploded, killing a Druze police constable. The second then went off, mortally wounding an Arab bystander.

  Shortly afterwards, three buses taking Jewish workers from a nearby building site back to Haifa passed by. The Arabs decided that the Jews were to blame for the explosions. They started hurling stones and a small riot ensued with both sides exchanging missiles.

  Now a police team from Haifa arrived on the scene. They were led by Sergeant Walter Medler, a conscientious and popular twenty-seven-year-old. By 5.15 p.m. calm had been restored and passengers were waiting to re-board the train. Then Sergeant Medler made another discovery. Stuffed under one of the seats was a sack, tied at the neck with string. Medler picked it up, threw it out of the window and ducked. Nothing happened. He stepped from the train and began, warily, to untie the string. A second later Medler was dead. So, too, was Constable Michael Ward, a twenty-two-year-old only recently arrived in Palestine who was standing behind him. The explosion, it was learned later, was caused by a time bomb – quite a sophisticated device by the standards of the time and place.13

  It had been Medler’s bad luck to be called to the oil terminal. As a junior sergeant at the Haifa police station he worked under Geoffrey Morton, acting as his deputy on many operations. That day Morton had taken a squad on a duty that was becoming part of their regular routine. Twenty miles to the south of Haifa at Wadi Hawareth, Bedouins were being evicted from land they had grazed their livestock on for generations. It had been sold over their heads to Jews who planned to build a kibbutz and the police were there to intervene in the likely event of trouble. It was to Morton and many other policemen ‘one of the more distasteful tasks’ they were asked to perform.14 Normally, Morton would have taken Medler with him and left his senior sergeant, Jack Bourne, behind to deal with emergencies. He wrote later that on this day, however, ‘for some reason which in retrospect I have never been able to understand, I decided to take Jack Bourne with me to Wadi Hawareth and to leave Wally Medler in charge in Haifa’.15 The eviction went off without incident. Morton returned from a long and dispiriting day to be told Medler and Ward were dead. The death of comrades was almost a routine event by now, but the news hit Morton very hard. Medler was not just a valued colleague but a close friend. He came from Norwich where his father was a wholesale fruit merchant and went to the city’s Junior Technical College, a pioneering academy for the sons of ordinary families, but left early to work in a solicitor’s office. Then, according to the local newspaper report on his death ‘the opportunity of seeing something more of the world and the prospects of advancement attracted him to the Palestine [Police]’. His hopes had been realized. In 1935 he became the youngest sergeant in the force. He was a good sportsman and the police welterweight boxing champion.16

  Even allowing for the generosity shown to the newly (and violently) deceased it is clear that Medler was an exceptional man. ‘Trim and neat in figure, whether in charge of a traffic escort or on the sports field, in giving evidence in court or in the boxing ring, Walter Medler bespoke his character’ ran the appreciation by ‘BWF’ in the Palestine Post. He was ‘an omnivorous reader, yet not a bookworm, a popular messmate and comrade … the all-round athlete who had time for good books, good concerts, good contacts and wholesome entertainment’. Medler’s rank, BWF concluded, might be that of ‘second class sergeant’, but ‘his rank among his many friends was “prince”’.17

  Morton, like most of his colleagues, took a cheerfully fatalistic view of life and death but the loss of his friend brought on an uncharacteristic fit of the blues. ‘Haifa lost much of the savour it had previously held for me,’ he wrote. ‘I was lonely and miserable and found it difficult to concentrate on my work.’18 After hearing the news he went to say his farewell to his friend in the mortuary. A silver pencil, splintered by the explosion, was sticking out of his breast pocket. He took it and kept it as a memento for the rest of his life.19 Among Morton’s papers is a photograph of Wally Medler. It is a well-framed shot showing him sunbathing with another policeman, Arthur Brument, next to the ruins of a Crusader castle on the Mediterranean at Athlit, just south of Haifa. Even though it is in monochrome you can almost feel the heat of the burning sand and admire the depth of the two men’s suntans.

  Who had planted the bombs? The likeliest culprits were right-wing Zionists, angered by the campaign of murder and arson being waged by the Arab rebels against the Jews of Palestine. In the face of Arab aggression, the instinct of the Zionist establishment was to exercise havlagah – to show restraint and to suppress the desire to hit back. Such a stance was both moral and practical. Retaliation would almost certainly mean killing innocent Arabs along with the guilty, and undermine Zionism’s claim to high ethical standards both in its aims and in its conduct.

  In showing restraint the leaders of Palestine’s Jews also hoped to gain political advantage. The great majority of Zionists, left and right, believed that their interests lay in cooperating with the empire. By holding back they were relieving the hard-pressed security services of an extra burden. Their good behaviour, they calculated, might persuade the British to look more favourably on their ambitions for statehood.

