The idea of an Italian alliance had been floating around since the early days of the war. It was planted by a man called Moshe Rothstein, a mysterious figure in a very murky story. Rothstein said that he was in contact with Italian secret agents and approached the Irgun with an interesting offer. He claimed that the Italians were keen on a partnership with some anti-British force in Palestine. The Irgun, with their nationalist and militaristic ideology and record of antipathy to the empire, seemed the perfect fit.
It is unclear exactly when the initial approach was made. Irgun veterans would later say that the first overture was to David Raziel shortly after he emerged from Mazra’a in October 1939. Raziel treated it with extreme caution. He had, after all, agreed to cooperate with the British and although Mussolini had not yet signed up to Hitler’s war, cosying up to the Fascists could only be interpreted as a hostile act. There were also real doubts as to Rothstein’s bona fides. He had been hanging around the fringes of the Irgun since the early thirties when he lived in the Revisionist stronghold of Rosh Pinna. He had played little or no part in operations and how he came to be in touch with the Italian secret service was a mystery.
Rothstein was lying about his Italian connection. He did, however, have a clandestine relationship with another intelligence service. He was closely involved with the Haganah’s Shai. The Haganah saw themselves as the legitimate defenders of the Yishuv and the Irgun as dangerous usurpers. They therefore had a strong interest in doing them down. The initial approach to Raziel seems to have been a provocation designed to generate black propaganda to be used, when appropriate, against their rivals.
With Raziel’s decision to back the British and the subsequent improvement in relations between the Revisionists and the Yishuv’s leftist establishment, the Irgun appear to have taken over Rothstein and his plot and proceeded to run it against Stern. This was certainly how the CID interpreted events. ‘It has been known for some time that following the split which occurred in the IZL (Irgun) in the summer of 1940 and the subsequent formation of the Stern Group, the policy decided upon by the former organization to prevent further members from being enticed away to Stern’s programme … was to expose and emphasize his relations with a foreign power – ie Italy,’ wrote Alan Saunders to Chief Secretary Macpherson when summing up events at the end of 1941.
‘With this end in view certain Irgun leaders engineered a meeting between Stern and a person [i.e. Rothstein] … who introduced himself as being in touch with the Italians and able to negotiate on their behalf. Through this person the trick prospered for some time and served the double purpose of keeping the Irgun informed of Stern’s intentions regarding collaboration with the enemy and at the same time actually preventing the group from getting into touch with the Italians.’1
The man manipulating the plot was probably Israel Pritzker, a senior figure in Irgun intelligence. Pritzker was on close terms with the CID and a copy of the proposed agreement between Stern and the Italians was soon in their hands.
For all his academic brilliance, Stern could be remarkably gullible. He had been in prison at the time of Rothstein’s first appearance, which could explain his willingness to at least examine the bait that had been rejected by Raziel. His eagerness to bite on it, though, alarmed his lieutenants who warned that it could be a trap. Stern was unconcerned. He argued that, at worst, Rothstein was an agent provocateur, in which case the knowledge that the group was prepared to do a deal with the enemy might wring some concessions from the British. At best, he might be genuine.
Italy was now on Palestine’s doorstep. A few days after the Italian air force bombed Tel Aviv on 9 September 1940, a large Italian army entered British-held Egypt, advancing sixty miles to construct a forward base. These developments appear to have encouraged Stern to believe that it might not be long before Fascist troops were marching into Palestine. If an Axis victory was imminent, it was a matter of urgency to have arrangements in place before Britain fell.
