Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  We are the anonymous soldiers without uniform

  Surrounded by fear and the shadow of death.

  We have all been conscripted for life;

  From these ranks, only death will free us.

  Refrain:

  In the red days of riots and blood,

  In the dark nights of despair,

  In the cities and villages our flag we will raise,

  And on it: defense and conquest!

  We are not conscripted by the whip like multitudes of slaves,

  In order to spill our blood in foreign lands.

  Our desire: to be forever free men!

  Our dream: to die for our nation.

  [Refrain]

  From all directions a great many obstacles,

  A cruel fate has been placed in our path;

  But enemies, spies, and prisons

  Will not be able to stop us.

  [Refrain]

  And if we fall in streets and in the houses

  And we will be buried quietly in the night,

  In our places will come thousands of others

  To defend and to guard forever.

  [Refrain]

  With the tears of bereaved mothers,

  And with the blood of innocent babies,

  Like cement we will use our bodies as building blocks

  To establish the structure of the homeland.30

  In addition, the Irgun circulated handbills, posters, and pamphlets explaining its aims and motivation. Each had the Irgun logo prominently emblazoned across the top—depicting a hand gripping a rifle against a background of a map representing both Palestine and Trans-Jordan, which the Revisionists erroneously claimed constituted the original British mandate—beneath the words “Rak Kach” (Only thus).31

  Throughout June 1939 the Irgun launched a succession of shootings, bombings, road minings, and various acts of sabotage and vandalism against British and Arab targets alike. These incidents, however, paled in comparison to the Irgun’s bombing, for the third time, of Haifa’s vegetable market. The blast, which was heard as far as a dozen miles away in Acre, killed 20 Arabs, among them 8 women and 2 children. Twenty-seven persons were wounded. Three years of Irgun terrorism, amounting to some sixty separate attacks, had by now claimed the lives of more than 250 Arabs and injured hundreds more.32

  The Yishuv recoiled in horror. Davar warned that the Irgun’s actions perilously threatened to reignite the Arab Rebellion just when it was on the verge of defeat. A headline in a Histadrut-owned newspaper read, “Terrorism in Its Despicableness.” Ben-Gurion issued a statement on behalf of the Jewish Agency that condemned these “foolish and tasteless acts of sabotage [which] do nothing except to help our enemies. These shenanigans of crime and death,” he declared, “stain our just war, undermine the legitimacy of our activities and give a hand to our enemies.”33

  The Irgun dismissed this criticism as further evidence of the Jewish Agency’s serial political miscalculations and the Haganah’s operational impotence. “Arabs use terror as a means in their political fight—and they are winning,” an Irgun communiqué retorted. “Meanwhile the leaders of the Jewish Agency do nothing but talking and analysing and going back and forth in their own steps. A hitting fist,” it concluded, “must be answered by two hitting fists—a bomb explosion has to be replied with two bomb explosions.”34

  The febrile pace of Irgun attacks—and their sanguinary results—inevitably brought intensified scrutiny from the authorities. The Jewish section of the PPF’s CID had redoubled its efforts to penetrate the group either with its own agents or with Jewish informants. By July 1939, accordingly, seventy-four of the ninety-five Jews detained under the Order in Council’s emergency regulations were categorized as “Revisionists”—members of the Revisionist Party, Betar, or the Irgun. A deadly cat-and-mouse game thus emerged between the police and the Irgun throughout that summer. Inspector Ralph Cairns, the head of the CID’s Jewish section, oversaw PPF operations against Jewish terrorists. One of the few British police officers fluent in Hebrew, Cairns had acquired notoriety within the Irgun for his alleged torture of prisoners. The Irgun accordingly had warned Cairns that he would be killed if he continued to mistreat captured Irgun fighters.35

