Anonymous Soldiers

by Bruce Hoffman

  Various attempts were undertaken by members of both Irgun factions to effect some reconciliation. Then, in August, Jabotinsky suffered a massive coronary while inspecting a Betar training camp in upstate New York. His death plunged the Irgun into further disarray. The group’s members were confronted with the painful choice of electing to stay with Raziel or to leave with Stern.11

  Raziel and his followers derisively referred to the splinter organization as the Stern Group, although it called itself Irgun Zvai Le’umi B’Yisrael, dismissing it as a “small isolated movement with no public backing, without a moral basis or a political plan.” The British disdainfully called them the Stern Gang. Stern, however, paid no attention to Jewish doubters and defeatists and still less to Palestine’s colonial masters. Instead, he set about to create an appropriately grand “historical mission” for the fifty or so fighters who gathered around him. In this, Stern was inspired as much by the nineteenth-century revolutionary ethos of “propaganda of the deed” as he was by the personal heroism and self-sacrifice of the Irish rebels during the 1916 Easter Rising. He therefore looked to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) and its struggle against the tsar. These idealistic young men and women had understood that their comparatively small subversive movement could not hope to overcome the Russian monarchy’s capacity for repression. Accordingly, they attempted to draw attention to themselves through heroic acts of violence designed to inform, educate, and ultimately rally the politically ignorant or indifferent masses behind their revolution. Stern similarly saw terrorist attacks on the British in Palestine as a means to teach the Yishuv that the liberation of their homeland would only be achieved through sacrifice and armed struggle.12

  Stern and his followers were also convinced that Britain’s preoccupation with the war presented the Jews with an ideal opportunity to seize control of their destiny either by driving a harder bargain with Britain in exchange for the Irgun’s support or simply by continuing the revolt. In this, Stern had in mind the model of the 1916 Irish Easter Rising, which had been deliberately timed to occur when Britain was similarly distracted by World War I. He had studied P. S. O’Hegarty’s book The Victory of Sinn Féin, translating parts of it into Hebrew, and was continually inspired by the Irish rebels’ martyrdom and example. He thus consciously sought to replicate the Irish revolution in Palestine.13

  It would be mistaken, however, to see the historical mission that Stern had ordained for his followers strictly in classical nineteenth- and twentieth-century secular-political-revolutionary terms. Indeed, unlike the assertive secularism of the labor-socialist-dominated mainstream Zionist political movement or the strident nationalist pride evidenced by the Revisionists, Stern placed his struggle in a religious and even messianic context. This is not entirely surprising given that Stern himself was a devout Jew who, according to his wife, prayed daily and “never went to sleep without first reading the bible.” His melding of religion with revolution is revealed in one of his poems where he writes, “Like my father, who, on Shabbat, reverently carried his prayer shawl in his bag on the way to his house of prayer, I will carry in my bag holy pistols … Because there is a religion of redemption—a religion of the war of liberation. He who acknowledges this war—will be blessed; he who desecrates it—will be cursed.”14

  This was also the impression of Geula Cohen, the founder and leader of the extreme right-wing Tehiya Party and member of the Israeli Knesset from 1974 to 1992 who was a teenage member of the Irgun and followed Stern when he left the group. She describes how Stern imbued his followers with the conviction that the freedom they were fighting for “was not simply a freedom from foreign rule, but one that would enable us to create a new, distinctively Hebraic way of life.” To Stern’s mind this entailed resurrecting the Kingdom of Israel in a manner that conformed to the geographic dimensions of the biblical promised land along with the building of a Third Temple in Jerusalem to replace the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans two millennia before. He also called for the ingathering of Jews dispersed across the Diaspora and the complete restoration of the Jews’ historical, cultural, and spiritual autonomy.15

