# The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land

Patrick Bishop

From the bestselling author of ‘Fighter Boys’, the true story of two ruthless adversaries and a wartime killing that shook the modern world.On a cold, bright morning in February 1942, fugitive Avraham Stern was cornered in a flat in Tel-Aviv and shot dead. His killer, Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, claimed Stern was trying to escape. But Stern was no ordinary criminal. And witnesses insisted he was executed in cold blood.Stern was a militant Zionist, self-proclaimed Jewish liberator of British Palestine and mastermind of bloody terrorist attacks targeting and killing policemen. On the run from Morton, a British colonial policeman assigned to capture him, his shooting inspired a cult of martyrdom that would ignite enmities between Jews, British and Arabs in the future hotbed of Israel. The Reckoning is the first book to tell the tale of a rebel who terrorized Palestine, the lawman determined to stop him and the events that led to their fatal meeting.

## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Glossary

Maps

Prologue

1 ‘There Are Few Who Do Good and Many That Do Evil’

2 ‘This Was the Job for Me’

3 ‘Let Fists Be Flung Like Stone’

4 ‘A Soul for a Soul and Blood for Blood’

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

6 ‘In the Underground’

7 ‘They Will Cover Your Memory with Spittle and Disgrace’

8 A ‘Trap for the British Brutes’

9 ‘Al-Ta’Amod!’

10 ‘It Doesn’t Matter If They Kill Me’

11 ‘Avraham, Avraham’

12 ‘The Blood of Your Brethren Is Calling to You from the Grave’

13 ‘Hatred Was Aflame in Their Hearts and the Need for Vengeance Burned’

14 ‘Terrorism Is an Infectious Disease’

15 ‘Striking a Blow against the Falsification of History’

16 ‘It’s Nothing Like the Truth’

17 ‘The Holy City’

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Picture Section

Also by Patrick Bishop

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

## Dedication

IN MEMORY OF RICK BEESTON

AND

IAN MACKENZIE

## Author’s Note

I have not tried to impose any orthodoxy on spellings of Jewish and Arab personal and place names, which inevitably vary in transliteration. To keep things simple I have left some as they appear in contemporary documents, while those that might seem confusingly archaic have been updated. In writing the story I found it had a habit of straying from the path to dart down some fascinating alleyway. To keep the narrative moving, I have sometimes explored these byways in the source notes. Consulting them may also help to answer questions arising from the text.

## Glossary

Balfour Declaration

Statement issued by the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in November 1917 that the government favoured the idea that Palestine would one day be a ‘a national home for the Jewish people’.

Betar

Militaristic youth organisation of the Revisionist movement. Particularly strong in Poland.

Haganah

‘The Defence’. Militia founded in 1920 to defend ‘Jewish lives, property and honour’. Under the control of the left-leaning Zionist establishment.

Havlagah

Policy of self-restraint in the face of Arab attacks. Favoured initially by the Haganah and the Yishuv’s leaders but opposed by the Revisionists.

Irgun Zvai Leumi

The ‘National Military Organization’, which broke away from the Haganah in 1931 in protest at its unpreparedness in the face of Arab violence. Revisionist in outlook.

Jewish Agency

The body officially representing the Yishuv to the British administration of Palestine and the outside world.

Lehi

‘Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’. The name of the splinter group which followed Avraham Stern after the 1940 split with the Irgun.

Mapai

Left-wing political party led by David Ben-Gurion and the dominant political force in the Yishuv.

Palmach

Elite unit of the Haganah.

Revisionist movement

Founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1925 to demand a ‘revision’ of Zionist policies towards the British mandate. Its militarism and capitalist sympathies created sharp differences with the Yishuv’s establishment.

White Paper

The 1939 document drawn up by the British to decide the future of Palestine. Its proposal for strict limits on immigration, if implemented, would effectively have doomed the aspiration for a Jewish state and it was fiercely opposed by all Zionists.

Yishuv

The Jewish community in Palestine.


## Prologue

‘Where to Rest My Tired Head?

Where to Hide My Shivering Flesh?’

Avraham Stern was asleep on a makeshift bed in a corner of the living room. A few feet away, curled up on a couch, lay a slim, dark woman. Rain rattled on the window panes of the tiny rooftop flat and cold seeped through the thin walls. Four storeys below, the streets of Tel Aviv lay silent, blanketed in the darkness of the wartime blackout.[1]

At six o’clock there was a scratching at the door. The woman stirred. Her name was Tova Svorai and she was Stern’s landlady and now his sole protector. She glanced over at him and saw he was already awake. They both knew what the sound meant. It was the signal announcing a visit by one of their few remaining contacts with the outside world, a girl called Hassia Shapira. But what was she doing here? Her instructions were to stay away, in case British detectives were watching and followed her to the flat. The clock on the cabinet ticked ominously. One, two, three seconds passed. Eventually Stern nodded. Tova rose and padded the few steps across the chilly tiles to the hallway, opened the door and pulled Hassia inside.

She was full of apologies. The police were everywhere but she had to risk coming. She was carrying a vital letter, one that might save Stern’s life. He calmed her and led her to Tova’s bed, telling her to get under the covers and keep warm until it was light and she could slip away. Then he sat down at the small square table in the hallway to read the message that Hassia had considered so important. It was indeed a lifeline. A former ally who had become an enemy was now offering him sanctuary. It was a generous and unexpected gesture, but Stern’s mind was made up. There would be no running away and no going back. In his neat hand he wrote a polite rejection. It declared: ‘I am not one of those who voluntarily give themselves up to the police.’

Dawn broke just after seven o’clock. It was Thursday, 12 February 1942.

By 7.30, daylight was showing through the shutters, painting bars of light on the drab walls. It was safe now for their visitor to leave. Tova unlocked the door and Hassia descended the staircase and stepped outside. Mizrachi Bet Street was in the middle of Florentin, a neighbourhood of small factories and workshops and cheap apartment blocks. The working day had begun. The people who lived here were recent immigrants and Yiddish, Romanian and Polish mingled in the chatter, laughter and shouts drifting up to the flat.

Tova put out the breakfast things and boiled a kettle for tea. Stern paced to and fro, from hallway to living room and back again. He was thirty-four years old, slightly built, and five feet six inches tall. His thick, dark hair was swept back from his brow in a widow’s peak above high cheekbones and grey, deep-set eyes that mesmerized his followers.

They sat down in the gloomy half-light to their breakfast of bread, cheese and jam, eating in silence. Both had much to think about. A few miles away Tova’s husband, Moshe Svorai, lay under armed guard in a hospital ward, recovering from gunshot wounds sustained during his capture by British detectives. She had not dared to visit him for fear that she would be followed and would lead Stern’s pursuers to his hideaway.

He was now the most wanted man in Palestine. His picture was blazoned across the newspapers and on billboards all over the country and there was a thousand-pound reward upon his head.[*] This slim, introspective figure was the man behind the wave of violence currently rocking Palestine. At the start of the year his followers had pulled off a wages snatch, killing two innocent bystanders in the process. When two of the perpetrators were caught, he declared war on the police. His men lured detectives to an apartment in Tel Aviv then triggered a bomb that killed three officers. In the ensuing manhunt, two members of the group were mortally wounded and two more captured.

These outrages dismayed Stern’s fellow Jews. The Jewish Agency, which spoke for most of them, led the outcry, offering its wholehearted support ‘in order to track down the murderous gang and free Palestine … from the nightmare of hold-ups and assassinations’. The words invoked images of Prohibition-era Chicago and were chosen carefully to puncture Stern’s grandiose self-image. In his short life he had morphed from promising scholar and poet to aspiring Zionist theorist to underground fighter. Now he seemed to think of himself as a warrior prophet, taking the name ‘Yair’ in homage to the leader of the Zealots who killed each other rather than surrender to the Romans. In the course of the journey he had formed an unshakeable conviction – that Britain was the main enemy of the Jews and the chief obstacle to the creation of a new Israel. The outbreak of the war had done nothing to change his mind. When his former comrades in the underground went off to fight alongside the British, Stern tried to undermine them by allying himself with their enemies, seeking deals with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

His ambitions challenged not just Britain but the Zionist establishment and together, it seemed, they had defeated him. His organization was in ruins. Men he had regarded as brothers had given themselves up and the rest had been arrested or had gone to ground.

They finished breakfast, and Tova cleared away the plates. Stern sat down again at the small table and began writing, as he did most mornings, filling long strips of paper in neat, scholarly script. He had been writing poems to pass the long hours. One verse, at once self-pitying and defiant, read:

Mad pouring rain

And ardent bitter cold

Where to rest my tired head?

Where to hide my shivering flesh?

He sat hunched at the table, thin, dark and lonely. The pen scratched over the paper. All he could do was wait.

Three miles away, on the north-east outskirts of Tel Aviv, Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton of the Palestine Police was setting off to work. He lived in Sarona, a cluster of attractive stone villas and bungalows on the edge of the city. He walked down the pathway to the waiting car, dressed in plainclothes detective’s civvies: tweed jacket, grey flannels and trilby. His wife, Alice, a strong, intelligent woman, who taught at the Jaffa High School for Girls, was at his side.

Morton and Stern were almost exactly the same age. Physically they could hardly have been more different. Morton was over six feet tall, slim and well muscled with big, size-ten policeman’s feet. He had blondish hair with a long face and a cleft chin that hinted at stubbornness. His eyes sloped down at the corners, giving him a slightly melancholy air. They were, however, quick to light up. He looked upon the complicated scene around him with dry amusement and the almost equine face split frequently into a grin. Stern and he nonetheless had things in common: they were both ruthless, ambitious and utterly convinced of their own righteousness.

The saloon carrying the Mortons hummed southwards along the highway on the six- or seven-minute journey. To the left stretched a landscape of palm trees and low stone houses, through which camels and donkeys and Arab men and women in long, loose clothing made their unhurried way. To the right gleamed the white Bauhaus-style apartment houses and office blocks of Jewish Tel Aviv, a brand-new city, whose streets and boulevards were already choked with traffic.

Morton’s reputation at that time was at its peak. He was intelligent, hard-working, famously brave, and to all appearances heading for the top. Since late 1939 he had commanded the Tel Aviv area Criminal Investigation Department, charged with countering Jewish and Arab political violence. With the start of the war, this work had taken on great importance. Britain was on the defensive everywhere and in the eastern Mediterranean the situation was getting worse. In Egypt, a hundred miles to the south, British forces were bracing for a renewed assault from the west by Rommel and the Afrika Korps.

Morton believed he was only a few steps away from removing one cause of concern. The Stern group’s rampage was an affront to law and order in Palestine. If it managed to get backing from the Nazis it might develop into a more serious threat – a fifth column operating in the rear of British forces as they prepared for the next German advance.

Thanks to Morton, though, the group was on its knees. Sixteen days earlier, he had led a raid on a flat in central Tel Aviv where some of Stern’s most dedicated followers were holed up. He had burst through the door and shot down three of them, including Tova Svorai’s husband, Moshe. The raid had convinced some of the group to surrender and others had been rounded up. Without Stern, however, Morton’s victory could not be complete. But where was he?

The big saloon stopped outside police headquarters, a bleak three-storey concrete block on the main road between Arab Jaffa and Tel Aviv. The couple got out and Alice set off for the high school, to give her first lesson of the day. Morton headed for his office, to await what he hoped was vital information.

The big prize was within his grasp. Some days before he had laid a trap which, if it came off, would complete the destruction of the Stern Gang. Two of the men he had shot in the raid had since died. The survivors, Moshe Svorai and the group’s master bomb-maker Yaacov Levstein, were recovering in the detention ward of the Government Hospital in Jaffa. They were in the charge of Sergeant Arthur Daly, an Irishman who spoke good Hebrew. Soon after the prisoners arrived, Daly had come to Morton with a plan. He proposed offering to act as a go-between with the detainees and their families. He had succeeded in winning Levstein’s confidence and had been running messages to his mother. Disappointingly, the letters revealed nothing. But now Svorai had decided to make use of the sergeant’s services. Might he perhaps provide a clue that would lead to the leader of the gang?

Morton had barely had time to settle behind his desk when the news he was awaiting came through. Shortly after ten o’clock his car pulled up outside 8 Mizrachi Bet Street. His big feet clattered up the fifty-nine steps to the door of the rooftop apartment. The details of what happened next would be endlessly contested. There were, though, two undeniable facts. Minutes after Geoffrey Morton entered the flat, Avraham Stern was dead and Morton had shot him.

At the time, the exact circumstances of the shooting scarcely seemed to matter. For the British, a dangerous enemy had been taken out of the game and a difficult case was closed. For the Jews, a gangster whose activities had brought shame on the community had been eliminated. Morton and his men were deluged with praise. But what seemed like an end was only a beginning. In death, Stern would prove far more menacing than he had ever been in life. The shots Morton fired would echo down the remaining years of British rule in Palestine and reverberate through the titanic events that shaped the birth of Israel. If you listen carefully, you can still hear them today.

