The Reckoning

by Patrick Bishop

  Strelitz appointed Stern as his deputy with responsibility for propaganda as well as the intelligence section. He was also to act as the main link between Palestine and the European organization and to oversee the considerable funds brought in from the Irgun-organized illegal immigration. Stern was soon at work explaining the rationale of a spate of deadly attacks on Arabs. On the morning of 29 May an Irgun squad led by a firebrand called Moshe Moldovsky entered the village of Bir Adas on the coastal plain near Jaffa apparently looking for ‘gangsters’. They shot dead five Arabs, four of them women. Jabotinsky had opposed mounting attacks to protest at the White Paper and first heard about the operation from a British newspaper. He dispatched an angry letter to Strelitz demanding an explanation. It read: ‘An order: The Times reports that at Bir Adas four women were killed with the use of a revolver and those who were shot were found not outside the house but inside. That means that they intended to target the women. If this is a lie you must immediately deny it. If it is true you must punish those responsible and inform me what the punishment is.’16

  There was no denial and no one was punished. The account of the incident put out by Stern was a fiction in which a group of their men had chased off an Arab band that had been sheltering in Bir Adas and went on to ‘conquer’ the village. The bulletin mentioned nine wounded Arabs but no dead women.17 Stern turned the event into a great symbolic victory, which had taken the struggle into the Arab heartland. ‘Our enemy today is the Arabs,’ he wrote. ‘By our reprisals … first within the Hebrew Yishuv, then on the borders of the Arab area and in the end by penetrating to pure Arab areas like Bir Adas we will uproot the feet of the hateful Arab spy.’18 His attitude towards the Arabs was simple. The issue of who owned Palestine would be decided by force and rightly so. The Arabs had after all won the land by conquest and intended to rule it for ever. Now it was time for the Jews to win it back.

  The logic was that every Arab was an enemy and therefore a legitimate target. On the same day as the Bir Adas action another operation was mounted in Jerusalem which showed that Strelitz and Stern had now abandoned any pretence that Irgun violence was directed only at the guilty. It was devised by Roni Burstein’s twenty-one-year-old cousin Yaacov ‘Yashke’ Levstein, who had chosen to study chemistry at the Hebrew University in order to gain expertise in bomb-making. He had also learned how to handle explosives at an Irgun training camp in Poland. The plan was to plant bombs in the Arab-owned Rex cinema during an evening showing of a Tarzan film, when the auditorium would be packed. The operation would be carried out by four men and three women from the Irgun cell in Jerusalem. They were chosen because of their dark looks, which enabled them to pass as Arabs, and, as Levstein gleefully recounted, they played their parts to perfection. One, Mazlia Nimrodi, ‘was groomed like an Arab, perfumed, his hair sleeked, a colourful handkerchief in his chest pocket, his shoes glistening. He had expensive English cigarettes in his pockets, an Arab favourite.’19

  Nimrodi was a Sephardi tailor who spoke Arabic. He had sewn the special jacket packed with explosives which would cause the initial blast. The other members of the team posed as courting couples. The women each carried a box of ‘chocolates’ inside which was a tin containing a charge of gelignite, nails and metal shards. Just before the film began, Nimrodi got up from his seat in the stalls, leaving his jacket hanging on the back of the seat in front of him, and left the cinema. Seven minutes later, at 8.30 p.m., the bomb exploded. The couples in the balcony then threw their chocolate-box bombs into the screaming, panic-stricken mass below.

  The attack killed five and wounded eighteen, among them a Jewish boy and girl. The Irgun claimed responsibility for the blasts but showed no sympathy for the injured Jewish couple who had gone to the pictures ‘to enjoy themselves in the company of Arabs’.20

  In June and July, the Irgun carried out random attacks on Arabs in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv. Stern thoroughly approved of the policy, though there is no evidence he ever threw a bomb or pulled a trigger himself. His job was to publicize the mayhem and to explain the purpose behind it. By now he had a well-established nom de plume. He was ‘Yair’, in homage to Elazar ben Yair, one of the leaders of the Jews of Masada.