  Cohen in fact always refers to Stern by the underground nom de guerre he chose for himself: Yair—the Hebrew word for illuminator or “he who enlightens.” This name was also clearly meant to evoke the heroism of Eliezar ben Yair—one of Jewish history’s most famous revolutionary heroes. Following the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., ben Yair and approximately a thousand Jews fled to the mountaintop fortress of Masada located on the eastern edge of the Judaean desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. There, they withstood a three-year siege by the emperor Titus’s Roman legionnaires.16

  Stern hoped his combination of revolutionary zeal and terrorism’s didactic power would galvanize the masses behind his extravagant redemptive plans. His organizational and leadership styles, moreover, were just as unique as his hybrid ideology fusing secular, nationalist conceptions of insurrection with religious imperatives. Rather than the rigid, hierarchical, command-and-control structure typical of terrorist movements throughout history, Stern evolved a more networked, innovative structure decades before it became common among many contemporary terrorist movements. “We had no hierarchy, no GHQ [general headquarters], just a central committee,” Shamir recalled. There was no distinction between officers and other fighters, no saluting or standing at attention on parade. There was no “follow the leader.” But discipline, he states, was nonetheless very strict. Most important, Stern wanted his followers to be able to think for themselves and function on their own without having to constantly refer to orders or directives. “Study, train and think” was the guidance Stern regularly imparted to his followers. For all these reasons as well as his personal magnetism, Stern “was very highly thought of in the underground,” Shamir claimed. “He was a mixture of statesman, philosopher, poet and also fighter.” British intelligence, however, regarded him as little more than a “megalomaniac, fifth column gangster,” while the mainstream Irgun regularly excoriated him for “leading a useless existence, supported by lies and promises.”17

  Stern’s grandiose dreams and half-baked plans lacked at least one ingredient critical to their attainment: money. For an underground to survive, let alone pursue as ambitious an agenda as Stern had defined, it requires ample funds. Dwellings have to be rented or purchased for use as safe houses; food, clothing, and other necessities must be bought for outlaws unable to hold jobs or function openly in normal society; and resources are required to spread propaganda. The Stern Group, however, was bankrupt. Moreover, having issued its first communiqué on September 3, 1940—the one-year anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany and the Irgun’s truce—the fledgling organization now had to make good on its claim as the sole legitimate voice of the fighting Jewish nation. It therefore began robbing banks. On September 17, 1940, several gunmen grabbed £4,400 from the Tel Aviv branch of the Jewish-owned Anglo-Palestine Bank. Although everything went according to plan, with the loot quickly transferred from the getaway car to a motorcyclist who sped away in the opposite direction, police captured the hapless driver of the car. Information he provided led to the arrests of six other Sternists the following day. The group was consequently forced to eke out an existence derived from theft, extortion, and the kidnapping of wealthy Jews.18

  Stern, however, sensed a potential turn in the group’s fortunes when war suddenly intruded on Palestine. Over the course of several days in September, Italian aircraft bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv. More than a hundred people were killed and nearly 150 injured. Then, in the middle of the month, Italy’s armies in Libya and East Africa began pushing east and north toward Britain’s meager defenses in Egypt and the Sudan. The Battle of Britain meanwhile was being fought in the skies over England, coming hard on the heels of the setbacks suffered since the spring with Germany’s conquest of France and the Low Countries and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Du
nkirk. With British defeat in multiple theaters seemingly looming, Stern took the first fateful step toward an alliance with Italy and Germany.19

  Stern’s interest in pursuing such a partnership is not entirely surprising. He had lived in Florence between 1933 and 1934 and was steeped in Italian culture, and according to Joseph Heller, an Israeli academic, Stern himself was “enchanted by the Italian revolutionary movement, as expressed through the figures of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and in a different sense, Mussolini.” He in fact had strong fascist leanings. “Stern’s origins are in European fascism,” Heller explains. “They’re the most extreme group Zionism ever produced. They didn’t just want a Jewish state, they wanted a Jewish kingdom. Nor did they fully grasp the portent of Hitler. They thought he was just another anti-Semite.”20