Rothstein was in possession of what purported to be some draft proposals from the Italians. According to some Stern group survivors the document went back and forth with additions and amendments before being agreed. The result was the so-called ‘Jerusalem Agreement’. It was a very damaging document. For all his talk of a proud ‘Kingdom of Israel’, Stern seemed prepared to sacrifice sovereignty to the Fascists on several key matters. Under its terms, Italy would organize the transfer of Jews under Axis control to their homeland and provide the wherewithal for a Hebrew army. The Jews would get a state – but it would be modelled on Mussolini’s Italy and built along corporatist, Fascist lines. Its foreign policy was to be identical to that of Rome, making the new Israel an Axis satellite. The Italian navy would be given Haifa as a base. The Old City of Jerusalem, the longed for, mystical heart of Judaism, would be, with the exception of the Jewish holy places, placed under Vatican control. There is no evidence that these proposals ever reached the Italians and their circulation was limited to the intelligence departments of the Irgun, the Haganah and the CID. Rothstein was eventually rumbled and Yaacov Levstein given the job of killing him. The career double-crosser was understandably prudent and moved lodgings constantly. When Levstein finally tracked him down the house was full of Rothstein’s relatives and ‘since we did not wish harm to innocent people we cancelled the operation’. Rothstein disappeared thereafter ‘and we never heard from him again’.2
In attempting to strike a deal with the Fascists, Stern at least had the excuse of entrapment. But at the same time as the Rothstein affair was playing out he was engaged in another overture to a foreign power, one that was even more ruinous to his reputation and which was not prompted by the manipulations of an agent provocateur. The Italians were the junior partners in the Axis. The real masters of Europe were the Germans. It was they who held the fate of Europe’s Jews in their hands and it was they who had the means to deal Britain the death blow.
Stern’s idea was a logical continuation of the process that he had begun so successfully with the Poles. If Poland could become a partner in the Irgun project, why not Germany? The principle was the same. They wanted rid of their Jews. Those struggling to bring about the rebirth of Israel needed them – to oppose the British and to populate the land. It was an equation that, in his eyes at least, seemed ripe with the possibilities of mutual benefit.
At the end of September, a few weeks after the Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery, he sent an envoy to Beirut to make contact with the Germans. Since the fall of France, Lebanon had gone from being a friendly territory to an outpost of Vichy loyalists who were collaborating enthusiastically with the Italians and Germans. Both had diplomatic missions in Beirut. The man chosen for the mission was Naftali Lubentchik, a sophisticated Moscow-born polyglot (he spoke seven European languages) who was in charge of the Stern group’s finances. His job was to open lines of communication with the Nazis, but also to contact Italian officials to find out whether or not there was any substance to the Jerusalem Agreement pantomime.
Levstein, who had been moved to Haifa to escape police heat following the Anglo-Palestine affair, was in charge of Lubentchik’s arrangements. He had dealings with Jewish and Arab smugglers who moved people and weapons between Haifa and Beirut. He had also found an ally in the French. Under the ‘confused conditions it was easy to obtain arms, even from the official French sources who wanted to be paid in hard currency,’ he wrote. ‘Those sources gladly supplied us with arms of all kinds, knowing that they were intended to attack their British enemy, thus combining French patriotism with profit making.’3 Lubentchik assumed the identity of a Maronite businessman who had been in Haifa to buy merchandise. He reached Beirut without trouble and soon made an appointment to see a visiting German diplomat, Werner Otto von Hentig.
Von Hentig was head of the Foreign Ministry’s Levant section. He was a survivor from the pre-Nazi era who had served the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic and regarded himself as an honourable man untainted by anti-Semitism. He had been sent to Lebanon and Syria on a month-long fact-finding mission. His task was to check out reports that the French were treating German citizens in the area badly and also locking up pro-German Arabs. On arrival he chose to install himself in the unobtrusive Monopole Hotel rather than the swanky St George and was soon receiving a throng of supplicants seeking the Reich’s favour.
‘The most remarkable delegation came from Palestine itself,’ he wrote in his autobiography. It was led by ‘an exceptionally good-looking young officer type’.4 Von Hentig’s memory is faulty on this point and in fact Lubentchik was on his own. Many years later, at the age of ninety-seven, the diplomat gave a fuller version of the encounter to an Israeli journalist. ‘The Jewish young man made a fine impression,’ he told Shlomo Shamgar of Yedioth Ahronoth.5 ‘He was well dressed and had a gift for political persuasion. He told me of his anti-British organization and his willingness to join with the Reich to continue the war against the British. In exchange for participation in the war against the British, he proposed that the Reich help his organization establish a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael and allow the Jews from the occupied lands to make aliyah [immigrate] and settle in it.’