  The original Yair’s followers were a minority inside the Jewish community whose uncompromising beliefs and sacrificial deaths provided a heroic example for their weaker brethren to follow. The modern Yair presented the Irgun in a similar light in newspaper articles, leaflets and broadcasts by a clandestine radio station, Radio Liberated Zion, which broke into the airwaves of Palestine to abuse the Yishuv establishment, and glorify Irgun actions. A typical bulletin described the activities of 29 June in flat, military communiqué-style form: ‘At 5.30 a.m. an Arab was killed by our men at Jaffa−Tel Aviv Road near Nahlat Benyamin Street … another Arab was killed near the orchards of Sheikh Mouness … an Arab carriage was fired at by our men in the vicinity of Beit Shearim. Four Arabs were killed and one wounded and died later.’ It noted that, in the southern district of Palestine alone, Irgun men had, in the space of an hour, managed to kill fourteen Arabs.

  Their industry was in sharp contrast to the Haganah approach. The concerted action between the two organizations in February had been short-lived and efforts to create a joint strategy had come to nothing. Stern’s propaganda presented the Haganah as timid, even treacherous. On this occasion they ‘failed to follow our steps and did not go into battle’. Instead, in Haifa, they ‘handed over to the police a Jew who was believed to be shooting an Arab’.

  The Irgun’s random killings were ‘not acts of despair and not acts of revenge … These were fighting acts of persons who believe that the Jewish kingdom must be created by force.’ Their deeds had divine approval. The ‘unknown soldiers’ (a nod to Stern’s poem of the same name) were obeying ‘the ancient Jewish command, issued by God himself in his holy Torah: “A soul for a soul and blood for blood.”’21

  Stern was preaching to a largely hostile audience. If, as Giles Bey believed in February, the Yishuv had tolerated anti-Arab outrages in the hope that they might force the British to reconsider their new policy of abandoning the Mandate and making the Jews of Palestine subject to the laws of democracy, they did not do so now. The bloodshed had brought no gains and with the mainstream Jewish organizations committed to a programme of non-violent protest in the form of strikes and boycotts, the Irgun’s actions were widely deplored.

  Giles’s weekly intelligence report of 28 June noted a leaflet distributed by ‘The Daring Ones’ whom he took to be a group on the left wing of the Labour party. It denounced the Irgun as a ‘gang of despised hooligans’ who were ‘raging through the country. Through the wireless and in loathsome leaflets they boast of their heroic deeds.’ It went on to list some of the Irgun’s recent actions: ‘They murder an Arab family in Byar Adas [sic]. They murdered Arabs passing on their business through Tel Aviv. They killed and wounded Arabs passing through Jewish quarters …’

  These ‘conquerors’, it went on, ‘stain the splendour of our clean war for the liberty of the nation with the blood of innocent people’. The real aim of their campaign, the authors asserted, was to ‘establish a reign of internal terror, throw down national discipline, divide the Yishuv, throw mud at the elected bodies and sow anarchy’.22 Stern and Strelitz regarded any criticism of their methods as an act of aggression. Early in July, Moshe Smilansky of the Farmers Association wrote an article in the mainstream Haaretz newspaper stating that Jews who ‘committed acts of terrorism against innocent and defenceless Arabs … merely brought degradation on Jewry’. Attached to the article was a declaration headlined ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ signed by 200 prominent members of the Yishuv. A few days later the newspaper’s editor received a letter from the Irgun ‘press section’. It demanded that he publish a response comprised of biblical quotations justifying acts of vengeance or face ‘proper action’. The editor bravely refused.23

  Stern’s propaganda machine also issued threats against Jewish members of the Palesti
ne Police. A leaflet urged them to ‘remember your duty to your nation’ and warned: ‘The rifle in your hand should not be aimed against us. You should not guard our prisoners in the prison. You should not convey our heroes to the gallows.’24 The seriousness of the threat was made clear when, on the same evening as the Rex cinema blast, a gunman opened fire on a Jewish CID detective, Arieh Polonski, and a male companion, Asher Nemdar, as they stood talking in a Jerusalem street. Polonski died two days later. The killing was described as a ‘death sentence’ on ‘a trickster in the pay of the Jewish Agency and the C.I.D’.25 Two more Jewish officers would be killed later that summer.