  As the Arab revolt rumbled on and the murder of innocent Jews persisted, patience with havlagah began to wear thin. The political divisions of the Jews in Palestine corresponded to the politics of the countries they had left behind. The ideologies of old Europe were mirrored in the numerous parties and organizations that flourished in the Holy Land and the political spectrum contained communists, socialists and those whose aesthetic and beliefs bordered on fascism.

  The ideological centre of gravity of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was known, lay firmly on the left. The dominant political force was the Mapai, in Hebrew the acronym for the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, and the dominant political figure was its leader, David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Grün in 1886, in the Polish town of Płońsk inside the Russian Empire. His father, Avigdor, was a lawyer and enthusiastic Zionist and at the age of fourteen David founded a youth club to study the Hebrew language and promote emigration to Palestine. In 1906, after studying at Warsaw University, he practised what he preached by setting off to pick oranges on one
of the earliest Jewish settlements in Palestine at Petah Tikva – the ‘gate of hope’. And it was hope, not fear, that drove him and the other young Zionists of Poland and Russia to Palestine’s shores. ‘For many of us, anti-Semitism had little to do with our dedication,’ he wrote. ‘I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution … we emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for positive reasons of building a homeland.’20

  Ben-Gurion was an atheist but looked and sounded like an Old Testament prophet. He seemed to exude a pacific tranquillity, yet all his life was a fighter, starting from the day in 1908 when he took up arms to defend the agricultural settlement in the Galilee, where he was now living, from Arab attack. He was an idealist but also a superb political tactician. By 1935 he had established himself as both the head of Mapai and also the chairman of the Jewish Agency, which had been recognized five years earlier by the British as the legitimate representative of the Jews of Palestine and therefore the de facto government of the Yishuv.

  His main ideological opponent was also brilliant, driven and charismatic. Whereas Ben-Gurion radiated calm, Ze’ev Jabotinsky hummed with restless energy. He had a chin that stuck out like the prow of a ship and a mouth like a downturned scimitar. His dark eyes scrutinized the world from behind wire-rimmed spectacles with ruthless intensity. He was a remarkable writer and speaker, expressing himself in statements and utterances that seemed to have been chiselled from stone.

  He had been born Vladimir Zhabotinsky in 1880 in the lively cosmopolitan city of Odessa, in the Russian Empire. His parents brought him and his sister up with little reference to their Jewishness. He was converted to Zionism by an event that transformed the lives of many young Jews. In April 1903 in Kishinev,* a city on the south-eastern borders of the Russian Empire, Christian mobs embarked on a pogrom, killing forty-seven Jewish men, women and children while the tsarist police looked on. The incident was shocking not only for the amount of blood shed but because of the conduct of Jewish males, who ran away or hid when the rampage began.

  The massacre taught Jabotinsky a lesson. It was summed up in a slogan: ‘Jewish youth, learn to shoot!’ He followed his own prescription, founding Jewish self-defence units across Russia. In the First World War he was a founder of the Jewish Legion, created to fight alongside the British against the Turks in Palestine. The move was designed to win British support for the establishment of a Jewish state. Jabotinsky admired the British Empire and would have preferred to work with it, but Palestine’s rulers regarded him as a troublemaker. They imprisoned him and finally banished him in an – inevitably unsuccessful – attempt to shut him up.

  Jabotinsky’s style was emphatic and impatient. His vision of Zionism rejected gradualism and compromise and exalted action. He preached that every Jew had the right to enter Palestine, that only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and that only Jewish armed force would ensure a Jewish state.21

  The need for some sort of military force had been recognized since Zionist settlers first began arriving in Palestine. After the anti-Jewish riots of 1920, a paramilitary organization, the Haganah (Defence), had been established under the loose control of Mapai and with the tacit acceptance of the British. The organization would eventually come under the overall control of Mapai and the Jewish Agency to form the ‘secret army of the Left’, as a British report put it.22 In its early days, though, it lacked structure and resources and its failure to protect Jews during the pogrom that erupted in the summer of 1929 led to demands for more vigorous action. In 1931 a group that included many Jabotinsky supporters broke away. Eventually the secessionists would form a new underground militia known as the Irgun Zvai Leumi, or National Military Organization. Its philosophy and aims were summed up in its badge, which showed a hand clutching a rifle superimposed on a map with the outline of an Israeli state stretching far across the Jordan and bearing the slogan ‘Raq Kach’ – Only Thus.

  The Irgun’s underground status bred a secretive and conspiratorial culture. According to a British intelligence report, the organization combined ‘totalitarian tendencies’ with ‘violent nationalism’ and ‘a hearty dislike for socialism’.23 The last attitude guaranteed a difficult relationship with the overwhelmingly left-wing institutions of the Yishuv. Its members were young, avid and quarrelsome and the potential for schism was strong. In the spring of 1937 a passionate debate on future strategy produced the first big split. One side proposed uniting with the Haganah to form a single Jewish military body. The other argued that their approaches were incompatible and that the Irgun should remain independent. The issue was decided in a referendum, with each side arguing its case at secret meetings of local groups. The Irgun divided down the middle with half returning to the Haganah.

