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