[*] The equivalent of a thousand pounds sterling and a very substantial sum.

## ONE. ‘There Are Few Who Do Good and Many That Do Evil’

On the morning of 3 March 1938, a slim figure dressed in the blue and silver frock coat and white-plumed cocked hat of a Governor General of the British Colonial Service stood on the deck of HMS Endurance looking east towards the fast-approaching shore of the Holy Land. Haifa harbour had been dressed up for the occasion. Union Flags and bunting fluttered from ships and buildings. Chiaroscuro light effects added to the drama as the sun made intermittent appearances, darting in and out from behind the dark rainclouds stacked up over Mount Carmel.

For Sir Harold MacMichael, the arrival in Palestine to take up his post as High Commissioner represented a considerable change in his fortunes. At the age of fifty-five, his career had been going nowhere. He had spent most of his working life in one of the empire’s least congenial corners, imposing a semblance of order on the natives of Sudan. He immersed himself in its culture, spoke fluent Arabic and was admired for his scholarship, evident in such works as Brands Used by the Chief Camel-Owning Tribes of Kordofan. He was equally at home in the drawing rooms of the empire’s elite. His mother, Sophia, was the sister of George Nathaniel Curzon, sometime Viceroy of India, whose hauteur had been immortalized in a famous piece of doggerel while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford.[*]

Ability and high connections had brought few obvious benefits. Departmental jealousies and bureaucratic rules stalled his progress and after nearly three decades in Sudan, the Colonial Office’s reward was to shunt him sixteen hundred miles further south to be governor of Tanganyika. There he stewed for three years, uninspired and unfulfilled, treating the post as ‘a disagreeable interlude before a more suitable position’ came along.[1]

Then, in December 1937, a message from London offered a way out of the cul-de-sac. The High Commissioner of Palestine, Sir Arthur Wauchope, was moving on. Would MacMichael, the Colonial Secretary Sir William Ormsby-Gore wondered, be interested in replacing him? The answer was yes. And now he was entering his new domain, with all the pomp and circumstance that the empire could muster.

Endurance docked at a few minutes before nine o’clock. The rain had come to a respectful halt and the sea glittered in bright sunshine. Sir Harold, with Lady MacMichael and his daughter, Araminta, by his side, walked down the carpeted gangway and into the harbour’s No. 3 Shed, transformed into a reception hall for the arrival ceremony. The officials and notables gathered to greet him stood to attention while the band of the Second West Kent Regiment played the national anthem and the warship’s seventeen guns boomed out a salute. Sir Harold then mingled with the company, delighting those standing near him by chatting in Arabic to the mayor of Haifa, Hassan Bey Shukry.

Before the First World War the area had been under Ottoman rule, a backwater of a backward empire, unregarded by any of the major colonial powers. Britain’s presence there stemmed from a slight-looking document issued in November 1917, which would have seismic consequences for the region and, indeed, the world.

The Balfour Declaration was less than seventy words long. It was made public in a letter from the Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to the Jewish peer Lord Rothschild, a shy, bearded giant who preferred zoology to the family banking business. It stated: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

The formula passed through many hands before it was finally approved, yet no amount of drafting could resolve the contradiction at its heart. At the time there were roughly 60,000 Jews in Palestine, a mixture of Zionist pioneers trying to build a modern state on historic territory and the poor and pious, who wished to end their days on sacred soil. They were outnumbered twelve to one by Arabs, the great majority of whom were Muslims.

Britain’s motives for giving the first international endorsement of mass Jewish immigration to Palestine – with the implicit goal of establishing some sort of political entity there – were complicated. Among them was the fact that the war was stuck in a bloody stalemate and pro-Zionist declarations were thought useful to coax a reluctant United States into the fray. Possession would provide a land bridge to the oil-producing areas of Iraq, which now had great potential strategic importance. Persuasive figures in the British political establishment, Winston Churchill among them, also held the sincere conviction that the Jews deserved a home of their own. Altruism might bring its reward. Surely Jewish immigrants to Palestine would feel a debt of gratitude to their benefactors and cooperate closely with British plans for the area?

It was obvious that mass immigration would cause huge social, economic and political upheaval. How such a feat of human engineering would be achieved without friction, tension and – very probably – bloodshed was neither explained nor even addressed. Britain was in hurry to finish the war and the consequences could be dealt with later.

A month after the Balfour Declaration one major obstacle to its implementation was removed. The Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany in the war. Unbeknownst to its enfeebled ruler, Sultan Mehmed V, the British and French had in 1916 hatched a future carve-up of his Arab possessions, a shady bargain known as the Sykes−Picot Agreement. In 1917, British forces advanced from Egypt to secure their portion. On 11 December their commander Sir Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem’s Old City on foot to take its surrender. Palestine soon belonged to Britain by right of conquest and, at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, it hung onto it. Britain’s governance was formalized when the League of Nations granted it the Mandate to rule Palestine in 1922.

Fifteen years on, a territory that had been acquired in a spirit of hasty opportunism was starting to feel like an accursed burden. When MacMichael accepted the post, the Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore left him in no doubt of what he had got himself into. ‘I am very grateful indeed to you for consenting to take on what I must admit is the hardest and toughest job under the Colonial Office,’ he wrote. ‘The various problems of Palestine [are] among the most difficult that the empire has been confronted with in its history.’ Given that Britain’s domains included the vast human mosaic of the Indian subcontinent, Canada and Australia, widely scattered footholds on the shores of the world’s oceans and large chunks of Africa, this was saying something. Palestine represented only a tiny sliver of the great imperial pie. The populated area was less than 150 miles from north to south and no more than fifty miles wide. But as the British had learned with Ireland, the smallest morsels could cause the greatest heartburn. As with Ireland, it was the inhabitants who were the problem. ‘The human material, both Jewish and Arab is particularly difficult,’ lamented Ormsby-Gore. ‘The country is full of arms and bitterness and there are few who do good and many that do evil.’[2]

There had been trouble from the start. With intoxicating swiftness, the Zionists’ dream of a Jewish state had become a practical proposition. From 1918 Jews flocked to Palestine, most of them refugees from an Eastern Europe shaken up by revolution and the aftershocks of the First World War and rancid with anti-Semitism. They brought energy and modern attitudes and skills and came armed with money, buying up large swathes of cultivable land, mainly from Arab proprietors.

For the Arabs of Palestine, rooted in the stasis of centuries, the rush of change was shocking and then threatening. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Jerusalem in 1920 and the port city of Jaffa in 1921. They were stoked by a sandy-haired, lisping rabble-rouser, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and, by virtue of his office, the leading Muslim legal authority. The Mandate’s rulers remained serene. They were used to this sort of thing. Then in August 1929 came an explosion of violence that could not be ignored. In a week of murder, rape and arson 133 Jews lost their lives. In suppressing the pogrom, 116 Arabs were killed. British complacency evaporated.

London dispatched a commission to investigate, the first of many that would wrestle with the Palestine problem. Essentially, it addressed Arab grievances and recommended reining in Jewish immigration and restricting land purchases. It was a vain proposal. Not only would it prove unworkable. The British had revealed that their commitment to the Balfour Declaration was faltering and from now on Jewish suspicions and disillusionment would grow.

In the meantime, though, it was the Arabs who were causing the trouble. MacMichael would be taking over in the middle of a full-blooded uprising. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany had triggered a new Jewish exodus. In 1935 more than 60,000 Jews arrived in the country, and more were trickling in illegally. There were now about 430,000 in Palestine – roughly a third of the total population.[3] It only needed a spark to ignite Arab anger and that came in April 1936 when the murder of two Arabs by Jewish extremists in retaliation for the murder of two Jews sent violence rippling through the country.

Arab bands, reinforced by mercenaries and sympathizers from Syria and Iraq, attacked Jews, policemen and soldiers. They felled telegraph poles, ambushed cars and blew up railway lines and the oil pipeline that ran through Palestinian territory on its way from Mesopotamia to Haifa. A general strike lasted for six months. The rebellion was coordinated by the Arab Higher Committee, a collection of notables dominated by the Mufti. Their demands were simple: an end to Jewish immigration and land sales and a representative council that would pave the way for an independent Arab state.

London responded with another commission, led by Lord Peel. It arrived in October 1936 and there was a lull while it went about its work. Its report was published in July 1937 and came up with a drastic but inevitable-seeming solution – the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The Jews gave qualified backing to the plan. The Arabs rejected it outright and now, as the security arrangements for MacMichael’s onward journey to Jerusalem made plain, the revolt was back in full swing.

Just before ten o’clock the High Commissioner’s party boarded a special train. The authorities were expecting trouble. As the engine steamed slowly away from the harbour, it was preceded by a flatbed trolley, mounted with a machine gun manned by soldiers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Others stood guard at regular intervals along the track. For the first few miles three Royal Air Force aircraft weaved in formation overhead.

No matter how fiercely the rebellion burned, it was clear that the Jews were in Palestine to stay. As the special train passed Tel Aviv and clattered onto the spur line that climbed up to Jerusalem, it came within sight of the settlement of Rehovot. It was the home of the scientific research centre run by Dr Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born Manchester University chemistry lecturer who was Zionism’s most effective lobbyist in Britain and the president of the World Zionist Organization. A few days earlier he had been visited by ‘William Hickey’ of the Daily Express – the pseudonym of the influential boulevardier Tom Driberg. The journalist had been impressed by the ‘sun-bathed orange groves, orchards, Riviera-like gardens, the white-walled Institute where seventy scientists from many countries are working, the garden city beyond …’[4] In the subsequent piece, Weizmann had delivered his judgement on the partition plan. He was prepared to accept it ‘on the “half a loaf” principle’ and believed that ‘with slight improvements, most Jews’ would do the same.

Even so, he made it clear that the territory allotted to the Jews was not nearly big enough to absorb Europe’s persecuted masses. ‘No territory you could produce would hold them,’ he said. ‘There are five or six million of them – in Germany, Hungary, Romania, Poland. You can’t fight a tidal wave. All we can do is salvage the children. Concentrating on young Jews, I anticipate bringing one and a half million of them into Palestine in the next twenty years.’

When Driberg suggested that this was fanciful, Weizmann retorted: ‘It may be sentiment but we have converted the sentiment into dynamic power.’ It was the English, he said, who were sentimental – ‘sentimental about the Arabs. They admire picturesque inefficiency. It is the tourist attitude. We may be spoiling the landscape but five years ago all this was bare desert.’ Driberg was convinced. ‘It is this spectacular success of the Zionist colonisation,’ he concluded, ‘that has made the clash acute. The Arabs are in retreat from the land.’

It was true that many British officials had a soft spot for the Arabs, a combination of affection shot through with condescension. Before taking the job, MacMichael had sought the counsel of Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, until recently commander of the Royal Air Force in the Middle East. He had given freely of his advice. ‘One sees the Arab seated under a tree and playing on his pipes to encourage his sheep and goats to graze,’ he mused.[5] ‘One goes down to Tel Aviv and one sees all the bustle and blatancy of a mushroom-like town. From the purely economic point of view, far more wealth is being produced and circulated in Tel Aviv than by any number of Arabs playing to their goats. But one may be permitted to wonder which method really does more ultimate good in the world, and I fancy the Arab is feeling the same sort of thing.’

His paternalistic sympathy was matched with a Victorian belief that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. ‘As of course you know, what the Arab appreciates is swift punishment,’ he wrote. ‘Any delay he regards as weakness.’

MacMichael did know. His high, donnish forehead, receding chin and quiet manner disguised an outlook that was as hard and sharp as flint. Familiarity with colourful, oriental cultures did not incline him to leniency towards colourful, oriental rebels. He had a strict sense of racial hierarchy with the Sudanese of the Upper Nile who lived in a state of ‘semi-simian savagery’ at the bottom and the British at the top. MacMichael, wrote a historian of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, combined ‘great intelligence, extensive study and experience [and] a commanding ability in debate’ with ‘a rigidity of standards, and a public presence of icy reserve’.[6] He brought to every problem ‘logic, orderliness, orthodoxy’ and a keen awareness of protocol. The daytime temperature in Khartoum averaged 99 degrees Fahrenheit, yet he insisted on his officials being properly attired in jackets and ties when dealing with natives, for ‘any informality of dress and manner … might be resented and undermine authority’.

MacMichael’s orthodoxy was one of the main reasons he had been chosen for the Palestine job. With the Arab revolt showing no signs of abating, London needed a man who could be relied on to follow instructions and take hard measures. That had not been the style of his predecessor. Wauchope was unpopular with his officials, the military and ultimately his chiefs back in London, whose belief that he was too soft on the rebels had hastened the decision to retire him.

As Ormsby-Gore made clear in his welcoming letter, there could be no question of backing down in the face of force. ‘We have to remain in Palestine for strategic reasons and for reasons of political prestige,’ he declared. He did not hide from MacMichael his opinion of Wauchope’s administration, which had been ‘weak and poor to say the least of it’. The situation required ‘firm’ as well as ‘wise’ handling.