  The 1800 who stayed put were mostly hardline Revisionists and the majority had served in the Betar, the movement’s youth organization whose members, with their fondness for uniforms and parades, resembled the Italian boy fascists of the Balilla. The link with the Revisionists was made explicit when Ze’ev Jabotinsky was installed as the new Irgun’s supreme commander – essentially a figurehead role since the British had barred him from Palestine. It was from this quarter that the opposition to maintaining havlagah was strongest. Ben-Gurion was adamant that abandoning restraint would be a moral and political error. Jabotinsky, too, was reluctant at first to condone reprisals as he was hoping the British might allow the emergence of an official Jewish military force. His followers, though, were straining at the leash. From the beginning of the Arab revolt the Irgun carried out sporadic, unauthorized tit-for-tat reprisals. On the early morning of 14 November 1937 came a wave of attacks which showed that they had finished with havlagah for good.

  Following the killing of five young men from a kibbutz near Jerusalem, a wave of gunfire rippled across the city. Five Arabs, two of them women and all of them innocent of any obvious involvement in the uprising, were killed. The attacks brought a horrified reaction from the Yishuv. The Palestine Post could barely bring itself to believe that it was Jews who had carried them out but, if that were the case, ‘the depraved wretch or wretches would have to be excommunicated’. Whoever was responsible must be ‘found, faced and dealt with’.24

  The operation had in fact been planned by David Raziel, the Irgun’s twenty-six-year-old Jerusalem commander. He was quiet, strongly religious and committed to the notion of ‘active defence’. This was presented as a military doctrine by which Arab aggressors were targeted before they could launch anti-Jewish attacks. In practice it translated into indiscriminate bombings and shootings aimed at any Arab who was to hand. After ‘Black Sunday’, as the Jerusalem outrages became known, the Palestine Police rounded up a number of suspected Irgun members. The anti-Arab campaign, now sanctioned by Jabotinsky who realized he had no means of stopping it, continued nonetheless and the tempo of operations increased.

  The bombs on the train at Haifa in April 1938 appeared to be part of the campaign. But instead of murdering Arabs, they had killed Wally Medler and Michael Ward. Until now, Geoffrey Morton’s police activities had mainly involved dealings with Arabs. The incident had brought him into painful contact with what was the emerging, and would eventually be the dominant, threat to law and order in Palestine – the activities of dissident Jews. According to Morton the Irgun issued leaflets admitting their responsibility for the bombs ‘but stating that [they] had been intending to kill Arabs and not British police’. He was ‘not able to derive any consolation from this explanation’.25

  In his autobiography which appeared in 1957, and in another unpublished account of his police career in Palestine written just before he died, Morton gave great emphasis to the incident. As well as losing his friend he had gained an enemy, a figure who would come to dominate his life. Preoccupied with the Arab uprising, Morton knew little about the Irgun, which anyway had only a small presence in Haifa. He now ‘took the opportunity to find out all I could’ about them.26 In the process he ‘heard for the first time of the man’ who was reputed to
be the brains behind the killings. ‘His name,’ he revealed with a flourish, ‘was Abraham Stern.’*

  In the later memoir, completed in 1993, three years before his death, he gave a slightly expanded but no less dramatic version. ‘Intelligence sources reported that one Abraham Stern, who was known to be their ballistics expert, was responsible for devising and setting this booby trap,’ he wrote. ‘It was a name I had not heard before. I was to remember it.’27

  This account varies in some minor details from the earlier one. The main assertion, though, is the same: Avraham Stern was the man behind the bomb that killed Wally Medler and Michael Ward. The detail that the bombs were aimed at Arabs rather than policemen would soon be overlooked as, within eighteen months, the Irgun widened the scope of their operations and British officers came under attack.

  Morton was right to blame the Irgun for the bombing. But was it true that Avraham Stern was behind it? There is no surviving official documentation on the killings of Medler and Ward. Much of the Mandate’s paperwork was destroyed or scattered in the process of departure.

  The most complete record of activities of the Palestine Police CID – the department that dealt with the Jewish underground – was collected by the Haganah, who had many members and sympathizers among the government’s Jewish employees. It is made up of documents secretly copied under the noses of the Mandate’s rulers and papers captured after the British left and is now housed in a library in Tel Aviv. The boxes contain no material about the Haifa bombings. When, later, Avraham Stern’s name does begin to appear in intelligence reports, there is no mention of his being suspected as the brains behind this operation.