  Stern had already made contact with the Italian consul in Jerusalem before Italy entered the war in June 1940. But these feelers never went anywhere. They were resurrected three months later—supposedly after Stern learned from an Irgun double agent that Italy was interested in establishing a fascist Jewish state in Palestine under its protection. Bathed in the optimistic glow of an imminent Italian victory, Stern drew up the so-called Jerusalem Agreement to be concluded between his organization and Italy and eventually Germany. Its entire premise was based on the fatally erroneous assumption that for Hitler the crux of the Jewish problem in Europe could be solved by evacuation, not annihilation. Indeed, under its terms, Italy would facilitate the repatriation of European Jews to Palestine. Haifa would serve as the capital for a vast Italian-backed enterprise to organize, recruit, and build a Hebrew army and then a Hebrew state. This state would have a fixed 80 percent Jewish majority and be guaranteed the diplomatic recognition of, and enjoy economic cooperation with, the region’s Arab states. Finally, the Vatican would assume responsibility for Jerusalem’s governance—except for those sites in the Old City sacred to Jews. In return, Stern would turn his envisioned “Kingdom of Israel” into a German and Italian vassal. This patently implausible daydream went nowhere—whether from lack of Italian interest or sheer incredulity remains unclear. At the end of the year, Stern himself accepted its futility following Italy’s dramatic battlefield reversals in the Western Desert and Greece. A secret British police intelligence report, however, claims that about this same time Stern was nonetheless successful in securing a monthly stipend of $2,000 from Italian intelligence officers based in Beirut.21

  Undaunted by his failure to secure a modus vivendi with Italy, Stern shifted his attention to Germany. As preposterous as such an alliance now appears, there was an admittedly desperate logic behind Stern’s overture. To his mind, Britain was the Jews’ preeminent enemy because of its betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and throttling of the Jewish national home. Stern regarded Germany as only a “persecutor.” His enmity against Britain had hardened when Stern learned that his father was trapped in Poland—barred from entering Palestine and therefore consigned to an uncertain fate in war-ravaged Eastern Europe.22

  Even though the Nazi execution squads were already at work in Poland, Stern held out hope for a solution that would spare Europe’s Jews annihilation. Given that the conference held in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, where details of the Nazis’ “final solution” of the Jewish problem were formally articulated, was still a year away, Stern’s wretched gambit—however contemptible—is nonetheless barely comprehensible. It must also be kept in mind that he was absolutely certain that the Jews were now on the verge of a monumental historical turning point that could be exploited in their favor—provided that they were ruthlessly unsentimental and coldly calculating in parsing their few actual, remaining options.23

  Although the precise chain of events remains obscure, it appears that the idea to approach the Nazis was Stern’s alone. His two loyal deputies, Hanoch Kalay and Benjamin Zeroni, evidently offered no opposition. Toward the end of the year, Stern ordered Naftali Lubenchik to travel to Beirut bearing the alliance offer. Lubenchik arrived in early January 1941 and presented a memorandum proposing a formal alliance between the “new Germany” and the “renewed National Popular Hebrew Movement” (that is, the Stern Group). Its fundamental premise was that Nazi Germany wanted to rid Europe of its Jewish population and that this could be accomplished by their mass evacuation to Palestine.24

  Precisely how Berlin greeted this unusual invitation remains unknown. However, there is some indication that the Nazis might indeed have taken it seriously. The Jerusalem Consular Files of the U.S. Department of State contain a memorandum of a conversation held on June 6, 1941, between President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and the Polish ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski. It states, “The Polish Ambassador … said that the Nazis were talking about the establishment of a Jewish state in Syria and Palestine where all Jews from central and eastern Europe would be located.” Although both Hull and Ciechanowski regarded the report as Nazi disinformation, the ambassador’s remarks suggest that Stern’s entreaty might not have been dismissed completely out of hand.25

  Stern could not of course have known this, because there is no evidence of any German reply and Lubenchik himself was never able to report back to him in person. British intelligence intercepted Stern’s emissary in Syria and immediately transferred him to Palestine’s Mazra detention camp. Lubenchik, along with other Stern Group and Irgun members, was eventually exiled to a prison in Eritrea, where he died in 1946.26

