Making of a martyr

The Reckoning: Death and Intrigue in the Promised Land. By Patrick Bishop. Harper; 352 pages; $26.99. William Collins; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OF ALL the reasons for Zionism’s rapid success, perhaps the most important was its ability to be a colonising and anti-colonial movement at the same time. The establishment of a Jewish national home owed its genesis to the declaration in 1917 of a British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, who hoped that Jewish settlement in Palestine would underpin British influence in the Middle East. But many of those settlers felt uncomfortable with their client status. Within two decades they turned their guns on the British mandate that had been established to protect them, and then carved out their own state.

Most Zionist movements in Palestine suspended their armed struggle at the start of the second world war, judging that Nazi Germany’s determination to annihilate the Jews was a far bigger threat. At least 30,000 signed up for the British army, receiving training, security information and weapons, which later proved decisive in Israel’s war of independence in 1948. But a fringe broke away under the leadership of a Polish-born romantic poet, Avraham Stern. Throughout the war, they ambushed British forces, even soliciting fascist and Nazi support for their campaign.

Patrick Bishop sets out in detail the story of the British manhunt to root out “Herr” Stern and his small band of “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”, better known by its Hebrew acronym, Lehi. As long as Stern’s men were perpetrating atrocities against Palestinians, the British continued to hold the ring. His militants sewed explosive vests and planted bombs in chocolate boxes and milk-churns in Arab cinemas, cafés and markets. When caught, they did spells in detention camps, often escaping with remarkable ease.

But when the Stern gang began turning those same tactics on British administrators and the Jewish “collaborators” who worked for them, booby-trapping their officers along Tel Aviv’s main drag, Dizengoff, and detonating gelignite under commanders’ cars, Britain’s chief of police in Palestine sought its “liquidation”. Encircled by Vichy forces in Lebanon and Syria, a Nazi-backed takeover in Iraq and Rommel’s forces advancing into Egypt, the British were loth to leave Axis sympathisers on the loose in Palestine. In February 1942 they began shooting Stern’s men on sight.

Netting them proved fairly simple. Within 17 days of the police chief’s order, Britain’s Criminal Investigation Department announced that 85 of an estimated 100 militants were in prison. Three had been killed, including the 34-year-old Stern. For all his paeans to violence, Stern cut a rather pathetic figure. Policemen found him in his underwear and slippers cowering unarmed in a wardrobe in a Tel Aviv garret. The local assistant superintendent, Geoffrey Morton, shot him dead.

As so often with counterinsurgencies, Britain won the battle but lost the war. Stern, writes Mr Bishop, proved far more formidable dead than alive. His flirtations with fascism as a student in interwar Florence were theatrical. He never fired a gun or set off a bomb. By the time of his death, most of his disciples had abandoned him. But his killing made him into a martyr. Other hardline Zionist currents which had sided with Britain went back to fighting it, confident that the allies could win the second world war without them. Armed with intimate knowledge of British bases, they blew up the waning empire’s warplanes, trains and headquarters in Palestine and the British embassy in Rome. Within five years, Britain had abandoned its mandate.

Mr Bishop’s depiction of Stern’s downfall is masterful. No less intriguing is Stern’s legacy. Mr Bishop notes that his Lehi successor, Yitzhak Yezernitzky, a Warsaw University law student, became one of Israel’s longest serving prime ministers, as Yitzhak Shamir. He records the tribute Israel’s officials paid to Stern and the terrorists who blew up Jerusalem and Jaffa’s Arab-owned cinemas by naming city streets after them. Stern still commands a striking hold over many of Israel’s ruling right-wingers, including the successors of the mandate-era Jewish underground who continue to perpetrate attacks on Palestinian civilians. Many still choose his nom de guerre, Yair, for their sons, including Israel’s current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. One of the most fanatical settlements is named after him. And the garret where he was shot is a museum and place of pilgrimage for a growing number of hard-right youths.

Perhaps Stern’s most potent legacy is to have been among the first Zionists to mix that dangerously romantic cocktail of religion and nationalism. Whereas most Zionist leaders were staunch secularists, Stern took only a Bible and his leather phylacteries as he fled from one hideout to the next. Biblical imagery peppers his love and war poems. He called for holy war and the building of a third temple, and espoused a Davidic kingdom rather than a democratic state. And he championed rejection of the prevailing superpower, even when it was a patron. A fringe discourse in the 1940s, Stern’s language is increasingly echoed by the activists on the religious right, Israel’s most potent grassroots force.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article we mistakenly identified Kochav Yair as a fanatical settlement named after Stern. This was incorrect. Kochav Yair is neither a settlement nor fanatical; it is on the Israeli side of the "green line". This was changed on May 8th 2014.