The Reckoning Read online

  How much of this is true? There is plenty of evidence from the Arab revolt to suggest that some Palestine Police officers were on occasion guilty of beating and even killing prisoners. These crimes, though, were committed out of sight of higher authority. Zeroni’s claims are more sensational. He suggests that at the heart of the PPF, in its very headquarters, torture was routine and systematic and not only tolerated but observed by the force’s top brass.

  According to the PPF historian Edward Horne, who served in the force from 1941, ‘torture as such was forbidden but it would be foolish to say that it didn’t happen’. Arab officers in particular were likely to deliver ‘a most terrific thump across the face or chest’ if they suspected a prisoner was lying to them.34 British officers, too, sometimes lost their temper and struck a prisoner. The fastidious Dick Catling admitted that when, in 1944, a man was brought in who was suspected of killing his friend John Scott, ‘I thumped him. I thumped him hard. I was absolutely furious about this murder.’35

  This was not the same as the extended, formalized brutality alleged by Zeroni. The claim that Giles was present at some of the torture sessions was, Horne said, ‘in the realms of fantasy’.36 As for Zeroni’s account of his escape from the police station, a building Horne knew well, his verdict was: ‘I can’t see how it could happen.’

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Zeroni was once again at liberty. According to Levstein he went into hiding in Jerusalem before being smuggled out to Tel Aviv by Stern and Efraim Ilin, the host of the lively Tel Aviv parties, who installed him at his sister’s flat in the city.

  Levstein went to see Zeroni shortly after his experience. ‘The man was physically broken but his spirit was strong,’ he said. To Levstein’s approval, he was ‘determined to seek revenge’.37 However, he claimed that he had to push Strelitz and Stern to agree to move against Cairns. As a prelude, he planned to kill a Jewish officer called Gordon who, Zeroni said, had been present at the interrogations. Gordon was married to an English woman and ‘was totally committed to the British cause’. He ran a wide network of informers and had gathered a mass of data on the Irgun. ‘I was afraid that after we killed Cairns he might use his information against us and cause us a great deal of trouble.’ The assassination was set up for Friday, 18 August. Gordon was waylaid as he returned to his home in Zephaniah Street in the Kerem Avraham neighbourhood of Jerusalem for Sabbath supper. The would-be assassin stepped in front of him and pulled the trigger twice but the automatic pistol jammed. The attempt nonetheless had the desired effect. Shortly afterwards Gordon ‘took his family and left the country without a trace’.38

  Levstein then set about planning Cairns’s death with his customary thoroughness. Official accommodation was scarce and, despite the growing risks, Cairns lived away from police premises. A team of watchers followed him to his home in a modern block in Rehavia, a residential district near the centre of new Jerusalem. They noted his routine. Cairns was in the habit of crossing a building site on his way to and from his apartment. During the night of 25/26 August a huge mine built by Levstein to a pattern he had learned in Poland was buried near a path that led across the site. The planters defecated around it to deter the curious. That Saturday afternoon Cairns was walking back to the flat with a friend, twenty-seven-year-old Inspector Ronald Barker from Reading, Berkshire, when the bomb, packed with thirty-three pounds of gelignite, was detonated by a command wire operated by one of the team watching from a workman’s hut. Both men were killed instantly.

  In the following day’s Palestine Post this spectacular event appeared low down on the front page. Its columns were crowded with the dreadful news from Europe. All the reports pointed to war within days. German troops were deploying on the frontier with Poland. The German government was shifting from the centre of Berlin to the suburbs and the call-up of reservists was in full swing.39

  The killings brought another appalled response from the Jewish Agency. This act of ‘dastardly murder’ had come at ‘a fateful moment in the history of our people and of humanity at large … when the lands of freedom and democracy must take their stand against tyrannical regimes’. It urged Jews to ‘follow the ancient command’ to ‘eradicate the evil from thy midst’.40