A tougher strategy against the rebels was already evident. During Wauchope’s absence on sick leave his Chief Secretary, a genial, indiscreet but above all efficient Cornishman called William Battershill, moved to impose some grip. The government approved his request for a crackdown and on 1 October 1937 those members of the Higher Committee who had not already fled were rounded up, put on a British warship in Haifa and deported to the Seychelles. The Mufti, who Battershill discovered on first greeting him ‘had a hand like a piece of damp putty’,[7] took refuge in Jerusalem inside the Haram al-Sharif. The compound enclosed the Dome of the Rock, the shrine that marks the spot from where Mohammad made his night journey to heaven on the white steed Buraq and a place so bristling with religious sensitivities that it was a no-go area for British hobnailed boots. From there he soon escaped, disguised as a woman by some accounts, and made his way to French-controlled Lebanon, to carry on agitating.

Martial law was imposed and henceforth rebels were tried by military courts which could impose death sentences for the mere possession of a firearm. The Palestine garrison had been steadily reinforced since the troubles and was now 20,000-strong.

The most important element in the struggle against unrest was not the army but the police. The Palestine Police Force (PPF) was set up in 1920 with a core of British officers controlling a much larger native force of Arabs and a smaller number of Jews. It had failed to prevent, and struggled to contain, the persistent outbreaks of violence. Late in 1937 two colonial police veterans, Charles Tegart and David Petrie, were brought in to devise a strategy against the revolt and to carry out reforms.

Their most dramatic proposals were to build a network of reinforced concrete forts at key points around Palestine and a barbed-wire barrier along its northern and eastern frontiers to stem the flow of arms, fighters and supplies from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. They also called for the strengthening of the Criminal Investigation Department. It was clear that the police would continue to play the lead role in gathering information about political subversion in Palestine. They, after all, lived in the place and were kept up to date on the moods and machinations of the Arab and Jewish communities via their local employees. The RAF had a permanent presence in the country and air force intelligence officers made some contribution to the information picture. The army units, though, came and went, and military intelligence resources had anyway been drastically run down after the war. On the recommendations of Tegart and Petrie, the CID would be transformed into a vigorous, systematic and efficient service aimed at penetrating the workings of the multiple organizations – Jewish and Arab – that threatened to undermine the rule of the Mandate.

The authority of the British was being challenged everywhere. It was essential to demonstrate confidence and resolve and remind the local populations where the balance of power lay. As MacMichael’s train laboured up the switchback track that led through the stony slopes of the Jerusalem hills, three RAF aircraft appeared overhead once more, swooping and wheeling through the thunderclouds glowering over the Holy City. By the time it pulled into Jerusalem station at 2 p.m., the heavens had opened and when the band of the Black Watch had played a few bars of the national anthem Sir Harold and his party were whisked off to Government House.

There, in the ballroom, 200 guests were waiting. Sir Harold’s finery was matched by the costumes of many of the assembly. Soldiers, policemen and airmen were in full dress uniform. Prince Naif, son of King Abdullah, Emir of the British protectorate of Transjordan, wore Bedouin costume. The Palestine Post’s reporter declared that it was the assembled patriarchs, priests and rabbis who ‘presented the most striking picture, rivalled only by the Moslem religious dignitaries in their red tarbushes, white turbans and black capes’.[8]

They stood as Sir Harold signed the royal commission of appointment and Chief Justice Trusted, wearing full-bottomed wig and purple cape, gave his welcoming speech. According to the Post, it was ‘very brief and delivered with deliberation and emphasis’. After paying tribute to each of Sir Harold’s four predecessors in Palestine, he concluded with an observation with which the new High Commissioner was by now all too depressingly familiar: ‘Many major problems await your excellency’s consideration,’ he rumbled, ‘and we cannot doubt that you are faced with an arduous task.’

Sir Harold’s reply was short and frank. He was not going to make a speech as he had only been in Jerusalem for half an hour and was starting work in a country of which he knew ‘practically nothing’. That night, in a twelve-minute broadcast to the people he now governed, he again protested his ignorance, saying he was ‘sure of little but the incompleteness of my own knowledge of conditions and personalities’. He nonetheless laid down the principles on which he would govern. The first was ‘the duty to maintain the authority of His Britannic Majesty and the firm establishment of law and order’.

This uncompromising message was softened by a declaration of his good intentions to all. ‘The motives that will actuate me will be simple ones of good faith and honest endeavour to do what is best for all concerned with firmness and impartiality,’ he said. ‘Nor does impartiality present difficulties for me, for the problem is not one upon which I have any preconceived ideas or bias.’[9]

It was not impartiality, though, that the Arabs and Jews wanted from the British. As MacMichael would soon learn, each side would be clamouring for his undivided support. After delivery, the speech was re-broadcast in Arabic and Hebrew. There was nothing much in it to indicate to the listeners that this cold, efficient man held the key to the Palestine conundrum. Looking back over the day, the Palestine Post was reduced to taking comfort in superstition. ‘There were three good omens in connection with His Excellency’s arrival in Haifa,’ it reported on its front page. ‘A rainbow was seen over the Bay of Acre as the Enterprise drew near the harbour. As Sir Harold entered the transit shed, a dove flew the length of the building. An old Arab proverb welcoming an honoured guest says “when you came, the rain came”.’[10]

[*] My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/I am a most superior person/My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek/I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

## TWO. ‘This Was the Job for Me’

The rainbow that arced over Haifa that day would have been visible to Geoffrey Morton as he went about his duties controlling the city’s traffic during Sir Harold’s arrival and departure. He was not the sort of man to believe in omens. Life was good. He was thirty years old, fit, happy and second in command of the Haifa urban district. His service record was crammed with seventeen commendations and in the 1937 New Year’s Honours’ List he became the first recipient of the new Colonial Police Medal in recognition of ‘distinguished and valuable services’. He had got where he was not through luck but by hard work and determination.

Haifa was a good posting, the most attractive city in Palestine. It faced onto the Mediterranean which sparkled like a sheet of sapphires in the bright daylight and glowed like molten gold in the setting sun. To outsiders it seemed blessedly civilized, a relief after Tel Aviv’s perpetual building works and Jerusalem’s unedifying religious rivalries, which were enough to put some of the devout among the Mandate’s rulers off God for ever. When the Arab revolt erupted, though, Haifa had felt the shock waves.

Morton was there for the start of the trouble. One morning in May 1936 he was dispatched to deal with a crowd of Arabs who were gathering in the souk. They waved knives and sticks and shouted anti-Jewish and anti-British slogans and were soon surging through the streets towards the District Commissioner’s offices in the middle of town.

When the main body was blocked by a police cordon, a breakaway band of troublemakers regrouped on Kingsway, one of Haifa’s main streets, and began stoning Jewish cars. Morton was one of the small squad sent to deal with them. He was wearing a steel helmet – standard riot issue. As he stood in the lee of a building discussing the situation with a fellow officer, someone dropped a coping stone from three storeys up, which caught him square on the head.

He was knocked unconscious but when he came round he carried on with his duties. The requested reinforcements did not materialize. The mob was getting ever more threatening. The senior officer present, Inspector G. F. ‘Dinger’ Ring, decided it was time for action. The Palestine Police had a detailed drill for dealing with mobs. Ring yelled out a proclamation in Arabic, calling on the rioters to go home or face the consequences. The Arabs responded with a shower of missiles. He now ordered the designated marksman in the party, Sergeant ‘Nobby’ Clarke, to move to the next step. He ‘went through the rifle drill as calmly and efficiently as if we were giving on the parade ground a demonstration of our humane methods to a delegation from the League of Nations,’ Morton recalled.[1]

First Clarke held a cartridge aloft to leave the crowd in no doubt of what was coming and give them time to do the sensible thing. The gesture had no effect. He loaded the round into the breech and thrust the bolt home. There was another pause, then Ring gave the order to take aim – but to wound, not to kill. ‘Slowly and deliberately’ Clarke drew a bead on the knees of the mob’s ringleader. Morton saw several stones and sticks hit the sergeant’s body ‘but he stood there, steady as a rock, resisting the irresistible instinct to flinch and duck’. Morton speculated later that perhaps a missile had spoiled Clarke’s aim or the victim had been stooping to pick up a stone when he was hit. Whatever the reason, an instant after the order to fire, the ringleader ‘lay, 20 yards away in front of the mob, stone dead, with a neat, round hole between the eyes’. The gunshot was followed by ‘a split second of petrified silence and then by the vague sounds of myriad feet running for dear life’. Moments later ‘there was not a soul to be seen, and that particular riot was over’.

In later life Morton recounted this incident – and many more like it – with relish. He liked the smell of danger. He welcomed the psychological challenge inherent in every confrontation between the forces of law and order and the mob. Inevitably the police were outnumbered and, though armed, would be overwhelmed if the rioters went on the rampage. By keeping their nerve, though, and reading the mood of the crowd, good policemen should be able to impose their will on far superior forces. Service in the Palestine Police would give him many opportunities for matching his will and skills against the enemies of British rule.

Like many in the force, he had arrived there almost by chance. Geoffrey Morton was the second son of William Jackson Morton, a lively character who seemed to embody the vigour, public-mindedness and optimism of early twentieth-century Britain. He was the manager of a busy branch of United Dairies, whose horse-drawn carts supplied London housewives with their daily milk and butter. The premises were in Urlwin Street, Lambeth, south London, next to the yellow-brick arches of a railway viaduct that carried commuters and shoppers back and forth between Blackfriars Station a mile or so away on the north bank of the River Thames and the south-east suburbs of London. Mr Morton lived a few dozen yards from his place of work with his wife, Sarah, two sons and daughter and a maid in a large nine-room terraced house. Their home was a middle-class outpost in a boisterously working-class area. It faced onto Camberwell Road, a wide, traffic-ridden street that during the day was lined with barrows selling fruit and vegetables manned by coarse, chatty costermongers. The many pubs, music halls and cinemas ensured that the area was equally lively at night.

At first sight, William Morton appeared a man of monumental respectability. He attended the local Anglican church on Sundays and was an enthusiastic Freemason. For thirty years he sat as a Conservative member on the London County Council, the powerful municipal body that ran many of the capital’s services, and, as a lay magistrate, dispensed justice to the drunks and delinquents of the borough. When the war came in 1914, he was forty-three, too old for the colours. He signed up instead as a special policeman, rising to command the auxiliaries in Lambeth and neighbouring Southwark. On his death in 1940, the local newspaper described him as ‘one of the best-known figures in South London’.[2]

Behind the austere frontage of conformity, though, there gleamed a sense of fun. Edward VII was on the throne when Geoffrey was born and William Morton shared his sovereign’s enjoyment of card games and long, smoke-filled evenings. Like the monarch, he did not allow his wife’s strict sense of rectitude to interfere with his own enjoyable routines of meeting friends and visiting music halls.

Later in his own life Geoffrey Morton would give an exhaustive account of his professional career. He said very little about his boyhood and adolescence – as if it had no bearing on who he was or what he became. He left nothing on record concerning his brother, Arnold, four years his senior and a ‘black sheep’ who disappeared early from the family story. Much more is recorded about his younger sister, Marion, an ambitious, spirited girl who went on to become a teacher and an international standard netball player.

He started at his first proper school aged eight in January 1916. Every morning he set off from Camberwell Road on the two-mile journey to St Olave’s Grammar School, an impressive red-brick building, adorned with stone bas-reliefs of philosophers and poets, which sat on the south bank of the Thames next to Tower Bridge. ‘Stogs’, as it was known to generations of pupils, was founded in 1571 to provide free education to boys from modest homes. The curriculum in 1916 included scripture, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, English grammar and literature, history, geography, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, physics and botany. Great store was set on the values of the rugby field and the cricket pitch. Olavians filled the ranks of the professions. They were lawyers and bankers, accountants and teachers and doctors. They also served the empire as soldiers, sailors and administrators.

The list of distinguished Old Boys was long. It seemed unlikely that Geoffrey Morton would ever be among them. ‘He has been somewhat disappointing,’ recorded his form master, Mr Midgley, when Geoffrey had been at the school barely six months. ‘His work has shown ability but he is not consistently keen.’[3]

The school’s ethos was Victorian and Edwardian – forward looking, but intensely patriotic and nostalgic for an imagined chivalric past. Its solid brick walls could not shield it from the very modern war being fought across the Channel. Stogs men were floundering in the khaki mud of Picardy, and dying at the same rate as everyone else. In Geoffrey’s first year, the school magazine was full of death notices and unsparing accounts of the fighting. ‘In the Royal Army Medical Corps we see the most terrible side of war,’ wrote an Old Boy, Leslie Hocking.[4] ‘We see strong men pass us on their way up the trenches and a few hours later it is our duty to fetch some back as terribly disfigured and mangled corpses.’ Hocking was killed before his account appeared.