The proposals drawn up by Stern were set out in a memorandum which carried the stamp of the ‘IZL in Israel’, which von Hentig passed to the Foreign Ministry.6 They were repeated in another document, dated 11 January 1941, drawn up by the German naval attaché in Ankara, Admiral Ralf von der Marwitz, and given to the German ambassador in Turkey who transmitted them to Berlin. How he came to hear of them is a mystery, though French intelligence may have tipped him off. In setting out his offer Stern was being economical with the truth. He left out the fact that ‘IZL in Israel’ was only a fragment of the original Irgun. This made his offer of help slightly more impressive. He was offering ‘active participation in the war on the German side’. The Nazis would have the use of his men, in the Middle East and Europe, to carry out sabotage and espionage operations against the British. His condition was that the ‘aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised’. These were the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine, populated by the Jews of German-occupied Europe who should be allowed free passage to emigrate there.7
Von Hentig said he received no reply to the proposals before he left Beirut. On returning to Germany he asked Ernst von Weizsäcker, the deputy head of the Foreign Ministry, whether he had seen the memorandum. Von Weizsäcker ‘sharpened his gaze. “Do you really think the Reich could be interested in a Jewish state in [Palestine] when we are trying to win over the Arabs and Muslims to further our war aims?”’ he asked.
It was a good question. The Germans had already made it clear that their strategy favoured the Arabs. German intelligence and military officials were at that moment working with Iraqi generals and the Mufti, who was now conducting his anti-British and anti-Jewish activities from Baghdad, involved in a conspiracy that would result a few months later in the overthrow of the British-installed Iraqi monarchy. More fundamentally, why did Stern think Hitler would be interested in anything that might bring long-term benefits to the Jews?
Stern’s belief that a deal with the Germans was both desirable and possible was not a momentary aberration. He clung to it even when it was clear that it would not and could not lead anywhere. In the endless discussions that were an inescapable part of life in the underground, he drove home the distinction between an ‘enemy’ and an ‘oppressor’. The Jews’ enemy was the British who occupied their land and, as the White Paper proved, were now bent on blocking the establishment of a Jewish state. The Germans, for all their hatred and persecution of the Jews, were mere oppressors. Only by fighting the British could you hope to change their minds. Stern was not opposed to an understanding with them. But they would first have to recognize the leadership of the Yishuv as a temporary government that would establish an independent state at the end of the war, recognized by Britain. Until that happened, any collaboration was an act of treason.8
It was some time before Lubentchik’s account of the episode reached Stern. It described how von Hentig had explained to him that there were two schools of thought among the German leadership regarding the Jewish question. Some took a realpolitik approach and proposed the expulsion of the Jews to some far-flung territory – Madagascar perhaps. The idealpolitik faction was committed to the total annihilation of European Jewry.9
Despite the failure of Lubentchik’s mission, Stern continued to harbour hopes of an alliance, spinning fantasies of how collaboration might work. Some were so wild that he shared them with only a chosen few. He confided to them a plan whereby he would offer ‘help divisions’ made up of tens of thousands of young European Jews to the Wehrmacht to fight with them against the British in North Africa. If the Germans never made it to Palestine, the ‘help divisions’ would then desert and head for the Holy Land. Such was his devotion to a deal with the devil that he was prepared to stand at the head of a quisling government, willingly accepting his inevitable assassination by Jewish patriots. This, he told a friend, ‘will be my sacrifice to the resurrection of the kingdom of Israel and the rescue of the Jewish nation’.10 Such suicidal visions may have seemed plausible to Stern himself but to most they were incomprehensible.