  Meanwhile, as the war appeared to tilt even more decisively in the Axis’s favor throughout the spring of 1941, Stern was becoming increasingly agitated by fears that the historic moment had passed. April 1941 alone saw Germany’s conquest of Greece, the rout of British forces in North Africa by Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, and a pro-Axis coup in Iraq that threatened British access to oil fields and its land bridge to India.27

  Distraught over the prospect of a providential opportunity slipping from his hands, and powerless to effect any change given the paucity of men, weapons, and money at his disposal, Stern played the only card he had. For months the group had been preparing to inaugurate an underground radio station that purported to provide the Yishuv with the “correct news” about both Zionist and world events and would broadcast weekly on Saturday evenings. It went on the air in May with a scathing denunciation of the Jewish Agency, describing it as a “clique of ageing lobbyists … [whose] authority is less than that of a Jewish community in territories conquered by Germany.” The reaction was swift and, for Stern, nearly catastrophic. Acting on information presumably provided by the Haganah’s intelligence service, Shai (the acronym for Sherut Yediot—Information Service), police raids over the course of the following twenty-four hours netted several key Stern Group members. Stern’s pathetic response was to offer his terms of an alliance to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill. Predictably, they demanded the white paper’s immediate abrogation, the establishment of a Jewish army, and self-rule leading at the war’s end to complete independence. Equally predictably, there was no response.28

  Hence, by the summer of 1941, the grand historical mission that Stern had sought for his movement had run out of steam. Another major bank robbery, this time of the Ottoman Bank in Jaffa, was again bungled. A Saturday evening clandestine radio broadcast forlornly evoked the martyrdom of Ben-Yosef to a disinterested, if not actually hostile, audience. The Stern Group was also singularly bad at keeping secrets—the sine qua non for an underground movement’s survival. All of Stern’s overtures to the Italians and the Germans, for instance, were known to and closely monitored by British intelligence. The police, moreover, seemed able to apprehend group members almost at will.29

  In these circumstances, the group turned on itself. Kalay was the first to challenge Stern and criticize his leadership skills. Others complained about Stern’s failure to initiate any kind of a sustained terrorist campaign against the British. Zeroni in fact approached the mainstream Irgun to discuss the prospects of effecting a reunification. It thus was in desperation th
at Stern once more turned to Nazi Germany. In December 1941 he instructed the group’s chief of staff, Nathan Friedman-Yellin (who later Hebraized his surname to Yalin-Mor), to go to Turkey and establish contact with the Nazis. But that mission also ended in abject failure. British intelligence intercepted Friedman-Yellin in Aleppo, Syria, the following month and arrested him. Meanwhile, back in Tel Aviv, Stern was scrambling to prevent his organization from falling into complete irrelevance. Stern himself now assumed direct operational command. In hopes that a quick infusion of cash would turn the situation around, he authorized a new series of bank robberies in late December. Although the first passed without incident, it only netted the group a few hundred pounds. A more ambitious plan was hatched early in the New Year to rob a bank courier. It, however, went tragically awry and set in motion a chain of events with catastrophic consequences.30

  Shortly before 9:00 a.m. on January 9, 1942, a courier with a satchel under his arm stood waiting for a bus on Tel Aviv’s Ahad Ha’am Street. He was approached from behind by two men, one of whom struck him in the head with a homemade truncheon while the other grabbed the case, which contained more than £1,000 in cash. Both men fled and as they ran down the street were joined by an accomplice who had been standing watch. The injured courier struggled to his feet, shouting “Robbery! Pursue them! Catch them!” as several bystanders gave chase. The thief with the satchel disappeared, but a passing police patrol, alerted by the commotion, followed and cornered the two other assailants. One man fired several warning shots in the air before dropping his revolver and raising his arms in surrender. His companion, however, opened fire at the police but instead shot dead two innocent bystanders.31