The conflict was on the doorstep. Britons could no longer rely on the surrounding seas to insulate them from violence when the country went to war. In the summer of 1915 Zeppelin airships started to drop bombs on London. In 1917, a raid demolished homes in Albany Road, a few hundred yards away from the Mortons’ house, killing ten and injuring twenty-four.

Occasionally, Geoffrey responded to his teachers’ urgings to try harder. The rallies were brief. Now and again he shone at French and German. His best subject was English grammar. In everything else he was towards the bottom of the class. He was particularly weak at scripture. William Morton’s conventional piety had failed to rub off on his son and Geoffrey’s indifference to God would persist all his life.

He left St Olave’s in December 1922, three months after his fifteenth birthday. His penultimate report carried a wounding parting shot from the headmaster, William Rushbrooke. ‘Failure in effort is culpable,’ he pronounced. ‘He can’t smile a path to success.’[5] Geoffrey’s smile was one of his most noticeable characteristics. In the school photographs he always wears a shy grin that makes him seem vulnerable and very young. This immaturity was also commented on by the teachers. ‘He is often childish and silly in his behaviour,’ his last class master, L.W. Myers, observed in the same report.

Geoffrey’s subsequent amnesia about his schooldays can be explained as a simple unwillingness to recall a period of prolonged failure. Qualifications came to mean a lot to him. In his police career he accumulated many yet he left St Olave’s with none. In a recording made at the end of his life he confessed to being ‘embarrassed’ by this.[6]

Stogs boys were expected to stay until they were at least sixteen, when they sat for the School Certificate, which was an essential requirement for a halfway decent job. He never explained the early departure, but it is unlikely that money was the problem. The school fees were modest and the family’s circumstances were comfortable enough to fund Marion’s education through school and university. The likeliest reason was that there seemed little point, to parents and teachers, perhaps to Geoffrey himself, in staying on.

Without his ‘school cert’ he could expect only a dead-end job. He found one at the meat and poultry market at Smithfield in the City of London, where, each day, from the early hours, porters in bloodstained overalls humped carcasses from cold stores to butchers’ vans. He worked as a clerk for a provisions merchants, no more than a ‘general dogsbody’ he would say later.[7]

At some point he quit Smithfield and started work as a low-level manager with his father’s firm, United Dairies. It was scarcely more rewarding than clerking. He soon decided that his ‘future lay elsewhere’ but where exactly he had no idea.

In the early summer of 1926, chance pointed him in the right direction. Beyond the dairy walls, a great national crisis was brewing. Britain was in the throes of a social upheaval that seemed to some the prelude to a possible revolution. In May, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress called a general strike in an attempt to block proposals to cut miners’ pay and increase their hours. Nearly two million workers responded. The government set up volunteer units to maintain essential services. Tens of thousands of conservative-minded males stepped forward to do their bit to keep the country running, including Geoffrey Morton.

When the strike was announced he joined one of the expanded special police units that sprang up to assist the forces of law and order. They were untrained, unarmed save for a whistle to summon help and wore civilian clothes with only an armband to denote their authority. On the second day of the strike he turned up at the nearest police station and awaited instructions. The main drama of the day was an attempt by strikers to blockade the London County Council tramcar depot at Camberwell Green and paralyse local transport. One tram had managed to break through and travel half a mile to the Elephant and Castle, a busy road junction. It had been halted by pickets and Morton and a ‘burly constable’ were sent to the scene of the trouble.

When they arrived, he wrote, they found ‘a large crowd of men – several thousand of them – centred around a stationary tramcar to which they had clearly conceived a marked antipathy. All professional transport workers were on strike, so that the presence of the tram meant that it must be manned by volunteers – or blacklegs as the strikers would have called them.’[8]

Morton ‘saw smoke and flames rise from one end of the vehicle, to be greeted by an ironic cheer from its attackers’. Preoccupied by the spectacle of the burning tram, the strikers had not noticed the pair arrive. Despite the number present, Morton’s hefty companion ‘wasted no time. He did not trouble to draw his baton, but with a verve and determination which should assuredly have earned him his cap for England at Rugger, started to elbow his way through the mob towards the tram, with the strikers giving way right and left beneath the impetus of his progress.’

Morton followed in the constable’s wake, ‘safe in the vacuum created by his passage’. As the crowd registered the arrival of the police, the missile-throwing faltered. One man remained oblivious, and ‘brought his arm back over his shoulder, nearly hitting my policeman on the nose as he did so, and launched a bottle containing a colourless fluid at the tram. As the missile flew from his hand some instinct must have warned him of impending danger for, with a look of horror on his face, he turned his head and saw the huge bulk of the constable towering over him.’ The rioter blurted out an apology only to be ‘answered by a laconic: “Too late, mate!”’ The constable’s baton, ‘which had materialised as if by magic, came down smartly on the bottle-thrower’s unprotected left shoulder. In another second he had disappeared behind us, the baton was back in its pocket and we were on our way once more.’ Soon reinforcements arrived, the rioters were dispersed and order was restored.

Despite the jaunty tone of this account, the incident made a deep impression. Writing many years later, after a long and incident-packed police career, Morton declared he had ‘never anywhere witnessed a more effective display of sheer police sense than that given by that ordinary, uniformed, duty constable in dealing with that mob’. The arrival of reinforcements had relieved him of the need for a further display of initiative but Morton was convinced that ‘had they not arrived I am sure that my friend was prepared, as a simple matter of duty, to place himself squarely between the tram crew and the rioters, who would only have got at their intended victims over his dead body’.

The episode had given him an intoxicating taste of the possibilities of police work. It offered power, a whiff of danger, opportunities for heroics in the discharge of duty, and above all adventure and a way out of the tedium of his current existence.

When the strike ended after nine days in utter defeat for the trade unions, Geoffrey stayed on in the ‘specials’. Nothing he did subsequently, though, matched the excitement of those first days. During the next three years of service he carried out mundane police duties, doing well enough to rise to the rank of sergeant. He was still stuck in his boring job. Every day he scanned the small ads in the newspaper looking for a way out, but the prospects of finding one were dwindling. At the end of 1929 the Great Depression settled on the country and millions were out of work.

In the late summer, advertisements began to appear calling for recruits to the Palestine Police Force. The anti-Jewish rioting of August had demonstrated the urgent need for more British officers. The Colonial Office was offering adventure, comradeship, sport and sunshine and an absence of academic qualifications was no handicap. It seemed the answer to Morton’s prayers. ‘The more I thought about it,’ he wrote, ‘the more I was convinced that this was the job for me. It had everything, and surely I had quite a lot to offer in return – I was fit and strong, reasonably literate and willing to learn.’[9]

He set off to apply in person at the offices of the Crown Agents for the Colonies at Number 4, Millbank, Westminster, overlooking the Thames. He left after a brief interview with ‘an acute feeling of depression’. Preference was being given to ex-servicemen and being a sergeant in the specials did not compensate for his lack of military experience.

The walk home through the dreary streets of autumnal south London only intensified his determination to escape. A few months later more recruiting ads appeared. This time Morton did not apply in person but simply sent for the application forms, and filled them in with no mention of the previous setback. He was summoned for a brief interview and a medical, both of which he passed. He was in. On a bitterly cold morning in February 1930, together with twenty-nine other embryo policemen, he set sail from Southampton for Port Said, Egypt. The boat was the Esperance Bay. It was, he said later, a good name. ‘Esperance’ meant ‘hope’, the spirit sustaining all of them as they headed off to their new lives.[10]

The force they were joining had an exotic, frontier feel. They wore the kalpak, a high-crowned astrakhan cap, a legacy of the Ottoman era, and the rural sections patrolled the dusty fields, parched hills and stone-walled villages of the territory on horseback. The British contingent contained a high proportion of adventurers and risk-takers. It seemed to some of its members that they had joined a sort of British version of the French Foreign Legion, whose ranks were filled with men who had enlisted to escape or forget.

‘Between us,’ wrote Morton, ‘we represented every conceivable stratum of life in the British Isles, from the heir of an impoverished Earl, products of exclusive public schools and graduates of famous universities to professional bruisers, coalminers, regular soldiers and really tough Tyneside Geordies who played a better game of football in their bare feet than they did with boots on.’[11]

The PPF had been set up as a gendarmerie, whose main function was as shock troops ready to bash the heads of unruly locals at times of unrest. The British element kept to themselves, treated their Palestinian colleagues with a condescension bordering on contempt and were not required to have any knowledge of either Arabic or Hebrew. Morton noted that ‘the policeman of any rank who took the trouble to learn even a smattering of everyday language in the vernacular was looked upon … with scorn, only very slightly tinged with respect or envy.’[12]

It would take Morton some time to settle into his calling. By the time of MacMichael’s arrival he was an up and coming young officer, winning the attention of his superiors with his efforts on the front line in the fight to suppress the Arab revolt. As the spring advanced it was clear that violence was not only intensifying. It was no longer an Arab monopoly.

On the hot afternoon of Monday, 11 April 1938, a crowded train stood ready to depart from the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline terminal in Haifa Bay where oil from the Iraq fields ended its journey across the desert. There were several hundred passengers on board, most of them Arab workers who were returning home at the end of their shifts. Just before 4 p.m. an Arab sergeant of the Palestine Police was patrolling nearby when someone pointed out two suspicious-looking packages on board the train. He told the driver to delay departure while he removed the parcels. They were placed next to a guardhouse where one of them exploded, killing a Druze police constable. The second then went off, mortally wounding an Arab bystander.

Shortly afterwards, three buses taking Jewish workers from a nearby building site back to Haifa passed by. The Arabs decided that the Jews were to blame for the explosions. They started hurling stones and a small riot ensued with both sides exchanging missiles.

Now a police team from Haifa arrived on the scene. They were led by Sergeant Walter Medler, a conscientious and popular twenty-seven-year-old. By 5.15 p.m. calm had been restored and passengers were waiting to re-board the train. Then Sergeant Medler made another discovery. Stuffed under one of the seats was a sack, tied at the neck with string. Medler picked it up, threw it out of the window and ducked. Nothing happened. He stepped from the train and began, warily, to untie the string. A second later Medler was dead. So, too, was Constable Michael Ward, a twenty-two-year-old only recently arrived in Palestine who was standing behind him. The explosion, it was learned later, was caused by a time bomb – quite a sophisticated device by the standards of the time and place.[13]

It had been Medler’s bad luck to be called to the oil terminal. As a junior sergeant at the Haifa police station he worked under Geoffrey Morton, acting as his deputy on many operations. That day Morton had taken a squad on a duty that was becoming part of their regular routine. Twenty miles to the south of Haifa at Wadi Hawareth, Bedouins were being evicted from land they had grazed their livestock on for generations. It had been sold over their heads to Jews who planned to build a kibbutz and the police were there to intervene in the likely event of trouble. It was to Morton and many other policemen ‘one of the more distasteful tasks’ they were asked to perform.[14] Normally, Morton would have taken Medler with him and left his senior sergeant, Jack Bourne, behind to deal with emergencies. He wrote later that on this day, however, ‘for some reason which in retrospect I have never been able to understand, I decided to take Jack Bourne with me to Wadi Hawareth and to leave Wally Medler in charge in Haifa’.[15] The eviction went off without incident. Morton returned from a long and dispiriting day to be told Medler and Ward were dead. The death of comrades was almost a routine event by now, but the news hit Morton very hard. Medler was not just a valued colleague but a close friend. He came from Norwich where his father was a wholesale fruit merchant and went to the city’s Junior Technical College, a pioneering academy for the sons of ordinary families, but left early to work in a solicitor’s office. Then, according to the local newspaper report on his death ‘the opportunity of seeing something more of the world and the prospects of advancement attracted him to the Palestine [Police]’. His hopes had been realized. In 1935 he became the youngest sergeant in the force. He was a good sportsman and the police welterweight boxing champion.[16]

Even allowing for the generosity shown to the newly (and violently) deceased it is clear that Medler was an exceptional man. ‘Trim and neat in figure, whether in charge of a traffic escort or on the sports field, in giving evidence in court or in the boxing ring, Walter Medler bespoke his character’ ran the appreciation by ‘BWF’ in the Palestine Post. He was ‘an omnivorous reader, yet not a bookworm, a popular messmate and comrade … the all-round athlete who had time for good books, good concerts, good contacts and wholesome entertainment’. Medler’s rank, BWF concluded, might be that of ‘second class sergeant’, but ‘his rank among his many friends was “prince”’.[17]

Morton, like most of his colleagues, took a cheerfully fatalistic view of life and death but the loss of his friend brought on an uncharacteristic fit of the blues. ‘Haifa lost much of the savour it had previously held for me,’ he wrote. ‘I was lonely and miserable and found it difficult to concentrate on my work.’[18] After hearing the news he went to say his farewell to his friend in the mortuary. A silver pencil, splintered by the explosion, was sticking out of his breast pocket. He took it and kept it as a memento for the rest of his life.[19] Among Morton’s papers is a photograph of Wally Medler. It is a well-framed shot showing him sunbathing with another policeman, Arthur Brument, next to the ruins of a Crusader castle on the Mediterranean at Athlit, just south of Haifa. Even though it is in monochrome you can almost feel the heat of the burning sand and admire the depth of the two men’s suntans.

