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

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.