  The Irgun continued to watch the impending catastrophe through the narrow focus of their own obsessive struggle. Like the IRA, they regarded Britain’s difficulty as their opportunity, and, with the Mandate’s attention now deflected by the war, Stern’s plan to bring in mass reinforcements from Poland gained acute urgency. On 31 August he asked Roni to pack his suitcase: he was leaving for Warsaw the following day. First, though, he had to attend a meeting of the Irgun command, due to take place at Efraim Ilin’s sister’s flat at 6 Aharonovich Street in the centre of Tel Aviv. That evening he joined Hanoch Strelitz and other commanders in the third-floor apartment. The meeting started with a report from Yaacov Levstein, who had arrived from Jerusalem, on the killings of Cairns and Barker. They then went on to discuss the liberation army plan. While they were talking they heard heavy footsteps in the hallway outside followed by the sound of fists drumming on the door. They ran to the windows. Armed police were swarming in the street below. There was no way out. Strelitz told someone to open the door. Tom Wilkin burst in, pistol in hand, at the head of a squad of detectives. The entire leadership of the Irgun Zvai Leumi was under arrest.

  * Like most Jews in Palestine, Strelitz swapped his European name for a Hebrew one and would be better known as Hanoch Kalai. For the sake of consistency I have used the names by which the figures in the story were known to the British authorities at the time.

  FIVE

  ‘And He Is a Rebel, Eager for the Storm’

  Three days after the raid, the world was at war. Geoffrey Morton was on honeymoon in Britain when he heard the announcement. He broke it off to return to Palestine and a very different job. Until now, the activities of the Jewish underground had barely concerned him. He had spent the previous eighteen months on the front line of the struggle against the Arabs, as police commander of the town of Jenin, which made up one side of the ‘triangle of terror’ where the rebellion burned fiercest.

  Morton had done very well there. His performance had been praised by General Bernard Montgomery, then serving in Palestine, and won him a gallantry award.1 His new post presented completely different challenges. He was being given charge of the Criminal Investigation Department of Lydda District. The news came as a surprise. ‘From my point of view there were three distinct drawbacks to this new appointment,’ he wrote.2 ‘Firstly, that I was completely without experience in CID work; secondly, that during the last eighteen months I had been dealing exclusively with Arabs in rural areas, whereas much of my work would now be connected with Jews and urban areas; and thirdly, that apart from one or two one-day trips from Jerusalem, some years earlier, I had no personal knowledge or experience of the large and important areas concerned.’

  Lydda* covered Tel Aviv, Rehovoth and Ramat Gan, all new Jewish towns that had sprung up in the preceding few decades. It also included the old Arab port of Jaffa. With the crushing of the Arab revolt and the palliative effects of the White Paper, the Arabs were quiet now, even if they were not satisfied. It was the Jews who would present Morton with most of his problems.

  While settling in he received a letter from his bride, Alice, which ‘filled me with joy’. Morton had not expected to see her until the war was over but she had somehow managed to get a passage out on an Orient liner and would be arriving in a few weeks. This, he noted, was ‘no small achievement but it was typical of the resourcefulness she … displayed on many occasions’.3 Alice Fowler was clever, musical, hard-working and adventurous. She was best friends with Marion Morton and lodged at the family home, now in Calton Avenue in Dulwich Village, a green and prosperous south-east London suburb. She had met Geoffrey when he arrived home on leave in the winter of 1937 and ‘began to go out in the evenings to dance, theatres, dine etc with him’.4 She was nonetheless taken aback when,
one evening, he proposed. ‘I certainly liked him immensely but had never once thought of him as a potential husband,’ she remembered. Geoffrey’s certainty that they were made for each other – and the prospect of an exciting life by his side – persuaded her.

  Neither was to regret the decision and Alice, born and brought up in the tranquillity of Melksham in Wiltshire, where her father was stationmaster, would prove more than capable of dealing with the rough and tumble of life as the wife of a Palestine Police officer. By marrying Alice, Geoffrey wrote later, he ‘acquired a loyal, devoted, long-suffering and courageous wife and counsellor’.5 The marriage was long and happy, based on mutual respect and shared values. Above all, it was what Avraham and Roni Stern’s union was not – a partnership.