Who had planted the bombs? The likeliest culprits were right-wing Zionists, angered by the campaign of murder and arson being waged by the Arab rebels against the Jews of Palestine. In the face of Arab aggression, the instinct of the Zionist establishment was to exercise havlagah – to show restraint and to suppress the desire to hit back. Such a stance was both moral and practical. Retaliation would almost certainly mean killing innocent Arabs along with the guilty, and undermine Zionism’s claim to high ethical standards both in its aims and in its conduct.

In showing restraint the leaders of Palestine’s Jews also hoped to gain political advantage. The great majority of Zionists, left and right, believed that their interests lay in cooperating with the empire. By holding back they were relieving the hard-pressed security services of an extra burden. Their good behaviour, they calculated, might persuade the British to look more favourably on their ambitions for statehood.

As the Arab revolt rumbled on and the murder of innocent Jews persisted, patience with havlagah began to wear thin. The political divisions of the Jews in Palestine corresponded to the politics of the countries they had left behind. The ideologies of old Europe were mirrored in the numerous parties and organizations that flourished in the Holy Land and the political spectrum contained communists, socialists and those whose aesthetic and beliefs bordered on fascism.

The ideological centre of gravity of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was known, lay firmly on the left. The dominant political force was the Mapai, in Hebrew the acronym for the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, and the dominant political figure was its leader, David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Grün in 1886, in the Polish town of Płońsk inside the Russian Empire. His father, Avigdor, was a lawyer and enthusiastic Zionist and at the age of fourteen David founded a youth club to study the Hebrew language and promote emigration to Palestine. In 1906, after studying at Warsaw University, he practised what he preached by setting off to pick oranges on one of the earliest Jewish settlements in Palestine at Petah Tikva – the ‘gate of hope’. And it was hope, not fear, that drove him and the other young Zionists of Poland and Russia to Palestine’s shores. ‘For many of us, anti-Semitism had little to do with our dedication,’ he wrote. ‘I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution … we emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for positive reasons of building a homeland.’[20]

Ben-Gurion was an atheist but looked and sounded like an Old Testament prophet. He seemed to exude a pacific tranquillity, yet all his life was a fighter, starting from the day in 1908 when he took up arms to defend the agricultural settlement in the Galilee, where he was now living, from Arab attack. He was an idealist but also a superb political tactician. By 1935 he had established himself as both the head of Mapai and also the chairman of the Jewish Agency, which had been recognized five years earlier by the British as the legitimate representative of the Jews of Palestine and therefore the de facto government of the Yishuv.

His main ideological opponent was also brilliant, driven and charismatic. Whereas Ben-Gurion radiated calm, Ze’ev Jabotinsky hummed with restless energy. He had a chin that stuck out like the prow of a ship and a mouth like a downturned scimitar. His dark eyes scrutinized the world from behind wire-rimmed spectacles with ruthless intensity. He was a remarkable writer and speaker, expressing himself in statements and utterances that seemed to have been chiselled from stone.

He had been born Vladimir Zhabotinsky in 1880 in the lively cosmopolitan city of Odessa, in the Russian Empire. His parents brought him and his sister up with little reference to their Jewishness. He was converted to Zionism by an event that transformed the lives of many young Jews. In April 1903 in Kishinev,[*] a city on the south-eastern borders of the Russian Empire, Christian mobs embarked on a pogrom, killing forty-seven Jewish men, women and children while the tsarist police looked on. The incident was shocking not only for the amount of blood shed but because of the conduct of Jewish males, who ran away or hid when the rampage began.

The massacre taught Jabotinsky a lesson. It was summed up in a slogan: ‘Jewish youth, learn to shoot!’ He followed his own prescription, founding Jewish self-defence units across Russia. In the First World War he was a founder of the Jewish Legion, created to fight alongside the British against the Turks in Palestine. The move was designed to win British support for the establishment of a Jewish state. Jabotinsky admired the British Empire and would have preferred to work with it, but Palestine’s rulers regarded him as a troublemaker. They imprisoned him and finally banished him in an – inevitably unsuccessful – attempt to shut him up.

Jabotinsky’s style was emphatic and impatient. His vision of Zionism rejected gradualism and compromise and exalted action. He preached that every Jew had the right to enter Palestine, that only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and that only Jewish armed force would ensure a Jewish state.[21]

The need for some sort of military force had been recognized since Zionist settlers first began arriving in Palestine. After the anti-Jewish riots of 1920, a paramilitary organization, the Haganah (Defence), had been established under the loose control of Mapai and with the tacit acceptance of the British. The organization would eventually come under the overall control of Mapai and the Jewish Agency to form the ‘secret army of the Left’, as a British report put it.[22] In its early days, though, it lacked structure and resources and its failure 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 visit would turn out to be another protracted absence of the sort that was placing a strain on his marriage but the excuse was genuine; the mission was indeed important. He was acting as an envoy for the Irgun, liaising with high-level Polish officials who seemed willing to cooperate with one of the Revisionists’ boldest and most visionary schemes. There were three million Jews in Poland and the government was keen to reduce the numbers. When the Irgun proposed a plan to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine they had responded positively. They had gone even further and appeared willing to allow military training for young Jewish Poles and to facilitate the export of weapons to the Irgun’s armouries in Palestine. Stern was effectively the Irgun ambassador in Poland and deeply involved in all aspects of the transaction. It seems unlikely that he would divert from these duties to organize an anti-Arab outrage at 1500 miles remove, even if it had been logistically possible.

Stern was a very busy man. He was also a dutiful son and during his trips to Poland made time to visit his parents in Suwalki, 150 miles north-east of Warsaw near the border with Lithuania. It was there that he had been born on 23 December 1907, three and a half months after Geoffrey Morton arrived in the world. More than a century later, Suwalki has not changed all that much. The long main street is lined with pastel-painted, stucco-fronted public buildings, shops and dwellings − the sort of thing you can see anywhere in the thousand-mile swathe of territory between the Baltic and the Balkans.

There is nothing to indicate that Suwalki once had a thriving Jewish community − that the large yellow-washed apartment block on the high street housed the old Jewish hospital or a smaller, more elegant structure next to the town hall used to be a Jewish high school.[2] Stern’s home is marked, however. Set into the wall of a building just off the main street is a tablet of liver-coloured marble. The faded lettering on it records that this was the birthplace of ‘Abraham Stern – Yair’, the ‘poet and linguist’ who was ‘killed in action in Tel Aviv’. The town council was persuaded to put it there some thirty years ago by Stern’s younger brother, David, in return for him renouncing any claim to the house.[3]

The building is now a bank. In 1907 it was a bourgeois villa, the residence of Mordechai Stern, a dentist, and his wife Hadassah-Leah, known as Liza, a midwife in the Jewish hospital. Its windows look out onto the town hall and a large park. There in the summer you could take coffee, eat an ice cream, read a Warsaw newspaper, while bees buzzed over the flowerbeds and a cooling breeze stirred the leaves on the trees. ‘Oh, the park!’ remembered Leslie Sherer, a contemporary of Stern’s. ‘An oasis of fresh air and tranquillity. To sit down on a bench and close your eyes and listen to the “klop, klop” of horses’ hooves on the stone pavement.’[4]

The calm classicism of the architecture gives an impression of solidity and order. But in early twentieth-century Suwalki the fields began just on the other side of the elegant portes-cochères and beyond them lay the thick forests and vast lakes of one of the wildest stretches of north-eastern Europe.

The town’s position was unfortunate. The area was an endlessly contested borderland and had at various times been part of Polish, Russian and Prussian territory. When Avraham was born it lay within the Russian empire and had done so since 1815. It was a military post and tsarist troops were garrisoned in the gaunt brick-built barracks on the outskirts. Jews began arriving in the town in the early nineteenth century and before long, according to the historian of the Jewish community Shmuel Abramsky, ‘constituted the vital pulse of the region’s economic life’.[5]

Their energy and confidence was reflected in a crop of new buildings. In 1821 the first synagogue was built. Soon there were Jewish schools for boys and girls and Bible study centres. The elderly were looked after in the old folks’ home. The sick were treated in the Jewish hospital on the city’s main thoroughfare and the dead buried in a large cemetery on the edge of town, near the Czarna Hańcza river.

There was little friction between Jew and Gentile, though neither community mixed outside of business. ‘It can be said [wrote Shmuel Abramsky] that relations between Jews and Christians were generally tolerable from the founding of [Suwalki] until World War 1. There was no continuous tradition of fanatic anti-semitism. In fact there were no conflicts of interests between Jews and non-Jews.’

Zionism had taken root early in Suwalki. In 1881 a prominent local businessman and Talmudic scholar, Eliezer Mordechai Altschuler, set up the first Zionist foundation, Yissud Hama’ala, to raise funds for a colony in the Promised Land. The following year he set off on an exploratory mission. He left behind a land of woods and water on which the industrial age was rapidly encroaching and landed in a parched, backward world, sunk in medieval squalor. The collision with reality failed to a dent Altschuler’s enthusiasm – one of the essentials of Zionist belief was a contempt for mere facts. He wrote home that, on the journey from the coast to Jerusalem, ‘I descended from my wagon many times and fell to the ground and embraced it, and kissed the stones with burning lips.’[6] Eventually, a colony was established and Suwalki was linked to the Promised Land.

It was in this society, invigorated by prosperity and the stimulus of new ideas, that Avraham Stern passed his early childhood. His father Mordechai’s days were spent in his surgery on the ground floor. Liza went to and from the hospital a few blocks away, where she oversaw the births of most of the city’s Jewish babies. According to her grandson Yair Stern, she ‘was the powerful force in the family’.[7] Avraham was known as ‘Mema’, a nickname he used in letters to those closest to him for the rest of his life. In 1910 a brother, David, was born. Their upbringing seems to have been a stable and contented one and David’s daughter, Amira, remembered her father talking fondly of the early days in Suwalki.[8]

In August 1914 came the first tremors of the earthquake that would destroy old Europe. By the following June, Suwalki was in German hands. When the Germans arrived, Mordechai was in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, either receiving medical treatment or seeking supplies for his practice according to different accounts. He returned home to an empty house. Liza had fled with Avraham and David across the Lithuanian border to her father’s home in Vilkomir. Mordechai was arrested and sent to a detention camp.

The flight brought to an end the longest period of stability that Stern would ever know. For the next six years he was a refugee, reliant on the charity of a succession of relations or, after his mother decided to return to Suwalki, more or less having to fend for himself. He spent some of his exile with an uncle in Petrograd, which was still in a state of revolutionary ferment. Twelve-year-old Avraham worked for the local student cooperative in return for food. He made extra money selling cigarettes. He enrolled at a school and learned to play the piano. He also joined the Pioneers, the Communist Party’s version of the Boy Scouts.

He lived beyond the control of adults, hanging out with young revolutionaries and visiting the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theatres. When his parents wrote demanding his return, he played for time, asking to be allowed to finish the school year. In the summer of 1921 he could stall no longer and made his own way home. Without money or documents he was reduced to hopping freight trains, and arrived in Poland illegally, smuggled over the border in a sack on the back of a farmer.

He was barely out of childhood yet he had already had great adventures and witnessed historic events. At first family life was strange and restricting. Father, mother and son found it difficult to reconnect. According to Stern’s biographer, Ada Amichal-Yevin, Mordechai Stern was a distant figure who sat alone reading and ‘never … found a path to the heart of Avraham’.[9] Avraham Stern’s son, Yair, formed the impression from conversations with Liza that he was ‘not a father who [cared] a lot about his children’.[10] Liza, too, seems to have been too preoccupied with work and a busy social life to engage very closely with her son.

Avraham went to the Jewish Gymnasium on Kościuszko Street just down the road from his home. He had to learn Polish anew, but he had a gift for languages and was soon impressing his classmates with his eloquence. ‘He had his own way of building sentences,’ one of them remembered. ‘He had a captivating way of speaking.’

Avraham Stern stood out from the start. He was a show-off with a compulsion to perform. He organized amateur theatricals and took the best parts. In 1925 he played the title role in his own production of King Lear. He thrilled the Gentile girls at the Polish high school with a poetry reading, and managed to conduct a protracted flirtation with three of them, wooing them with examples of his own poetry. He preferred the company of girls to playing football or swimming in the Czarna Hańcza river with his schoolmates. He seems to have set out to be special. According to his biographer, ‘although he did not behave towards his friends arrogantly, they felt a distance – a certain secret and unexplained space between him and them’. This was seen in the way he dressed – sharply, as observed by the beady-eyed headmistress of the Polish girls’ school who noted disapprovingly the ring that flashed on the young Jew’s finger as he read verses to her impressionable Christian charges. It also showed in the way he froze out anyone who displeased him, behaving as if they did not exist.

