The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land. Patrick Bishop

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      That does not, of course, mean that British intelligence officers did not believe Stern was the culprit. If they did, they were wrong. It was true that Stern knew something about ballistics. Together with David Raziel, he had produced a 240-page small-arms manual entitled The Gun.28 He had no known expertise in explosives, however. There was a bigger problem, though, in linking him to the killing of Wally Medler. Avraham Stern was not in Palestine when the bombs went off.

* Modern-day Chişinău, the capital of Moldova.

* British officials tended to refer to him as Abraham rather than Avraham Stern.

THREE

       ‘Let Fists Be Flung Like Stone’

      On 8 April 1938, Avraham Stern wrote from Warsaw to his wife Roni in Tel Aviv. ‘My heart aches that I misled you and didn’t return when I said I would … but I am dealing with important matters and I must finish them. I get the feeling that for us, this trip is the most important one of all.’1

      Stern had left Palestine for Poland at the end of January. The СКАЧАТЬ