  These operations were fairly straightforward to organize and carried limited risks. Defenceless Arabs were easy targets. Jewish policemen lived outside barracks within their own communities and were vulnerable once they left work. Taking on the British was a different proposition. Having declared their enmity to the Mandate, the Irgun trod carefully at first, restricting themselves to symbolic actions. Once again Levstein was at the forefront of the campaign. On 2 June teams posing as repair men levered up manhole covers in Jerusalem and blew up junction boxes, cutting off half the city’s telephones. The exercise was repeated in Tel Aviv. The scale of the attacks required considerable manpower. Levstein claimed that 150 men were needed to manufacture, stand guard and plant the bombs.

  Next he came up with a plan to blow up Jerusalem’s central post office. The idea was appealing on several counts: ‘Firstly it would mean a direct attack on a government institution. Second the building was next to the CID headquarters, hence an attack on that place would shake the secret police. Third, an explosion next door would attract the top CID investigators, including their bomb expert. This man had dismantled many of our bombs, and discovered our methods. It was extremely important to put him out of action.’26

  Levstein made four letter bombs for posting in the large mailboxes set into the front of the building. Three were conventional time bombs. He claimed later that the fourth was designed not to go off but fitted with a booby trap to await the attentions of the police explosives expert, Constable Michael Clarke. On the evening of 10 June the bombs were posted and three duly exploded, tearing down the front wall of the post office. The following morning the fourth was discovered. Clarke went to work and the bomb exploded, killing him on the spot. Levstein would later describe the results with the same relish that he recounted all his bombing triumphs. ‘His head was thrust in the air and stuck to the ceiling, with his eyes staring down. The explosion and the ghastly sight scared the CID personnel.’27 Chief Secretary William Battershill visited the scene shortly afterwards and was made ‘physically sick’ by what he saw.28 The ‘beautiful hall … was now shattered’ and there were body parts scattered about. He noted that ‘discipline for the moment seemed to have vanished’.

  Mandate officials worked on the assumption that they were under constant threat of assassination. Battershill had a ‘sleuth’ protecting him round the clock and carried a revolver and thirty-five rounds of ammunition at all times. These precautions, though, had been intended as protection from Arab terrorists. Now, it seemed, Jews posed an equal threat.

  These exploits were publicized on Radio Liberated Zion. Blowing up the telephone network was presented as an attack on police and army communications, even though most of the lines knocked out belonged to Jewish subscribers. Listeners were invited to mock the discomfort of the British authorities. Reporting a bomb attack on the melon market at the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City, which killed five Arabs, the announcer ‘regretted having disturbed’ Sir Harold MacMichael who was at a meeting not far away in the King David Hotel at the time.29

  The mockery had a vicious undertone. The Irgun style was to demonize its enemies. For some, hatred of the British was an article of faith. When, in 1938, fifteen-year-old, German-born Uri Avnery let it be known that he was eager to join the organization, he was summoned before an ‘admissions committee’. The meeting took place one evening in a darkened schoolroom. He sat in front of a desk with a light shining directly into his eyes so that he could not see his questioners. ‘They asked me, do you hate the English?’ he remembered. Avnery loved English literature and particularly the novels of P. G. Wodehouse. When he said he did not, he ‘really felt the consternation in the room’. He gave the same reply when asked if he hated the Arabs and sensed a similar response.30 In the following years the anti-British animus would only deepen.

  Stern did not start out disliking the British. He spoke English well and in his early writings there is no sign of any visceral anti-British or anti-imperial feeling. However, their havering policy – or lack of one – had earned his scorn and eventually his hatred. He admired strength and determination, almost regardless of the ideological source from which it sprang, and could thus find qualities to respect in a fascist like Mussolini, a Catholic reactionary like Franco and a communist like Stalin. They made no attempt to hide their natures – and in his eyes this made them easier to deal with. He had, after all, enjoyed a profitable and even warm relationship with the Poles, whose policies since 1935 had been openly anti-Semitic. The behaviour of the British in Palestine had shown them to be slippery and inconstant, betraying their commitments to the Jews while see-sawing between appeasement and repression of the Arabs. To Stern that looked like weakness.