In one respect, though, Stern conformed with his contemporaries. Suwalki was a Zionist town. The chaos that rocked the borderlands after the war had deepened the belief that this was no place for Jews. At home and at school the message was repeated. Mordechai and Liza were fervent Zionists. The Gymnasium’s principal, Binyamin Efron, made sure his pupils were indoctrinated in the new faith. The regular curriculum was supplemented by ten hours of Jewish subjects – history, literature, the study of Hebrew and the Bible. Zionists were aspiring, at one level, to be normal – but in a Jewish way. In the land of Israel they would be farmers and sportsmen and soldiers. Contemporary Jewish military heroes were in short supply. Jewish boys had to reach far into the past for role models.

They called their football team after the Maccabees, the rebel army that drove out Hellenized usurpers and restored the Jewish state of Judaea, 160 years before the birth of Christ. If young Avraham Stern did not play football, he felt the excitement in the air and wanted to share in it. When the Zionist Boy Scout movement, the Hashomer Hatzair (‘The Youth Guard’), opened a branch in Suwalki, he became its first leader.

In 1925 the government subsidy to the school was cut and it was forced to close. Most of Avraham’s classmates made arrangements to continue their education elsewhere in Poland. Even before the announcement of the closure, the Sterns had been considering sending their son to Jerusalem to finish his studies. A Zionist charity supplied a grant which helped towards the costs. At the age of eighteen, Avraham Stern had already experienced enough dramas to last a lifetime. In December 1925, he left Suwalki with his friend Pinhas Robinson to embark on a new adventure.

The pair landed in Haifa on New Year’s Day 1926. Stern had no doubt he had made the right decision. In March he wrote to Meir Kleif, a friend in Suwalki: ‘I arrive full of hopes and reverentially touched this land … upon which I intend to build a new life full of song, sun and joy … I was like an innocent foolish and happy child as I ate and drank from what is ours, when I walked on our land and under our sun … the land was so pretty that my soul filled with hope and faith in a better future.’[11]

The boys went to Jerusalem where they enrolled at the Hebrew Gymnasium in the Bukharan quarter, a lively area of the new town growing up outside the Old City walls. Many of the pupils had been born in Palestine and raised in a culture of boisterous informality. Avraham, with his good manners and correct clothes, brought a whiff of the old world to the classroom. He seems to have enjoyed the distinction, teaching the other pupils ballroom dancing and sentimental Polish songs.

The dandyish pleasure in his appearance, the light-hearted love of theatricals and music were a genuine and enduring side of Avraham Stern’s nature. But they combined with a sense of destiny and a conviction that a violent struggle was looming that would settle the fate of the Jews. Both aspects of his character were displayed at one of the school’s end of term entertainments. He was chosen to recite a poem, and he selected ‘In the City of Slaughter’ by Hayim Nahman Bialik, a Ukrainian Jew, which described in harrowing detail the 1903 Kishinev pogrom that had radicalized Jabotinsky and transformed the outlook of many Jews.

The poem’s anger is aimed not just at the perpetrators but at the men of the Kishinev ghetto and their passive acceptance of their fate. These ‘sons of Maccabees’ had looked on from their hiding places where ‘Crushed in their shame they saw it all/They did not stir nor move/They did not pluck their eyes out/They beat not their brains against the wall’. The poem is a lament but also a call to arms. The dead of Kishinev must be avenged and the shame of those who cowered must be wiped away. Henceforth, says Bialik, ‘Let fists be flung like stone!/Against the heavens and the heavenly throne!’[12]

In October 1927 Stern gained a place to study Hebrew literature and classics at the Hebrew University. Among his year’s intake was a slim, open-faced seventeen-year-old with chestnut hair and bright brown eyes. Roni Burstein was the daughter of once wealthy but now impoverished émigrés from the Ukraine. Stern was captivated and was soon chatting her up. According to his son, Yair, ‘he approached her and started to talk to her and at the beginning she thought he was a Sephardi Jew because his face was dark … but then when he found out she was of Russian origin he started to speak Russian to her and quote Russian poets. She nearly fell down.’ He ‘started courting her and a big love story began’.[13]

The prevailing political atmosphere on Mount Scopus, among faculty and students alike, was liberal and leftist. The adolescent attraction Stern had felt in his Petrograd days for revolutionary communism was long forgotten. His main interests were artistic and he had yet to develop a coherent political outlook.

That changed with the riots of August 1929. Any complacency that might have remained among the Yishuv about the scale and dangers of the task they had set themselves was swept away by the massacres. In Hebron, where a small community of Jews had lived in peace with their neighbours for centuries, Arab mobs killed, maimed and raped, leaving at least sixty-five dead.

These events had the same effect on the Jews of Palestine as the Kishinev pogrom had on the Jews of Central Europe.

The events of August sent convulsions through the Yishuv. They revealed an alarming truth: the Haganah – the Defence – had failed in its prime task. It had lacked the organization or the means to shield the Jews from what was clearly going to be a continuing threat. Its leaders now set about training recruits and acquiring arms, unhindered by the British who, in light of their own failure to protect their charges, had conceded the notion that, in certain circumstances, the Jews had the right to defend themselves.

Stern was among the new recruits. The Haganah sent him first to a guard post in Jerusalem, then to a village in southern Galilee. By now the trouble was over and there were no weapons available even if violence were to flare up again. On guard duty, Stern passed the hours of darkness staring out into a night scented by the cooling earth, his head filled with melancholy thoughts. He felt, he wrote later, ‘alone and abandoned … so distant, a stranger … everyone is far from me. Only death is near; only he has not forgotten me.’[14]

After a month in the countryside he returned to Jerusalem. By then, Roni had left for a study course in Vienna and for the next year Avraham would have to rely on the power of his words, poured out in hundreds of letters, to keep the romance going. In October he went to visit his aunt in Alexandria on the train that clacked along the coast, stopping every few miles at Jewish settlements. He described the journey in a letter to Roni’s mother. The colonies were surrounded by orchards and plantations, making a ‘sea of green’ that ‘filled his soul with joy and happiness’, he enthused. But, simultaneously, the bucolic sight, glowing with vitality, aroused thoughts of death: ‘I thought how happily I would give my life so that all of Palestine could bloom like these orchards … we love Eretz Yisrael more than our lives … we are ready to give ourselves and our lives to her.’[15]

At this stage his attachment to Zionism was still romantic rather than practical. In a short time his outlook would change and be replaced by a determination to make his poetic vision of ‘Eretz Yisrael’ − the ‘Land of Israel’ in something like its biblical dimensions − a reality. Career and security, even his love for Roni, would take second place to his pursuit of this end, no matter how distant it might seem. As he wrote to his younger brother David in Suwalki in November 1930, ‘reality is not what it is and appears to be, but what force of will and longing for a goal may make it’.[16] This belief in the supremacy of willpower carried him through the rest of his life, colouring almost all his actions, a system of belief that simultaneously made compromise impossible yet opened the way to courses of action that seemed to contradict the spirit of the dream.

Despite the shock of August 1929, the Haganah remained a defensive organization and firmly under the control of the left-leaning Zionist establishment. Stern’s political opinions were hazy and coloured by his poetic imagination rather than hard fact. Events were shaped not by economics and social factors but by heroes and great sacrificial deeds. Among his inspirations were Jewish warriors of antiquity such as Simon bar Kokhba, who rose up against the Romans, and Elazar ben Yair, who in AD 73 or 74 led the Jews of Masada who chose to kill each other rather than surrender to Caesar’s forces. But they also included modern nationalist figureheads such as Giuseppe Garibaldi who, with a thousand dedicated men, had created modern Italy, and Jozef Pilsudski who in 1918 founded a new independent Poland after 123 years of foreign domination. Stern admired men of destiny, almost regardless of ideology. He could find positive attributes even in Mussolini, Stalin and Franco. In time he would come to believe he was a man of destiny himself.

These were men who did not shrink from violence and Stern’s poetry reveals a fascination with bloodshed and death. He might seem a dandy aesthete, but his imagination was filled with visions of sacrificial violence: ‘As my father carried a prayer shawl to Sabbath synagogue, I carry sacred pistols,’ he wrote in a 1929 poem.[17]

Stern’s attitudes led him naturally towards the Revisionist movement. Its image was self-consciously heroic. It rejected the gradual, democratic approach of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, which relied on Britain to realize the Zionists’ dreams. If Jews wanted a state, the Revisionist message ran, they would have to take it for themselves. It appeared to have a strong leader in Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose impatience and disregard for obstacles put him in almost permanent conflict with the Zionist establishment.

But Stern was above all an individualist. The discipline and structures of a political organization made him uneasy and he had an aversion to accepting orders. When, in 1931, radical elements inside the Haganah – most of them Revisionists – broke away to form what would become the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL), Stern did not rush to join them.

He was eventually recruited by David Raziel, a fellow student at the Hebrew University. Two years younger than Stern, Raziel was reserved and taciturn. He was committed to action and contemptuous of restraints. At the same time he had a firm grasp of practicalities and did not share the quasi-mystical enthusiasms of his friend.

Stern joined the Irgun early in 1932 and underwent a short junior officer’s course. His first contribution was to write a poem, ‘Anonymous Soldiers’, which subsequently became the Irgun anthem, with a melody composed by Roni Stern. Two of the verses sum up the essence:

We are soldiers without names or uniforms

Our companions are terror and death

We will serve in the ranks for the rest of our days

Only discharged with the last of our breath.

On days that are red with blood and atrocities

On black nights dark with despair

We’ll raise our flag in the towns and cities

On that flag ‘Protect and Conquer’ will appear.

At this stage these visions bore little resemblance to the activities of Stern and his comrades. He was mostly engaged in propaganda and political agitation, co-editing the Irgun magazine which preached unyielding resistance to Arab demands.

Stern was popular with his liberal-minded professors and his good manners and charm overcame misgivings they might have about his politics. In 1932, however, his activities brought him into conflict with the Hebrew University’s authorities. The chancellor, Judah Leon Magnes, an American-born liberal rabbi, intended to use the place to foster good relations between Jews and Arabs. When he appointed Norman Bentwich, the former Mandate attorney general who combined Zionism with sympathy for Arab aspirations, to the new Chair of International Peace, Stern helped to organize a protest. One demonstration had to be broken up by British troops at bayonet point. Even though Stern was not present he was suspended for several weeks.

Late in 1933 he left Palestine for the University of Florence, to study classical literature. His studies were interrupted when, the following spring, he was visited by the Irgun leader Avraham Tehomi who offered him the chance to do something significant for the cause.

He asked him to act as the Irgun’s agent, organizing the purchase of arms from Italian and Polish sources. Stern accepted eagerly. From now on, he would divide his time between Palestine and Europe. He roamed Poland, Romania and Italy posing either as a book salesman or a journalist, a correspondent for the Palnews weekly news magazine. His new work brought him into the Revisionist network in Europe, giving him great opportunities for building both a reputation and a following.

The movement was developing a distinct, radical political identity that put it increasingly at odds with the left. In 1935, Jabotinsky’s differences with Weizmann led him to pull his supporters out of the World Zionist Organization, and to set up the New Zionist Organization. This would now be the political face of Revisionism. It was supplemented by a militaristic youth organization, Betar, whose main strength was in Poland though branches had also been opened in Palestine.

Revisionism was, nonetheless, a movement rather than an ideological and organizational monolith, an ‘orchestra’, in Jabotinsky’s description, with himself as the conductor.[18] He was the towering figure but his authority was far from dictatorial. Banned from Palestine, he had to watch events unfold there from Europe and America. He was nominally the Irgun’s ‘supreme commander’. He was unable, though, to exercise close control over policies and personalities.

Stern agreed with Jabotinsky that the aim of Zionism should be to flood Palestine with European immigrants who would establish a Jewish state inside broad borders that stretched across the Jordan river. They would achieve the goal by force of arms if necessary. But when he first caught sight of the great man in January 1935 in Kraków, at a Betar international assembly, he was not impressed. He wrote to Roni that Jabotinsky was ‘ageing. This is not the same person who could once rouse the masses to follow him.’[19] Over the next few years his disenchantment would deepen as he grew frustrated with Jabotinsky’s flexible approach. Despite its treatment of him, Jabotinsky remained an admirer of the British Empire and imagined a future Israel as Britain’s ally in the region. For Stern, though the Arabs might be their immediate foe, the real enemy was the British who loomed behind them, blocking the road to a Jewish state. Over the next years he would turn against Jabotinsky, thus establishing a pattern of traumatic ruptures with colleagues that would last throughout his life.

Stern’s long periods abroad made it difficult to maintain his relationship with Roni. Nor did it help that he sent repeated, almost brutal, reminders to her that in the competition between love and duty the cause would always come first. The demands of his job would justify any disruption to their plans. She was nonetheless expected to be waiting, to minister to him humbly and lovingly when he decided that time allowed.