  Cairns knew that he was a marked man. He therefore wore a bulletproof vest, was always armed, and never went anywhere without his friend and colleague Inspector Ronald Barker, the head of the CID’s Arab Section. Nonetheless, an Irgun surveillance team was able to discover where he lived, and plans were made to assassinate Cairns. On the night of August 25, an Irgun team planted an explosive device between two trees along the walkway to Cairns’s residence. The following afternoon, Cairns and Barker alighted from their car and turned toward the house. As they passed between the trees, an Irgun operative detonated the mine, killing both men. The Irgun claimed credit for the murders twenty-four hours later in a communiqué announcing that Cairns had been found guilty of torturing prisoners by a special Irgun tribunal. He had ignored repeated warnings to stop and therefore had been executed. The message concluded with a warning to “every secret police officer—even if he is British—who dares to abuse a Jewish prisoner [you] will die!”36

  The police, though, had their revenge five days later when a massive raid on an Irgun safe house in Tel Aviv resulted in the arrest of the group’s entire high command, including Kalay, Abraham Stern, and three other officers. The loss of these men completely shattered the organization. But even this grave setback was incomparable to the cataclysmic events unfolding in Europe.37

  On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

  The outbreak of war placed the Jewish community in Palestine in a quandary. Although the menace to Jewry inherent in a German victory far outweighed the Yishuv’s hostility toward Britain, it did not diminish Zionist opposition to the white paper. However, any program of active resistance to the white paper and to British rule over Palestine, along the lines approved by the Jewish Agency in April, would inevitably hamper Britain’s prosecution of the war against Nazi Germany. At the same time, Britain’s enforcement of the white paper closed one of the few avenues of salvation open to European Jewry. The Yishuv’s political leadership therefore decided to steer a middle course between these two imperatives: it offered its undivided support for the British war effort, and it continued to press for the white paper’s repeal. This tension was palpable in the joint statement issued by the Jewish Agency and the Vaad Le’umi on September 3 pledging the Yishuv’s support for Britain. Ben-Gurion neatly encapsulated the crux of this contradictory policy when he declared, “We shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there was no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war.”38

  The following day, Jabotinsky, in his capacity as president of the New Zionist Organization, wrote to Chamberlain to affirm his and the organization’s loyalty to Britain. On September 10 the Irgun similarly proclaimed its support for Britain and publicly announced the suspension of all antigovernment activities for the duration of the war.39 This decision was not without controversy. With the entire high command in jail, full consultation had been impossible. Raziel had been able to draft only an outline of the statement, which was then smuggled out of his prison cell within the British army base at Sarafand, outside Tel Aviv, by a sympathetic Jewish police sergeant. Stern was resolutely opposed to the cease-fire and was apparently taken by surprise when it was publicly announced. This created an irreparable breach in his long friendship with Raziel that would eventually have far-reaching consequences for the Irgun, Britain, and the Yishuv.40

  For their part British officials had already taken Jewish support of the British war effort for granted when they had conceived the white paper. The propensity by 1939 to regard the Jews as a less troublesome and therefore less important factor than the Arabs in Britain’s Middle East policy had of course been the driving force behind the white paper.41 This depreciation of the Jews�
�� political importance in turn encouraged an impression among some senior British civilian and military officials of the Jewish people as an emotional, bleating, and even craven race. Weizmann later recalled sadly, “In those days before the war, our protests, when voiced, were regarded as provocations; our very refusal to subscribe to our own death became a public nuisance, and was taken in bad part.” Addressing the House of Commons during a debate on the white paper, the Labour MP Colonel Josiah Wedgwood alluded to the prevalence of such prejudice among British officials, citing “the attitude, which we all share, of liking people who stand up and fight for their rights … The Arabs stand up and fight and massacre … [while] the Jews are always complaining and begging for justice … The attitude of supplication, of being on your knees, has a very bad effect upon the respect of all nations for the Jews.”42