  Morton set about finding them a home, renting a stone-built bungalow in Sarona, a peaceful enclave shaded by eucalyptus trees founded by German followers of the Knights Templar, which lay on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv, just off the main road to Haifa. The bachelor life of mess and tennis court came to an end. Away from the dramas of the day the couple led a measured, middle-class existence, dining and playing bridge with friends and in the evenings tasting the pleasures of Tel Aviv. Despite the war, the latest films were showing at the city’s cinemas and they enjoyed concerts by the world-class Palestine Orchestra. Tel Aviv was beautiful and boldly modern, built to a master plan drawn up by a Scotsman, Patrick Geddes, its houses, office and apartment blocks designed by young Jewish architects who had been inspired by the leading lights of the Bauhaus school. The result was a townscape of cool, curved balconies and blindingly white walls softened by the lush foliage flourishing in multiple squares and gardens. Beneath the stylish facades the many cafés lining Dizengoff and Ben Yehuda acted as informal trading floors, crowded with men and women buying and selling illegal gold and diamonds, forged papers and immigration certificates. They seethed with rumour and gossip as the patrons, drawn or driven there from every corner of Europe and beyond, devoured any scrap of news about their families and friends, now swallowed up by the ‘night and fog’ of Nazi occupation. Apprehension, uncertainty and a sick feeling of excitement hung in the air as each pondered his or her private fate and wondered where the riptides of war would sweep them.

  In the broad, tree-lined boulevards, army lorries rumbled to and fro. The pavements and places of entertainment were crowded with men in uniform; airmen, sailors and soldiers, many of them Australian, Geoffrey Morton could have been among them. Just before the outbreak of war the officer commanding a battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders whom he worked alongside in Jenin during the Arab revolt had offered him an immediate captaincy. He wrote afterwards: ‘without pausing for thought I replied “thank you very much colonel but I think I’d better carry on where I am”.’ Morton never expanded on why he turned down what was a flattering and unusual proposal. He was, however, well advanced on his career and had set his heart on reaching the top. If he left the police service there was no guarantee he could rejoin at the same level if he survived the war. Given that he seemed to relish danger and had already risked his life numerous times, it is unlikely his decision was based on safety calculations. For, as he later remarked, if he had accepted the Argylls’ offer, ‘I do not believe with hindsight that I should have been exposed to more personal danger than I was to experience in my next tour of duty.’6

  Morton boned up on his new beat with his usual diligence, and ‘every bit of information or gossip and every name which came to our notice for any reason was carefully sifted, assessed and indexed for future reference’. He relied heavily at first on his second in command – Tom Wilkin. ‘Wilkie’, as Morton called him, ‘was a veritable tower of strength in every way, an excellent investigator and prosecutor, and a first-class Hebrew speaker; he knew more about Jewish politics and organizations than the rest of the Palestine Police put together’. He also had the gift of being able to express himself clearly and succinctly on paper. This, Morton judged, was ‘a virtue possessed equally by his assistant in the Jewish affairs section Sergeant Stamp’. Bernard Stamp was brought up in a large family in Hull. He joined the Coldstream Guards when he was eighteen and transferred to the Palestine Police just after the 1929 riots. He left school at fourteen but had educated himself thoroughly and had an impressive knowledge of English literature. He also had a privileged insight into the life of the Yishuv. Like his friend and boss, Wilkin, he spoke Hebrew and had a Jewish girlfriend, Fay Schreiber. They had met one afternoon on Gordon Beach, a few hundred yards from the centre of Tel Aviv, and soon fell for each other. The match would create great problems for both of them. Fay’s father, David, was strongly religious and patriotic. The thought of his daughter marrying both a non-Jew and a British policeman appalled him. When they broke the news of their engagement he disowned her and announced seven days’ mourning in the family. According to Stamp’s son, Dan, once it was known that his father was courting a Jewish girl he was taken aside by a superior and told that if they decided to marry, his career would hit a dead end and he could expect no further promotion. His father, ‘a very honourable man’,7 ignored the warning. They were married in 1941 with Tom Wilkin as best man. This development would play an important part in subsequent events.

