The Stern Gang

Ideology, Politics and Terror, 1940-1949

Joseph Heller

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136298943
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Weltgeschichte

This study of "The Stern Gang" attempts to demythologize the image of this extremist, Zionist underground group. The book analyzes the party's split from the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and its attempts to synthesize the politics and ideals of the right and left.

Part One
Revisionism in the 1930s

1
The Revisionist Movement: A Revolutionary Liberation Movement?

The Jabotinsky-Achimeir Debate on Ends and Means, 1928-33

Despite the hopes which he placed in the British, Jabotinsky had suffered disappointments from the beginning of their rule. These intensifed with the 'Wailing Wall' incident on the Day of Atonement (24 September) 1928, when the governor of Jerusalem, Keith-Roach, ordered the removal of the barrier separating men and women worshippers. Together with the subsequent riots of 1929, that event generated a traumatic change, not for Jabotinsky himself, but for the newly affiliated members of his Revisionist movement.

Both ideology and tactics began to change with the appearance on the scene of Abba Achimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yehoshua Heshel Yeivin. In 1927, before he joined the Revisionist movement, Achimeir had already claimed that England could have been relied on had its imperialism been a hundred years younger, but not now. Italian fascism had now to be the political model.¹ Both publicly and privately, Achimeir called upon Jabotinsky to adopt Mussolini's theory of power and his elitist doctrine ('Sir, why do you consult with us so excessively? Command us more.. We are obliged to obey you. Perhaps privately you desire to be a friend amongst friends . . . but fate has chosen you to lead, and you must not sidestep this role').² Unlike Jabotinsky, who was inclined to deflect his anger from England to the official Zionist leadership, Achimeir also regarded the British as the real culprits, accusing them of fomenting dissent between Arabs and Jews.³ The leaders of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) themselves displayed a cringing deference to the British authorities in Palestine. The Yishuv lacked the 'desire to rule' and would not be able to attain its goals unless cured of its three illnesses —the haluka (distribution of charity funds), socialist 'vegetarianism' and 'nativisation' by a handful of Englishmen. Instead it must follow the example of small peoples who had fought for their freedom and honour: the Boers in South Africa, those of the Tyrol who fought Napoleon, and above all the heroes of Yodepheth, the Temple Mount, Massada, Betar and Tel Hai.⁴

At this stage Jabotinsky avoided a confrontation with Achimeir, who was not challenging his leadership, merely his doctrine.⁵ But the uprecedented bloodshed of the summer of 1929 (when 133 Jews were killed and 339 wounded) aggravated the tension within the Revisionist movement between Jabotinsky and his disciples. Jabotinsky regarded the events as 'a terrible insult for us and a disgrace for the British nation, but they are not a holocaust'.⁶ Others, however, argued that England had now to decide whether she was for or against Zionism; otherwise Zionists might turn elsewhere.⁷ Moreover, while Jabotinsky still emphasised the 'common [that is, the anti-Arab] interests' linking Britain and the Jews and continued to stress Britain's energetic and honourable role, Achimeir and Yeivin portrayed the British Prime Minister as a latter-day Tsar. Ramsay MacDonald covered up the massacre of Hebron just as Nicholas II had covered up the pogrom at Kishinev.⁸ Lingering assumptions of 'common interests' received another blow with the publication of the report of the Shaw Commission of Inquiry. Could it be, Yeivin asked, that a vast empire, ruling 500 million human beings without asking for their agreement, could speak of annoying 'a handful of mutinous [Arabs] as a reason for violating international guarantees'?⁹

The sense of shock generated among Revisionist maximalists by the events of 1929, together with their disappointment towards England, is well expressed in Greenberg's poetry.

You have deceived me, O King; we, the wounded people, called you:
Cyrus the King, world champion of kings! . . .
We loved no other flag in the world like yours!
. . . We must have greatly erred in trusting the Gentile!¹⁰

Greenberg's solution was a secular messianism: . . . nation of Jews awaiting the Messiah . . .

. . . a beleaguered nation of Jews.