Apologists would later claim that his policy was driven solely by the burning urge to pursue all means possible to rescue Europe’s Jews. But Stern’s own words suggest that his main motive was to obtain the manpower for the conquest of Palestine. ‘All we want of the Germans is to enable us to transfer this army to the coasts of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel], and the war against the British to liberate the homeland will begin here,’ he declared to an old comrade, Yaacov Orenstein. ‘The Jews will attain a state, and the Germans will, incidentally, be rid of an important British base in the Middle East, and also solve the Jewish question in Europe.’11
But as Orenstein vainly attempted to point out, this was never going to happen. German hatred of the Jews precluded them from agreeing to any proposal, no matter how logical. Stern’s admirers would also try to justify his actions by explaining that at the time of these machinations, no one knew of the Final Solution to exterminate all Jews within Germany’s reach. It was true that the Wannsee Conference which formalized the murder programme did not take place until the end of January 1942, but it was already appallingly clear that German intentions towards the Jews were evil and that no accommodation was conceivable. The newspapers were full of dreadful stories. Stern had the evidence of his own family as to what the Jews of Europe could expect.
The war arrived in Suwalki on 1 September 1939 when Luftwaffe aircraft bombed the barracks around the town. A few days later the Polish army and police fled. The town was briefly occupied by the Soviets before they ceded it to the German army, who marched in trailing the Gestapo in their wake. On Saturday, 21 October, the Jews of Suwalki were told they had a fortnight to clear out. The Lithuanian border, fifteen miles away, was closed. The Germans’ new friends, the Soviets, were also denying entry to Jews. Family groups trudged over the fields trying to find an unguarded spot. Some were caught and turned back; others were shot. Among the refugees were Mordechai and Liza Stern. ‘They took some money and some coats and they ran away to the forest, towards the Lithuanian border,’ said their grandson Yair. ‘It was as cold as hell. During the stay in the forest my grandfather got paralysed in half his body. My grandmother carried him – I don’t know how as she was a very small woman.’12
Somehow she struggled across the frontier and paid a farmer to take Mordechai by horse and buggy to a hospital, where he died, apparently of a lung infection. About 3000 Jews from the Suwalki area made it to the temporary safety of Kaunas in Lithuania. The same number were left behind. On 2 December they were ordered not to leave their homes. The Jewish part of town was surrounded by SS troops and police and the inhabitants driven into the synagogue, jail and hospital. Everything of value was taken from them. Herded by vicious, snapping guard dogs, they were then marched to the railway station and loaded into sealed wagons for a two-day journey to Lublin. According to Dr Kasriel Eilender, a historian of the Jews of Suwalki, ‘most of them were shot in a forest near a locality called Łomazy’ (eastern Poland).13 Liza Stern stayed on in Kaunas where she managed to obtain a visa for Palestine from the British consul, who issued 700 certificates for Palestine in 1940 before the Soviets marched into Lithuania.14 She arrived via ship from Odessa sometime in the latter part of 1940.15
Stern would have heard her story and hundreds like it, yet nothing it seemed would deter him from the notion that the Germans were open to reason or that the British – to whom he owed the deliverance of his mother – were the real enemy.
When Yehoshua Yeivin, a Revisionist pioneer who had once declared an enthusiasm for fascism, told him, ‘they will say of you that you assisted Hitler … they will cover your memory with spittle and disgrace’, he simply replied: ‘I know that …’16
With no outside help forthcoming, the group was effectively moribund. The Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery had been followed in December by the blowing up of the Mandate’s immigration office in Haifa. For most of the following year, though, operations were severely limited and the ‘anonymous soldiers’ mainly stayed indoors. It was not just the lack of resources that inhibited them. Their names were now all too well known to the police. Their relative inactivity did nothing to diminish the efforts of the CID to nail them.