  Like many in the Irgun he took heart from events in Ireland. The many dissimilarities between the circumstances of the Jews in Palestine and the Irish in Ireland were overlooked. Instead their eyes focused on one central fact. In Ireland in 1916 a small band of revolutionaries who enjoyed virtually no popular support had launched a sacrificial struggle against the world’s greatest empire which only six years later had given birth to a free state. In an interview given to the New York World Telegram in July 1939 an Irgun representative purposely compared that organization to the IRA.31

  The Irgun were delighted to find that their views had support from an unlikely quarter inside the enemy camp. Josiah Wedgwood, a descendant of the great potter, was a former soldier and Labour politician who had adopted Zionism as one of his causes. In a speech in the House of Commons he came out strongly in favour of armed opposition to the Mandate. ‘We all respect people who are prepared to fight,’ he said. ‘The Irish people are revolting while the Jews are imploring favour … I heard that the Jews are intending to do things that are against the law. This is wonderful. The Jews are not helpless. Among them are organised persons and militarists. They are the people who want to remain free and independent. They believe that Palestine is theirs and they will not wait until it is handed over to the hands of the Mufti.’ These sentiments naturally exasperated MacMichael and the Mandate authorities but delighted the Irgun, who aired them on Radio Liberated Zion.32

  The police responded robustly to the Irgun provocations. Following the post office bombing they launched a manhunt across Jerusalem, raiding the addresses of suspected sympathizers and members. Levstein escaped from his lodgings in the Zichron Moshe quarter just before they arrived. The police discovered some explosives left behind by a previous tenant, Dov Tamari, as well as notes made by Levstein during his training in Poland. Tamari was tracked down and subsequently jailed for seven years.

  On 5 August, Binyamin Zeroni, the twenty-five-year-old who had replaced Strelitz as Jerusalem commander, was driving his car through the city centre when he was stopped by an Arab policemen who then escorted him to the Russian Compound, a large stone complex, built as a hostel for Orthodox pilgrims in the previous century, which now housed the CID headquarters. According to the account he later gave to Yaacov Levstein, Zeroni was handcuffed and chained to a chair to await interrogation by Inspector Ralph Cairns. Cairns, from Preston in Lancashire, was thirty-one years old. He had joined the force eight years earlier and his quick wits and command of Hebrew had propelled him to the position of head of the Jewish affairs section of the CID and the scourge of the Irgun.

  Cairns was presented by the Irgun as a sadist wh
o took sick pleasure in abusing his Jewish prisoners. Zeroni in particular was to tell a harrowing story of the treatment he received at his hands. According to the account he gave Levstein, on walking into the room Cairns immediately struck him on the head and carried on beating him for fifteen minutes. The ordeal went on for four days as Cairns tried to extract information. ‘I was stripped naked, my shoes and socks were taken off and I was made to lie flat on the table with my face up,’ he claimed.33 ‘Cairns tried to make me talk, pinching and hitting me. My hands and legs were tied, my underpants stuffed into my mouth, as Cairns put a rubber glove on his right hand, and began to squeeze my testicles one at a time. A sharp pain shot through my body … he keeps squeezing.’ Zeroni was allegedly subjected to an early form of waterboarding: ‘Cairns wraps a bandage round my nose and fastens it with a clothes pin. I cannot breathe through my nose and I have to open my mouth. He goes out and comes back with a large kettle full of water and starts pouring the water into my mouth. I try to close my mouth but I can’t breathe. I open my mouth and it fills with water. I try to breathe and the water goes into my lungs …’ In between torture sessions Cairns played mind games with his victim, threatening to bring in his girlfriend and rape her in front of him.

  Zeroni claimed that he was examined by the ‘government physician’ who checked that he was healthy enough to withstand further abuse. He also asserted that ‘from time to time’ Giles Bey and his deputy, Henry Bennett Shaw, ‘came to witness the inquisition’. After four days of this, during which Zeroni says he revealed nothing, he was left alone for a day. That night, despite his sufferings, he managed to prise open the wire netting above his cell, squeeze through into the guardroom, creep past the sleeping Arab guard, turn the key conveniently lodged in the guardroom door and tiptoe into the police station’s central courtyard, climb a high stone wall and a perimeter ‘fence’ and escape into the Jerusalem dawn.