  These British officials were also fully cognizant of the hopes and ulterior motives behind the pledges of Jewish support. Zionists of all stripes—the Jewish Agency, the Vaad Le’umi, the Revisionist Party, and the Irgun—were all of one mind in the expectation that Britain would reward their loyalty and support at the end of the war at least by rescinding the white paper and perhaps even by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Chamberlain’s careful reply to a letter from Weizmann assuring the government of the Yishuv’s allegiance to Britain illustrates this. The prime minister’s noncommittal response simply states, “You will not expect me to say more at this stage than that your public-spirited assurances are welcome and will be kept in mind.” A minute written on October 11 by Harry Maurice Eyres, the consul in the Foreign Office’s Eastern Department, more clearly alludes to the assumption implicit in Chamberlain’s reply. “They all [the Jews] seem to think that the defeat of Germany will necessarily entail the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine,” he observed, “which is unfortunate.”43

  CHAPTER 6

  The Shadow of Death

  The crowd sitting in the lobby of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel on October 24, 1939, must have been startled by the arrival of heavily armed police escorting a man shackled hand and foot in chains. Earlier that day, David Raziel had been taken from his jail cell at the Sarafand military base and brought to the hotel. There, he was delivered into the custody of Pinchas Rutenberg, the president of the Vaad Le’umi. A well-known Labor Zionist and the founder of the Palestine Electric Company, Rutenberg was intent on harmonizing relations between the official Zionist institutions and both the Revisionists and the Irgun and thus presenting to the British a united front of Jewish support.1

  Rutenberg was doubtless also concerned about a second, contradictory Irgun proclamation that had been released hours after the group announced its truce with Britain the previous month. “Treacherous and idle hands are directing the potential energy of the people into unsuitable channels,” the communiqué had declared. “IZL [Irgun] soldiers will not spill their blood for concepts of democracy, justice or European culture aimed merely at the defense of foreign interests and totally incapable of bringing our redemption any nearer.” Rutenberg was therefore keen to clarify this inconsistency and obtain from Raziel a reaffirmation of the Irgun’s commitment to stand beside Britain in the war. The Irgun leader complied, the police removed his shackles, and after five months in jail Raziel was a free man.2

  As the rival proclamations showed, the organization that Raziel now resumed command of had become both less unified and more extreme in his absence. Without the overriding imperative of fighting the Arabs, with Jabotinsky still exiled from Palestine and now living in the United States, and with Raziel in prison, long simmering disputes over leadership, policy, and strategy had surfaced. A dissident faction led by Abraham Stern objected to the Irgun’s perceived subordination to the Revisionist Party. An underground movement, Stern and his followers argued, can only truly be effective when it is completely free from political influence or pressure. He and his followers had also lost confidence in Jabotinsky’s leadership and especially his misplaced faith in Britain. Indeed, Stern openly styled himself as the movement’s chief ideologue and presumptive leader and criticized Jabotinsky and his policies as dangerously anachronistic. These internal tensions had exploded in public with the Irgun’s decision to suspend its revolt—which had caught Stern and the other dissidents by surprise and thus prompted their bitter riposte later that same day.3

  Like Jabotinsky, Raziel believed that Nazi Germany was the Jews’ preeminent enemy and that there was no option but to support Britain. Indeed, immediately following his release, Raziel had issued a public statement reasserting the Irgun’s loyalty. Privately, he told his followers, “I believe in the victory of England, which will be weakened at the end of the war, and then we will be able to enter into an open war if she still has not fulfilled her word. At the present time, a war against Britain would be suicide.” Stern and his fellow dissidents still disagreed. Both Britain and Germany were equally enemies of the Jewish people, they argued. There was no difference between the British, who closed the gates of Palestine to the Jew, and the Nazis, who persecuted him.4