The Mandate’s intelligence agencies soon got to know about Lubentchik’s mission to Beirut from a ‘hundred per cent reliable’ source, though they believed he had gone to see the Italians rather than the Germans. For a while, there was nothing to suggest that these overtures had got very far or presented any real threat to Palestine. In the spring of 1941 came hard evidence that the Stern group presented a genuine menace to security. On 17 March, following a tip-off, the police raided the home of a Stern loyalist named Itamar Ben Haroch, who had slipped into Palestine illegally. According to the CID report ‘a search of his room produced a sketch indicating the position of Military camps in the Rehovoth area, including those at Jul-us, Qastina, Gadera and Nesa Taiyona and the aerodromes at Tel Nof and Aqir’.17 In addition, they found records of the movement of British forces between Palestine, Britain and Greece. Here, surely, was active treason.
Stern and his men had moved to the top of the CID’s target list. In a letter written on 18 June 1941 to a veteran officer called Raymond Cafferata ordering the arrest of two suspects, Giles Bey described the group as a ‘collection of Jewish Quislings’. They were ‘a danger to the war effort in this country … accordingly we must not be squeamish in combatting them’.18 In later reports they are referred to as a ‘Fifth Column’ whose object was ‘to build up a vast organisation so that in the event of an enemy attack on this country they can assist that enemy by destroying communications, bridges, railways and any other object that will disorganise the internal security of this country’.19
The tone was set for a vigorous campaign. Police operations in Palestine were almost always conducted with an eye on the political implications of the action. Stern and his men, though, had crossed a line and the toughest measures were now considered justified. Giles Bey’s letter stressed ‘the group is dangerous and we cannot afford to take chances’.
The CID were already getting some important results. On 21 May, detectives led by Tom Wilkin swooped on a flat in a house at 48 Keren Kayemet Boulevard in Tel Aviv. It was the home of a teacher called Moshe Svorai and his wife Tova. They had a lodger, none other than Yaacov Polani, the boy from the Herzliya orange groves who had received military training in Poland. On the night of the raid two other men were present – Yehoshua Zettler, ‘the Farmer’, who had led the Anglo-Palestine Bank robbery, and Yaacov Orenstein. A search turned up more documents ‘which again proved the activities of the Group in the collection of information of a military character’20 and which Wilkin believed provided sufficient proof to charge them all under the Official Secrets Ordinance and the Defence Regulations. They were taken to the Northern Police Station in Tel Aviv. Security seems to have been extraordinarily lax. Polani and Zettler, the latter of whom had given the police a false name and whose true identity remained undiscovered, decided to try to escape. ‘In the morning,’ Polani told the police some months later, ‘when the door of the Station opened we dashed out and jumped over a fence.’21 Both got clean away.
By this time Polani had all but ceased his underground activities. Svorai, however, was a significant catch. He was a teacher from a village near Haifa, an Irgun man from the outset who had done six months behind the wire. He had been persuaded by Stern to give up his job and move to Tel Aviv as the group’s intelligence chief. Moshe and Tova were among Stern’s most dedicated disciples and would remain so for the rest of their long lives. ‘Yair was a special person, completely different from all around him,’ Svorai said not long before his death in 2011.22 His conversion to Yair’s world view was a testament to Stern’s remarkable eloquence. Moshe Svorai might be expected to have been repelled by Stern’s overtures to the Axis. After all, one of his first acts as a young activist had been to tear down the swastika flag flying over the German diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, a feat that won him the heart of Tova. Stern’s words dissolved all doubt. Svorai later described how Yair talked ‘in a monotone, without pathos, as if he was speaking in a straight line. There was something hypnotic in the way he looked at you – it was penetrating, unique and it was hard to look back at him if he caught your eye. His eyes were steel grey. They flashed with lightning. His face was full of nobility and impressively delicate.’23
Polani, too, bore witness to Stern’s mesmerizing persuasiveness: ‘As a speaker [he] held us all in a trance. His clever, deep set eyes, his even manner of speech, his ability to express himself in short, clear sentences – all captivated us.’24
CID records show the raid on the Svorai’s flat had been based on information from a source in the seaside town of Netanya, just up the coast from Tel Aviv. The informant was referred to in Giles Bey’s letter to Cafferata: ‘So far what has come to us has been from one source only, but a source which has proved most reliable.’25
This source might possibly be the same person who, in the autumn of 1940, had supplied the head of the CID’s political department, District Deputy Superintendent Roderick Musgrave, with precise details about the Stern organization. A document in Hebrew in the Haganah files lists the names, functions, addresses, workplaces and meeting points of all key members of the group from Stern down, and singles out those responsible for the Anglo-Palestine Bank job. The informant reveals that his name is among those on the list. In the event of his arrest, he would identify himself as ‘Mr Levine’ so that the police would then be able to return the favour and let him go.26 Though clearly intended primarily as an insurance policy, the approach might well have led to a more regular arrangement. The continuing references in police reports to solid inside information suggest there was at least one energetic traitor in Stern’s inner circle at the time.