  Morton was very impressed by his new deputy. ‘I placed myself at Wilkie’s feet to learn all I could of the Jewish political set up, which was so involved that many of the Jews themselves had but a hazy idea of the affiliations and functions of many of the groups,’ he wrote. Although he was a newcomer to Jewish political affairs he did know some Hebrew, acquired while serving in Haifa, and while nowhere near as good as Wilkin’s, ‘it stood me in good stead after I had brushed it up a little’.8

  With the coming of the war the Yishuv and Zionists everywhere had decided this was no time to let the bitterness caused by the White Paper to distort their view of the bigger picture. Britain had betrayed them, but in the long term it was still their natural ally in the struggle ahead. In the analysis of the Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald ‘it was vital for the Jewish national home that Britain should win the war. If Britain lost and Hitler won, there would be no national home. The Jews would be killed or expelled from Palestine, just as they had been 2,000 years earlier.’ It was this understanding that led Weizmann to write to the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain a few days before the outbreak of war, promising ‘the Jews stand by Great Britain and will fight on the side of the democracies’. Jabotinsky, too, had pledged the New Zionist Organization’s support for Britain and France and revived his idea of a Jewish Legion that would fight alongside the Allies against the Nazis. That did not mean that Britain could expect lamb-like docility from the Yishuv. The attitude there was summed up neatly by Ben-Gurion: ‘We shall fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there were no war.’9

  There would be many points of friction in the relationship. Britain’s relief that the Arabs were subdued was considerable and the government was desperate to avoid doing anything to stir them up again and drive them into the arms of the Germans. Repeated offers to provide Jewish units to fight the Nazis were turned down on the grounds that they would provoke Arab anger and could be a pretext to create a force-in-waiting that might later turn against the Arabs and even the British.

  At this delicate time, High Commissioner MacMichael wanted no private armies on his patch. That included the Haganah, which, no matter how keen it might be to fight the Nazis, ultimately took its orders from the Jewish Agency. When, on 5 October, a British Army patrol came across a forty-two-strong band of Haganah men drilling close to Yavniel, near Lake Tiberias, they were arrested and later given long prison sentences.

  The outbreak of war brought no relaxation of the campaign against illegal immigration. In occupied Poland the worst fears of the Zionist prophets were starting to be realized as Jews were herded into ghettoes or transported to forced labour camps. The lucky few who had escaped or bought their way out of Hitler’s expanding empire
were crowding the Black Sea ports seeking passage to Palestine. Britain exerted maximum diplomatic pressure to prevent the refugee ships sailing. When boats did land the passengers were arrested and taken to the camp for illegals at Athlit, near Haifa, with a view to shipping them out again, using force if necessary, to the British colony of Mauritius. Winston Churchill had opposed the White Paper and deplored the treatment of refugees. On becoming Prime Minister in May 1940 he discovered that Foreign and Colonial Office resistance to lifting the immigration barrier was fierce.

  According to their chilly mandarin logic it made no sense to soften the official line. The prison door had slammed behind the Jews of conquered Europe. Letting in twenty or thirty thousand refugees would make no real difference and could only serve to spark another Arab uprising and a possible alliance with Nazi Germany, which might well lead to the expulsion of the British from Palestine. MacMichael set the tone of fierce opposition to any relaxation. ‘Has every Jew the right to come to Palestine?’ he demanded rhetorically of the new Colonial Secretary Lord Moyne early in 1941. ‘Has every Jew who can reach Palestine the right to remain there?’10 This attitude would lead to a string of tragic episodes that would burn into the psyche of the Yishuv and increase the store of bitterness towards the British.

  One way of blocking the growth of Jewish private armies was raiding their armouries. The Irgun and the Haganah had begun breaking into military installations and bribing soldiers to add to their stocks of weapons and ammunition. Geoffrey Morton was soon reapplying the methods he had used so successfully on the Arabs of the ‘triangle of terror’. He spread the word that he would pay well for information leading to weapons seizures. He was soon contacted by a recent immigrant whom he called ‘Jacques’ who tipped him off about an arms cache in the colony of Mishmar Shalosh in the Galilee. On 16 January, Morton led a raid on the place and found fifteen rifles, two pistols, forty-five Polish-made bombs, ammunition and detonators where he was told they would be – hidden under the tiled floor of the post of the official Jewish Supernumerary Police which guarded kibbutzim and agricultural settlements. A week later another tip from Jacques led him to the settlement of Ben Shemen, near Lydda. Once again arms were found under the police station floor.