  That Raziel alone had been freed while Stern and the other Irgun commanders remained jailed added yet another corrosive element to their increasingly troubled relations. The final break came when Stern learned that Raziel had obtained his freedom by agreeing to spy for British police and military intelligence. In addition, Raziel had promised that the Irgun would assist the British military with clandestine operations in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Baltic States. The British would pay for the information and also had promised to free the remaining imprisoned Irgunists, stop censoring Irgun and Revisionist Party publications, and allocate to the Irgun a quarter of the immigration certificates in the next quota. Raziel would claim that he had made the deal to secure the release of the Irgun detainees but that the police had refused to free Stern and four other Irgun senior officers.5

  As the Irgun’s involvement with the authorities grew, Stern and the remaining imprisoned Irgunists became angrier. Accordingly, when they were finally released on June 18, 1940, they had already resolved to remove Raziel from command. At a meeting held in Tel Aviv the following day, they confronted the Irgun leader. Stung by accusations of treachery, Raziel resigned and returned to Hebrew University and the study of philosophy. Stern was selected to replace him.6

  Within the week, on June 26, 1940, the Irgun released a new statement explaining Stern’s vision for the revitalized group. After expressing regret for the “days of confusion and lost senses” that had recently paralyzed the organization, Stern outlined the reconfigured organization’s four core principles:

  • the “establishment of the Kingdom of Israel in its historical borders”;

  • unceasing resistance both to the “occupying army” and to British rule of Palestine;

  • complete noncooperation with the British war effort, including refusing to serve in the British armed forces; and

  • noncooperation with the official Zionist institutions, especially the Haganah, because of their support of British war aims.7

  There was one contingency, however, that Stern and his loyalists had apparently failed to take into account: Jabotinsky’s displeasure. Having been alerted by alarmed Revisionist Party elders in Palestine to the changes taking place in the Irgun, Jabotinsky sent telegrams to Raziel and Stern on July 17, 1940. He instructed Raziel to resume command of the Irgun and ordered Stern to subordinate himself to Raziel’s leadership. But events had gone too far to reverse the schism that now permanently divided the Irgun. Defeatism, Stern told his followers, “is destroying everything we now aspire to achieve.” Raziel was equally critical of his former best friend. In a letter he wrote to Hillel Kook, a Lithuanian-born Revisionist Party figure who had changed his name to Peter Bergson when he moved to America with Jabotinsky the previous year, Raziel described Stern as a “delicate playboy hovering over this base, earthly world in holy piety, almost not touching the impurity of this world with his angel’s wings,” who wa
s in fact an unscrupulous “super-demagogue … who so distorts the facts that the borders of reality mean nothing to him.”8

  Raziel’s scathing depiction of Stern encapsulates the paradoxes of a man who was variously described by those who knew him as a poet, a scholar, a dandy, a womanizer, a dreamer, and a zealot. Eliahu Lankin, who knew both men well, said Stern was “more of a dreamer, poet, idealist and patriot than a man of action, [who] had a sensitive soul and a keen mind, but he did not excel in the skills of leadership and organization. He was not a good revolutionary commander.” In his memoir, Yitzhak Yezernitzky (also spelled as Jeziernicky), who later, as Yitzhak Shamir, would serve as Israel’s prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992 and was among Stern’s most devoted disciples, provides this portrait of Stern: “exceedingly intelligent, erudite (he translated Homer into Hebrew), unusually good-looking, polite and very controlled … He was also somewhat of a dandy, very well-dressed, always in a suit with a tie—even in Palestine, where the tone was set in those days by men in shorts, open-necked shirts and sandals. He sounded and behaved like a young university professor.”9

  Fluent in both Greek and Latin, Stern had been an outstanding classics student at Hebrew University, where he and Raziel had first met. “He didn’t look like a terrorist or a man of violence,” Samuel Merlin, a former secretary to Jabotinsky and leading Revisionist Party official, recalled. Yet, beyond any doubt, Stern passionately embraced the same self-righteous conceit shared by visionaries who have employed terrorism through the ages: a belief that daring and dramatic acts of violence could change the course of history. This idée fixe completely estranged him from both Raziel’s pragmatism and Jabotinsky’s abiding faith in Britain.10