The list provided a solid foundation of fact on which the CID could build up a clear intelligence picture. The arrests that followed from it also gave opportunities for broadening their range of sources. One of the men whom Giles Bey wanted Cafferata to arrest was Arieh Menachem, a labourer of Yugoslav origin from Netanya. Two months after the request he was finally picked up. Menachem was questioned by Assistant Superintendent Barham, who was based at Tulkarm police station. Barham did not have to lean very hard on Menachem to win his cooperation. He seems to have told the superintendent what he wanted to hear, confirming Stern’s status as a fifth columnist. He later provided more information, claiming that Germany and Italy had ‘promised him full help in arms and money and the formation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine’.27 In return they ‘asked for maps and plans of military strategic points in Palestine’.
At some point Menachem decided to atone for his earlier allegiance. In a letter written in Croatian to an unnamed policeman he describes how he decided to turn against his former comrades: ‘I came to the conclusion that if I continued in this way I should never become a man, and besides this Stern’s fight is against England and this is the greatest crime a Jew can commit.’ He was now willing to work against the group in Tel Aviv. ‘It only depends on you,’ he concluded. ‘If you will give me the chance to become a man.’ Menachem was given his chance. His success, if any, was short-lived. A few months later Stern’s men discovered he was a British spy and shot him dead in Netanya in the early hours of 6 September 1941.
The British penetration deepened the atmosphere of fear and distrust inside the organization. When Moshe Svorai was arrested, Stern was living with a friendly family but moved out as soon as he heard the news. In June, Roni managed to find a room for him in a house in Balfour Street, belonging to an elderly couple. It had a separate entrance so comings and goings were less easy to monitor. By now Stern rarely appeared in daylight hours, only slipping out when darkness fell to see friends. Lily Strassman was in town. The war had smashed her gilded world to pieces. She had managed to reach Palestine in June 1940 via Italy. Her husband, Henryk, who had been an officer in the military reserve, was dead, murdered not by the Germans but by the Soviets in Katyn Forest, in one of the massacres of the elite that followed their invasion of Poland. At nostalgic evenings at Lily’s Tel Aviv house Polish émigrés gathered to remember the old days.
Stern’s contacts with those nearest to him were tenuous. He lived alone in the new flat. Roni would visit on Shabbat and they would stay closeted together, seeing no one. He rarely met his mother. He had no money to support her and Liza was reduced to working as a live-in nurse and au pair to an elderly invalid in Tel Aviv.