He finally proposed to her – eight years after they first met – during a visit to Tel Aviv in October 1935, but made it clear that the nature of the life he had chosen made it impossible for them to have children. For the time being, at least, she accepted his terms. ‘You are everything for me, beloved one,’ she wrote, ‘child and husband.’[20] He immediately set off on a two-month trip to Athens, Bucharest and Warsaw, returning in time for the wedding, which was due to take place on 31 January 1936 at Ramat Gan, in the house of Roni’s cousin. When the ceremony was due to begin there was still no sign of Avraham. It was a Friday and the hour of Shabbat was approaching. The wedding canopy was just being dismantled when, according to Yair Stern, the guests ‘saw a herd of cows coming towards the place of the wedding … and out from the cows comes the bridegroom, with flowers that he collected in the fields for his bride’.[21] The wedding photographs show a radiant Roni, wearing white and smiling at the camera, with her dapper husband standing proudly by her side.

The couple had three months together before Avraham departed once more for Poland. For the next three years he would shuttle back and forth between Europe and Palestine, boarding a ship at Haifa for the Romanian port of Constanta then proceeding by rail for Warsaw via Bucharest and Lvov. For much of the time in Warsaw he lived out of a suitcase, staying in cheap hotels and short-let apartments, spending his evenings in the Silver Rose and Europe cafés, arguing with friends and comrades over glasses of vodka and dishes of pickled herring. In the autumn of 1937 he was wafted into a higher social sphere. The charming, passionate young man caught the eye of a lawyer, Henryk Strassman, and his wife, Lily. Henryk was a senior official in the Polish Ministry of Justice, a lecturer in criminology at Warsaw University and a reserve officer in the Polish army. The couple were wealthy, well connected and Jewish. They had been assimilationists but the rise of Hitler and the mounting anti-Semitism of their fellow Poles converted them to Zionism. Lily soon fell under the spell of Stern who, she said, ‘enslaved my spirit with his simple and succinct talk’.[22] She put her wealth and influence at his disposal. She opened the Yarden Club in Poznanska Street in central Warsaw to host Zionist gatherings. In addition, the Strassmans backed two new newspapers, Jerozolima Wyzwolona (Liberated Jerusalem) and the Yiddish-language Di Tat (The Deed).

They also introduced him to important figures in the Polish government. Stern’s direct manner inspired confidence and cut through red tape. ‘Matters that normally would require prolonged deliberations … were settled simply and without signatures,’ wrote Ada Amichal-Yevin. Some of the officials he came into contact with became friends, among them Witold Hulanicki, the art-loving Polish consul in Jerusalem who helped arrange passports for Betar youths bound for Palestine and overcome the obstacles that the British were always throwing up in an attempt to stem the flow of Jewish immigration.[*] This was a heady experience. A Jew from the provinces, not yet out of his twenties, was moving easily in the highest circles and by his skill and charm striking valuable deals with a government whose outlook was increasingly anti-Semitic. It reinforced his conviction that anything was possible and persuaded him that help for the great project could be found in the most unlikely-looking quarters. This belief would cause him great trouble later on.

There were plenty who could attest to the young Stern’s magnetism. Lily Strassman herself described her decision to follow Stern in almost mystical terms. ‘It’s difficult for me to explain that this was not a simple matter of persuasion,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t religious. But it was as if the finger of God had pointed him in the direction he had taken and to me to follow him.’[23] Many of Stern’s acolytes were to use similar language in describing their dealings with him. Consciously or otherwise, their testimony has a scriptural ring to it, with them the disciples and Stern the Christ-like teacher. By now he was thinking and behaving as someone anointed for great things, a man who could not be expected to be constrained by the normal rules of discipline or behaviour. He conducted much of his business without reference to the Irgun command in Palestine, much less to Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

The Polish connection was essential to Jabotinsky’s vision. His grand plan was to arrange a mass exodus of 40,000 young Jewish males from Poland and elsewhere to Palestine, to form the core of a liberation army to wrest Palestine from the Arabs and challenge British rule. From late 1936, Betar members started training at clandestine military camps. Stern was closely involved in the process. Initially he teamed up with the man running the early courses, a Polish Jew named Avraham Amper. Then, through his contacts, he persuaded the Polish military to provide premises and instructors for three-month programmes. From the outset he seems to have regarded this as a personal project, one that would give him a power base independent of Jabotinsky, and he did his best to keep the details from him. By early 1939, the scheme had grown to the point where the Poles were providing a rigorous military education not only for local Jews but for visitors from Palestine. One young volunteer, Yaacov Levstein, remembered a twenty-four-hour rail trip from Constanta to Kraków, from where he went to a training base in the Tatra Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia. The instructors were ‘Polish army officers, some of them veterans of Pilsudski’s legions, some former members of the pre-World War One Polish underground, and the rest Polish army career officers’.[24] The instruction was divided into underground tactics and conventional war fighting. The underground training involved ‘terrorist bombing, conspiracy, secret communications … sabotage was taught on a scientific basis. Many hours were devoted to calculating the quantities of explosives needed for destroying targets.’

The lectures were accompanied by live exercises. ‘Every day we would go out to the woods … the vicinity roared with thunderous explosions, automatic fire and gun shots … we would go out at dawn on a long hike and come back at night, tired, frozen and dirty but joyous and hopeful.’

Avraham Stern would turn up during the course or at the passing-out parade and deliver speeches that moved not only the Jews but their Polish instructors. Levstein remembered him speaking ‘to us of his plan for national liberation and explained that if we did not act expeditiously the British would implement their plan of putting our country under Arab rule and reducing the Yishuv to a ghetto they could easily control’.

Yaacov Polani, another veteran of the course from Palestine who stayed on for a while afterwards as a Betar instructor in Poland, later told his British interrogators that Stern was believed to be using the training for his own ends. The programme was supposed to provide a professional military cadre which would remain in the ranks of the Betar and come under Jabotinsky’s overall control rather than that of the Irgun. Stern, however, was ‘busy organising what he called “the reservoir” … people who would get military training and on arrival in Palestine would join the [Irgun]’.[25] This manoeuvre ‘did not find favour in the eyes of the Revisionist Party and a number of people were expelled from Betar for joining Stern’s activities’. When Betar leaders appealed to Jabotinsky to urge Stern to desist ‘he got certain promises from Stern but very vague ones’.

In effect, Stern was creating the nucleus of a band of followers who could later be relied upon to carry out his plans. Some stayed on in Poland until the German invasion, then, by one means or another, made their way to Palestine where they naturally gravitated to Stern. Among them was Avraham Amper, a quiet man who followed orders unquestioningly, and Yitzhak Tselnik, who was effectively Stern’s deputy at the time of his death.

Stern’s ambition also created problems with the Irgun leadership in Palestine. Following the split in the ranks in April 1937, when half the members had returned to the Haganah, his old friend David Raziel had emerged as the commander-in-chief of the hard-line rump. During his stays in Palestine, Stern took charge of propaganda and worked with Raziel to produce a statement of the new group’s principles, the first of which was that ‘the fate of the Jewish nation will be decided by Jewish armed force on the soil of the homeland’.

Stern was loquacious and sophisticated, Raziel was taciturn and dour. They were both, though, dedicated to violent action, as Raziel had demonstrated in his response to the Arab uprising. The attacks on Arabs in Jerusalem on 14 July 1937 that signalled the end of havlagah had been followed by many more bloody reprisals. In the summer of 1938 the British hanged a young Betar member, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, for his part in an unsuccessful ambush of a bus full of Arabs near Rosh Pinna in the north of the country. Raziel ordered a wave of bombings and shootings. They were directed not at Mandate forces but at Palestinian civilians. In one attack, mounted on 6 July 1938, an Irgun man disguised as an Arab porter carried milk cans into the Haifa souk. He left them in a quiet corner and disappeared. A few minutes later they exploded, spewing fire and shrapnel into the shoppers. Twenty-three Arabs were killed. A few weeks later a similar attack in the same place killed thirty-nine. Stern had no moral objection to such outrages. By now, though, he believed that the effort was misdirected, and that the violence should be aimed at the British.

He also opposed what he saw as Raziel’s deferential attitude towards Jabotinsky. In November 1938 Jabotinsky called a meeting in Paris with the aim of merging Betar with the Irgun. Raziel went along with the plan but Stern was bitterly critical of it. He avoided an outright confrontation with Jabotinsky but let his feelings be known to Raziel. Behind his back he took soundings of Irgun members in Palestine to gauge whether they were willing to break away from the partnership with the Revisionists and reject Jabotinsky’s authority altogether. Stern’s machinations on this occasion came to nothing. It was clear, though, that further confrontations with his comrades were inevitable and that sooner or later Stern would be going his own way.

[*] Hulanicki’s connection did him no good. He would be abducted and shot dead by Stern’s followers in February 1948.

## FOUR. ‘A Soul for a Soul and Blood for Blood’

In the spring of 1939 Roni Stern was living a dull life in Tel Aviv, giving piano lessons while waiting for her husband to make one of his intermittent appearances from Poland. From time to time her routine was brightened by an invitation to a party given by a man who lived around the corner from her apartment in Nevi’im Street in the centre of the city. Efraim Ilin was only twenty-seven years old but he was already one of Tel Aviv’s liveliest characters. He was employed as a tax clerk in the port. The job provided a cover of respectability as well as access to shipping traffic and he used it to build up a profitable business smuggling in illegal immigrants and weapons. Ilin’s sympathies were with the Irgun. His parties, though, were a social and political pot-pourri. In his flat in Chen Boulevard, many of the leading players in Palestine’s tumultuous affairs rubbed shoulders, drinking, gossiping and dancing to gramophone records of the latest tunes.

Among the guests were officers of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Palestine Police Force. After nearly three years the Arab revolt was losing momentum, worn down by the ruthless efficiency of the Mandate forces and the death or capture of key leaders. The CID was now spending an increasing amount of time investigating Jewish armed groups, and the Irgun in particular. An invitation from Efraim Ilin provided an opportunity to meet the Yishuv’s power brokers as well as those with links to the underground in convivial surroundings and to forge contacts that might provide valuable information and lead to useful alliances. Roni’s presence at the parties was encouraged by her husband and his Irgun associates for similar reasons.[1]

Among the regulars at Ilin’s soirées were three of the CID’s brightest officers. Arthur Giles was a child of the empire, born in Cyprus in 1899 to a family of soldiers and clergymen. He served in the Royal Navy in the First World War before joining the Egyptian Police Service where he acquired the honorific title of ‘Bey’, by which he was known to everyone. Giles Bey spoke Arabic, Greek and Turkish and was regarded as a brilliant policeman. In 1938 he decided his career would benefit from a change of scene and in March he was appointed head of the Palestine CID.

Dick Catling was a wiry, energetic twenty-seven-year-old. Like Geoffrey Morton he had joined the Palestine Police to escape the soul-destroying lack of opportunity in 1930s Britain. He came from a family of Suffolk farmers and butchers but decided to seek his fortune in London. ‘The only work I could find to do was in the City of London in a wholesale textile warehouse,’ he recalled. ‘I worked there for three and a half years and on most days at lunchtime I would wander down to the Pool of London and look at the ships, and say to myself, I really must get into one, and go away as soon as I can because this is all too depressing.’ One day, returning home to Suffolk, his train stopped at Ipswich. ‘There was another train on the other side of the platform and I looked out of my window and saw sitting in this other train a young man with whom I was at school. I hopped out and went across and said Parker, haven’t seen you since we were at school. He told me he was off to Palestine to join the police there, so I returned to my train and thought, well, if Parker can go to Palestine, surely I can.’[2] Now, four years after arriving, he was one of Giles Bey’s brightest young detectives and relishing the challenges involved in penetrating the complicated and constantly changing world of Jewish political and military activism. It was ‘an extraordinarily fascinating battle of wits’, he said long afterwards. ‘We had to get up very early in the morning if we were going to come out on top.’[3]

Catling’s guide through the thickets of the Jewish political demi-monde was another East Anglian. Tom Wilkin was three years older than Catling and, like him, came from an ordinary home. His family lived in the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh where they were publicans, grocers, drapers and shoemakers.[4] He seems to have served in the Suffolk constabulary before joining the Palestine Police in 1931. Early in 1933 he went with a policeman friend to a ball at the Eden cinema, a Moorish-style venue in the centre of Tel Aviv, to celebrate the light-hearted Jewish festival of Purim when people wear fancy dress and make merry. Among the revellers was a blonde, pretty young woman wearing a long flowing dress and a black mask. Wilkin nonetheless recognized her as the same girl he had tried unsuccessfully to chat to at the Tarshish café overlooking the sea a few days earlier. Wilkin was a low-ranking inspector of police who lacked the polish of the young officers from old British regiments who populated Tel Aviv’s bars and hotels. He was slightly-built, had reddish hair and wore a rather unconvincing moustache. He was understandably nervous about making another approach to this sophisticated belle but his friend assured him that fate had clearly decreed that they should meet. They danced and talked. The young woman told him that she gave English lessons. Wilkin wanted to improve his Hebrew and they agreed to meet again. Thus was born an intriguing and unlikely love story that would endure until Wilkin’s violent death eleven years later.

