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