His most constant companions were Avraham Amper and Zelig Zak, both of whom acted as his bodyguards. One of Amper’s duties was to keep an eye on legal immigrants disembarking at the ports and identify potential recruits. There were few takers. One who did join the ranks was Israel Eldad, a right-wing former philosophy student. Eldad shared Stern’s intensely ideological mindset. When Stern revealed his latest strategic blueprint, a statement of eighteen ‘principles’ for the rebirth of Israel, Eldad responded with a commentary that covered forty-six pages of a notebook.28
At least someone was taking his ideas seriously. Outside the claustrophobic world of the group the Yishuv was backing Britain. In May the ‘National Institutions’ had urged all men aged between twenty and thirty to join the services. By then 8000 Jewish Palestinians were already serving.29 Their attitude was summed up in a police report, written by one of Geoffrey Morton’s men, Sergeant Alec Stuart, describing an incident he had witnessed in a Tel Aviv café when a party of about fifteen Jewish soldiers marched in. ‘One of this press gang took over the microphone whilst the remainder “sorted out” the patrons, two of whom were finally ejected in a quiet but forceful manner.’ The man at the mic ‘made an impassioned speech in Hebrew’ stating that the best way of combating ‘the Nazi atrocities [against] their brethren is to enlist in HM Forces and finally come to grips with the hated enemy and the persecutors of their race …’ The speech was ‘received quite enthusiastically by members of the audience’.30
David Raziel had himself put on British uniform. Relations between the official Irgun and the authorities had improved to the point where plans were hatched to use Irgun men in special operations in the area. In the early summer of 1941, Palestine’s situation was looking increasingly precarious. British forces had been driven out of Greece and then humiliated in Crete. In the Western Desert, Rommel had arrived to halt an Italian collapse and was now pushing Wavell’s army back to the frontiers of Egypt. In Iraq, the April coup engineered by the Germans had installed a pro-Nazi junta in power in Baghdad with General Rashid Ali at its head. In May, Luftwaffe aircraft began to arrive. With Vichy troops occupying Lebanon and Syria, Palestine was starting to feel hemmed in.
When, on 29 April, Rashid Ali began besieging the British base at Habbaniya, fifty miles west of Baghdad, Britain sent a relief force from Transjordan which marched up the Euphrates plain towards the capital. Meanwhile, a four-man Irgun team led by David Raziel flew into Habbaniya. It was tasked with sabotage and its first job was a diversionary raid on an oil installation near Baghdad. The squad had another unofficial target in mind. They planned, if the opportunity presented itself, to kill the Mufti, now enjoying the hospitality of Rashid Ali. When the raid was called off, they were sent instead on a recce mission to discover the strength of Iraqi forces near Fallujah. On 17 May, the jeep carrying the party, accompanied by a British major, had paused by a flooded area when a German light aeroplane appeared and dropped a single bomb. Raziel was struck in the head by a splinter and killed and the major was decapitated.
It was Roni who brought Stern the news of Raziel’s death. Despite their estrangement and the angry words that had flown between them, ‘the shock was very great,’ she recalled. ‘Yair’s head slumped and he held it in his two hands. I saw his shoulders were shaking with sobs. After a moment he recovered and regained his composure.’31
Raziel’s death must have intensified an already acute sense of isolation. They had once been David and Jonathan. Stern began to think that his own end – imagined so often in his poetry – might not be far off. Yitzhak Yezernitzky, better known later as Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had arrived from Poland aged twenty in 1935, joined the Irgun four years later, carried out his share of shootings and bombings and followed Stern in the split with Raziel, recorded a conversation as the pair walked one evening through Tel Aviv’s dark backstreets. Stern told him that it was ‘as clear as day that [the] police wouldn’t be satisfied with arresting him but would kill him on the spot. He said this in a quiet voice, with no emotion, and added that he was sure his murder wouldn’t be the end … On the contrary the murder would increase the movement’s strength and many would join the ranks.’32
Stern took premonitions seriously. He was superstitious. He read horoscopes and touched wood. Binyamin Zeroni remembered how once during a meeting a spider fell from the ceiling and onto Stern. Zeroni went to kill it but Stern stopped him. ‘It’s forbidden to kill a spider at night,’ he said. ‘If we do a catastrophe will befall us.’33
With the dearth of money, the skulking, fugitive existence, where every knock at the door might herald the arrival of the CID, the organization was slowly dying. What was needed was action. But action required money. The extortion that the group practised against wealthy Jews yielded limited returns. In Netanya, local businessmen who were leaned on had had enough. A police report noted that ‘demands have become excessive and one or two persons have refused to pay’.34 When one man refused to cough up fifty pounds a ‘gang of thugs’ raided his residence and ‘his home and furniture were liberally daubed with human excrement’. It was time for another bank robbery. On the night of 13/14 July, a team tried to break into the Arab National Bank in Jerusalem. The operation was a total failure. Once again Stern did not take part, confining himself to reciting psalms while the attempted robbery was in progress.