The woman in the mask was Shoshana Borochov. She was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a Russian-born Marxist-Zionist whose ideas helped shape the attitudes of the Yishuv’s left-wing establishment. Despite the high level of fraternization between Mandate officials and the Jews of Palestine, liaisons were frowned upon. Jewish parents were uneasy with their daughters consorting with Gentiles who seemed increasingly unsympathetic to their cause. The authorities, meanwhile, were concerned that soldiers and policemen would find that their loyalties were divided in the inevitable conflict between heart and duty. Shoshana and Tom defied the taboos despite family disapproval and official discouragement. They were not the only ones. Despite mounting tension between the Jews and the British, a surprising number of romances sprang up. Dick Catling had a Jewish girlfriend for a while, a Tel Aviv rabbi’s daughter whose sister went out with another policeman.

Wilkin’s Hebrew lessons were more than a ruse to win time with Shoshana. He was a natural linguist and was soon speaking the language fluently. He was intellectually curious and had a voracious interest in Jewish history and culture. Shoshana was from the Yishuv’s elite and introduced him to her circle. From these encounters Wilkin made his own friends, including businessmen like Ilin whom he met at a reception held by the mayor of Tel Aviv, Israel Rokach, and leading figures in the Jewish Agency and the Haganah. They were impressed by his good manners and genuine willingness to see their point of view, though when Ilin once challenged him over the ‘immorality’ of the stringent British restrictions on Jewish immigration he defended the Mandate line robustly.[5] Wilkin was careful not to advertise the range and quality of his contacts. ‘He was a very close man … a secretive man if you like,’ Catling remembered. ‘He worked quietly and, more often than not, alone.’[6]

Wilkin’s chief, Giles Bey, was equally energetic in cultivating all the players in his domain, Arab and Jew, no matter where they were placed in the political spectrum. He would meet anyone and sit talking for hours, uncensoriously exploring their opinions in an apparent spirit of impartiality. It was a technique that his brighter subordinates – notably Catling – adopted and used to great effect.

The word soon spread that Giles Bey was a policeman to be trusted. This reputation attracted some surprising approaches, none more so than a communication he received at the end of 1938 from David Raziel. Raziel was in a delicate position. The Irgun were now engaged in a continuing campaign of reprisals against Arabs. At the same time, they were the main organizers of illegal immigration to Palestine, a traffic that was swelling weekly as the circumstances of Europe’s Jews grew ever more desperate. Both activities placed a burden on the Mandate’s law and order resources and attracted the unwelcome interest of the Palestine Police in the Irgun’s operations and members.

The CID played an extremely important role in the affairs of the Mandate. Its field of activities was broad and included monitoring all aspects of political life in Palestine. Its reports were crucial in determining the views of Sir Harold MacMichael and the analyses and recommendations he sent back to the Colonial Office. The department was very well informed about the machinations of established Jewish organizations. Much of the information came from friendly sources inside the Jewish Agency and the Vaad Leumi – the Jewish National Council, which represented all the main factions of the Yishuv. The authorities also engaged in systematic phone tapping from listening posts based at the Jerusalem headquarters and the CID’s four district headquarters. Yishuv organizations – and particularly the Haganah – were equally well informed about the workings of the Mandate. Jewish policemen and Jewish officials routinely passed on information to the Haganah’s intelligence service, the Shai. The Irgun’s equivalent section, Meshi, also had its moles. According to Yaacov Levstein, who became one of Stern’s most loyal lieutenants, ‘from its inception Meshi did not spare any efforts to infiltrating the CID and making use of its employees, who provided us with first-hand information on political affairs, lists of men about to be arrested, copies of various documents etc.’[7]

Raziel’s feelings towards the British were ambivalent. Unlike Avraham Stern he had not arrived at the conclusion that it was they who were the chief obstacle to a Jewish state and were therefore the Irgun’s prime enemy. Like Jabotinsky, Raziel retained the hope that, despite Britain’s anti-immigration policy and periodic appeasement of the Arabs, in the right circumstances it could still bring its weight down decisively on the side of the Jews. At the end of 1938 it seemed that the right circumstances were approaching. Another world war was looming and Britain would need all the help it could get. An offer of military cooperation might be parlayed into unequivocal support for a Jewish state. Raziel decided that the time had come to reach out to the Mandate authorities. He made his overture in a letter to Giles Bey in which he wrote that he was ‘not an enemy of Great Britain in Palestine’. Indeed, he admired British culture and believed that Britain had ‘a friendly attitude towards my people’. The Jews in Palestine were surrounded by hostile Arabs and needed the support of a European ally. The Irgun might ‘criticize the methods of the government’. But ‘we do not intend to uproot their rule’.[8]

Giles’s response has not survived. However, within a few months of the letter being sent the Mandate’s policy had swung onto a new course which dealt a blow to Jews who believed in Britain’s good intentions. As 1939 dawned, war with Germany seemed not merely probable but inevitable. This realization forced a reassessment of British policy in Palestine. The Arab revolt had attracted widespread support in neighbouring Iraq, Syria and Egypt. It was vital to keep them on side in the coming fight. Two divisions of British troops who might be needed elsewhere at any minute were tied up fighting the Arabs. Some settlement would have to be found before the balloon went up.

Early in 1939 representatives from the Arab, Muslim and Jewish worlds were invited to London to settle the future of Palestine. The conference opened on 7 February in St James’s Palace and it was clear it was doomed from the start. The Arabs refused to sit with the Jews and each delegation arrived at a different entrance to avoid embarrassing encounters. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech had to be delivered twice – at 10.30 for the Arabs and at noon for the Jews.

It was obvious from the outset that British policy was shifting decisively in favour of the Arabs. As the pointless meetings ground on, the Irgun intensified their attacks on Arabs. They were joined now by ‘special squads’ of the Haganah who had decided that a policy of restraint was no longer tenable if they wished to represent themselves as defenders of the Yishuv. On 27 February 1939, bombs exploded across the country killing thirty-three and wounding nearly sixty. Most of the casualties were in Haifa, where bombs were planted in the eastern railway station and the souk. The Haganah’s calculation that the actions would have at least the acquiescence of the Yishuv proved correct. In his weekly intelligence report, Giles noted that the bloodshed had not been condemned by mainstream Jewry, who appeared to believe that it might force a change of heart by Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary. ‘There is no doubt that the Jewish public now believe that their case has been assisted by these outrages and the hands of the perpetrators have been strengthened thereby,’ he wrote.[9]

It was not to be. With no agreement between the parties, the government announced its own plan. The White Paper detailing the provisions was issued on 17 May, making it painfully clear that in the coming conflagration Britain had decided it needed the Arabs more than it did the Jews.

The White Paper’s message was that, with 450,000 Jews now settled in Palestine, the Balfour Declaration had achieved its aim and Britain was washing its hands of the Mandate. It had never been the intention to create a Jewish state against the will of the Arabs. In consequence Jewish immigration would be limited to 75,000 over the next five years and thereafter would depend on Arab consent. Sales of land to Jews would also be subject to heavy restrictions. It set a ten-year timetable for the establishment of an independent state in which Arabs and Jews would share government.

The White Paper was a shocking document for Zionists of every stripe. The terms meant that Jews could never form a majority in Palestine, putting an end to the dream of a Jewish state. But it was not just the future significance of the policy that caused dismay. It was the implications for the present.

Jews were pouring out of Germany but all over the world doors were being slammed in the refugees’ faces. And now the British were drawing the bolts across the gateway to Palestine – the land they had designated as a home for the Jews.

Cries of protest rang out from all quarters. The Manchester Guardian called it ‘a death sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews’.[10] In Palestine, David Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency denounced the ‘Black Paper’ as a ‘breach of faith … a surrender to Arab terrorism, a delivery of England’s friends into the hands of its enemies’. The Palestine Post editorial declared that ‘acceptance of this policy would be tantamount to national suicide’.[11]

In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv crowds took to the streets setting fire to government buildings and clashing with the police and army. In Jerusalem two British policemen were shot, one fatally, after confronting a 5000-strong mob. In London, on 18 May, Malcolm MacDonald nonetheless told the House of Commons that he had been assured by Sir Harold MacMichael that the situation was ‘generally quiet’. This prompted the tiny red-haired Labour member for Middlesbrough, Ellen Wilkinson, to ask him: ‘what is it like when it is not quiet?’ MacDonald made no reply.[12]

Avraham Stern was in Warsaw when the news of the White Paper broke, busy with the training camps, which now had full Polish support, and planning the mass exodus to Palestine. It was brought to him by Nathan Yellin-Mor, a former schoolteacher who was his co-editor on Di Tat. According to Yellin-Mor he took the British U-turn coolly, telling him that it might in fact be good news for ‘it will deal a mortal blow to the Jewish Agency, the National Council and the Zionist leadership – all those who link their future and the future of the nation to a partnership with Britain’.[13] That list now included Jabotinsky. Stern’s break with him was out in the open since he had denounced him in a press conference in Warsaw on 6 March, as a ‘former activist following a policy of complacency towards Zionism’s problems’.

Within forty-eight hours, Stern found himself thrust into a position from where he could attempt to apply his own solutions. The Irgun’s anti-Arab attacks had exhausted any goodwill Raziel might have bought himself with the British by his friendly overture to Giles. As the Yishuv boiled with rage over the White Paper, the CID moved to decapitate the organization. On the morning of 19 May, Raziel set off to Haifa for a meeting with Pinhas Rutenberg, a former Russian revolutionary, who, as well as setting up Palestine’s electricity generating network, was a founding father of the Haganah and a leading Yishuv fixer. The likely purpose of the rendezvous was to further enhance cooperation between the Irgun and the Haganah. It never took place. In order to avoid the British checkpoints that had sprung up on major roads, Raziel decided to fly. He boarded an aeroplane at Sde Dov, just north of Tel Aviv. The aircraft made an unscheduled stop at Lydda a few miles away. The passengers deplaned and were directed into a waiting room where their documents were checked. A few minutes later British policemen appeared and David Raziel was arrested and taken off to the nearby detention camp at Sarafand.

When the Irgun leadership met to respond to the crisis, they chose Hanoch Strelitz,[*] the Jerusalem commander, to replace him. Strelitz was born in Lithuania in 1910 and moved to Palestine with his family at the age of fourteen. He was a Hebrew language scholar who had been with the Irgun from the start and commanded the Haifa unit at the time of Wally Medler’s death. He was popular with his men. ‘He had a great influence over us and we loved him as a teacher and a leader,’ remembered Yaacov Polani, who had received his basic training from him.[14] Despite his scholarly manner, Strelitz was a hardliner who had been one of the first to argue for the end of havlagah and the start of reprisals when the Arab revolt broke out.

Strelitz’s first act as commander-in-chief was to widen the scope of Irgun operations. They would continue to kill Arabs. But from now on, in light of the treachery revealed in the White Paper, they would also attack British targets. The first actions would be largely symbolic in nature with the aim of winning over the Yishuv to the Irgun’s way of thinking. Words were as important as deeds and a skilled propagandist was needed to direct the campaign. A message was sent to Avraham Stern that it was time to come home.

The order could not have been more inconvenient. For one thing Roni had just arrived from Palestine. Anticipating that he would be in Poland until at least the end of the year, Stern had rented a house in the Warsaw suburbs and sent for her to join him. She duly quit her music teaching job, sublet the Tel Aviv apartment and boarded the boat for Constanta. More importantly, he was on the verge of closing several crucial deals. The finishing touches were being put to a large weapons consignment, part of which had been donated free by the Poles. He was also involved in buying, on very favourable terms, the Polish passenger ship Pilsudski, which he hoped would provide the transport for the 40,000 recruits for the liberation army plan.

Though Stern was becoming increasingly resistant to discipline, the order could not be ignored. He and Roni prepared for an immediate return. Before they left, Lily Strassman took Roni shopping for clothes. Stern had decreed that his wife dress only in Zionist colours and in accordance with his wishes she bought a blue coat. As they headed south the patriotic wardrobe expanded. In Lvov he bought her blue and white shoes and in Costanza a blue and white blouse.

According to Roni, his nerves were on edge throughout the voyage. What if the police were waiting for him at Haifa? But they passed through immigration unchallenged and were soon ensconced in the Yarden Hotel in Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda Street, a broad boulevard that ran parallel to the sea. Stern was still cautious. He told Roni not to leave the hotel in case she ran into friends who would want to know why she was back from Poland so soon. He, too, stayed inside, slipping out at nightfall to meet his Irgun cohorts. After two weeks the couple moved out to an apartment on Rothschild Boulevard, rented in Roni’s maiden name.[15]

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.