The failure prompted a crisis meeting at which frustration over the record of failure and deep misgivings about Stern’s German policy combined to spark a vicious quarrel. The revolt came from the top. Hanoch Strelitz, for several years an intimate and ally of Stern, and Binyamin Zeroni, who had shown his resolution and boldness in numerous actions, had had enough. According to Yaacov Levstein, the two now ‘saw no point in fighting the British while World War Two was at its peak.’35 Indeed, like the Irgun they were now ‘in favour of helping the British war effort’. Zeroni, with Strelitz’s approval, had already contacted Yaacov Meridor, an Irgun commander who had been with Raziel when he died, to see if they would be interested in allowing the Stern group back into the fold on equal terms. Knowing that Stern was unlikely to agree to the move, a contingency plan was in place to deal with him. He would be seized and kept under house arrest and confined to harmless activities such as writing poetry. As it was, the initiative came to nothing, but the scheme was a measure of how estranged Stern had become from his old comrades.
The emergency council brought together Stern and his two deputies and six or seven area commanders. It lasted more than a week and took place in a succession of hideaways in Tel Aviv. Stern spoke first, reiterating his determination to carry on trying to cut a deal with the Germans while at the same time launching a wave of actions that would boost the group’s standing in the eyes of the Yishuv. After Stern, it was Strelitz’s turn.
He rejected everything that Stern said. It was pointless to talk of operations when they had no resources to sustain them. The correct course was to reunite with the Irgun and seek ‘rehabilitation’ with the rest of Jewish Palestine. The measured tone of the opening exchanges soon broke down into quarrels and threats. Yaacov Levstein, whose loyalty to Yair would never waver, rounded on Strelitz for his perceived treachery and barked that he deserved ‘to be shot in the head’.
Stern retained his habitual, dreamy calm but it was no protection against the verbal lashing that ensued when Zeroni unloaded months of harboured resentment. He insisted that Stern should abandon all ideas of an alliance with the Axis. Furthermore, he declared that if there were to be any more operations, he would be in overall charge of them. ‘I told Yair that since you were never a fighter and you have no idea about actions, you can’t order me about when I lead them,’ he remembered.36 Stern would not agree. In Zeroni’s opinion, he was ‘jealous of Raziel’ and wanted to appear a man of action and not a mere thinker. Stern’s failure to pull a trigger or plant a bomb also rankled with Strelitz, who threw at him the charge that he had ‘never been out on an operation’. To a man who styled himself Yair after a great Hebrew warrior, the accusation must have burned like acid.
For the rest of those present, though, Stern’s authority held firm. After three days it was clear that Strelitz and Zeroni had failed to win over the area commanders and the pair left, eventually to rejoin the Irgun. The final parting was ugly. As Zeroni flounced out he offered a prophetic warning to Stern: ‘You won’t hold your own for long. The British will get you.’
Stern was now commanding a rump of a rump. They had no money and no friends. The might of the British Empire, the sentiments of the Yishuv and their former comrades in the Revisionist movement were now ranged against them. Their numbers were pathetically small: Haifa and Jerusalem had about twenty to thirty members, Tel Aviv thirty to fifty and the surrounding area perhaps another thirty. The founder members of this tiny club nonetheless felt the warm glow of exclusivity. The showdown, said Levstein, had ‘raised our morale, deepened our conviction that we had chosen the right way in our struggle for national liberation, and restored our faith in the leadership’.37
It was time to resume the fight. Stern’s determination to seal a pact with the Nazis was undiminished and in December Nathan Yellin-Mor, his old journalist colleague from Warsaw days, was dispatched on what was to prove another doomed mission. At home, there were two urgent goals. One was to raise money through another major bank raid. The second, according to Levstein, was to liquidate their enemies in the CID. Geoffrey Morton’s name was at the top of the list.