Surrounded by armies of hate, both Christian and Moslem and from each drop of Jewish blood will a bloodstone be formed and out of one such stone and another an eternal wall for that nation until the advent of Messiah and the thunder of the wheel in time.¹¹

The twofold confrontation with the Arabs and the British was a historical necessity; the British 'stand in our way like a barrier before the Messiah. They have consigned us to plunder and death at the hands of the filthiest people in the East'.¹²

Unlike Greenberg, Revisionist theoreticians did not ascribe a mystical-apocalyptic dimension to the situation of Jewry in general, or to that of Zionism in particular. But his fellow maximalists did believe that Jewry could only be saved by a meta-historical process of messianic salvation. Achimeir provides an example. Ordinarily, his Spenglerian outlook would have presupposed the decline of Judaism, but he was able to produce a gloss on the events of 1929 which saw them as a link in the chain of Jewish wars since Pharaoh, Rome, the Inquisition and the Tsar. They had all defeated the Jewish people, but where were they today? 'Can we not overcome a few dishonourable muftis, effendis and sheikhs . . .?' In his eyes the twentieth-century Arabs were no better than the Arameans, the Philistines, the descendants of Lot, the Canaanites, Prizzites and Girgashites, who had all disappeared from the stage of history. In contrast, the Jewish nation was a people distinguished by immortality. Theirs had not been a real defeat, but a transient one, which contained the seeds of future victory, like that of France in 1870.¹³ The romance between 'perfidious Albion' and 'innocent Jewry' had now come to a very disappointing end. Promises stemming from political intrigue were not to be believed: 'Study the entirety of world history and find where the messiah of any nation whatsoever crossed over a bridge of paper [Jabotinsky's term]!'.¹⁴ There was an ideal behind the suffering of the victims in their desire to overcome the trauma of persisting exile. Thus, they said 'It is good that this happened to us'. Here, then, was a decisive historical moment.¹⁵

Jabotinsky himself still refused to believe that all chances of a partnership with England were gone, though his faith had been weakened, and he too talked of seeking an alternative power.¹⁶ None the less, in the summer of 1930, dismissing the 'hysterical' pessimism of his disciples, he called for England to be given 'a last chance', since the real blame lay with the errors of the official 'Zionist leadership.¹⁷

Achimeir, however, had been certain as early as 1928. The publication of the Shaw Commission Report and the 1930 Passfield White Paper had provided the impetus for his nationalistic theories. For the Jewish people, he reasoned, 'to whatever extent the goal is supreme, all kinds of suffering are indeed feasible'. The goal could be Mount Moriah, where the temple of the movement would be built, or it could be Golgotha, where its bearers would be crucified. He proposed transferring the centre of Zionist leadership to Paris and Warsaw. France had interests in the Middle East and was independent of England, whereas Warsaw housed the Jewish masses. Zionism was in a position comparable to that of France after 1871 and Russia after the 1905 revolution, whereas England was in the position of Rome in its decline in the fourth century. The Jewish people was not made up of ghetto dwellers, but of heroic millions.¹⁸ Here was the source of those myths characteristic of maximalist thought in Revisionism — later to be inherited by Stern and his followers — for the lack of triumphant heroism was merely incidental, to be blamed on the leadership. Had the Yishuv been trained to take up arms when called upon, Hebron and Safed would still have been safe.¹⁹

The Passheld White Paper, with its harsh rulings on 'questions of life and death' for Zionism (immigration, land and the character of the regime) prompted Jabotinsky's disciples in Palestine to call for a war of liberation, even though he himself continued to adhere to the political option. Achimeir, however, rejected Jabotinsky's idea of a mass movement: 'In a liberation movement large numbers are valueless, human cannon fodder is valueless, herds are valueless; small numbers are valuable, as is activism, as are the youth.' A minority of heroes would establish the 'Kingdom of Israel', not within the borders prescribed by Herbert Samuel, but rather within those maintained by King David and Joab, his general.²⁰ These notions were inherited with only minor changes by the IZL and the Stern group. The new activism led, on 9 October 1930, to a demonstration against Dr Drummond Shiels, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, then on a visit to Palestine, during which Achimeir was beaten and arrested.²¹ Now, for the first time, Jabotinsky explicitly rejected fascism.²²

MacDonald's letter of 13 February 1931, a reversal of Passfield's White Paper on immigration and settlement, became a positive turning-point in the history of Zionism, since it facilitated the transformation of the Jewish Yishuv from a small settlement of about 170,000 in 1931 to one of 370,000 by the time of the Arab uprising of 1936. This could have become a turning-point in the development of Revisionism as well, had Jabotinsky considered it a positive document. He was, however, constrained by an ideology which expected the British to achieve greater Zionist ends by means of a classic colonial formula. Such a dogmatic ideology led eventually to extremist politics among his followers in Palestine, because of their high expectations. This explains the negative reception Jabotinsky awarded the letter: not only did it not abrogate the White Paper, but it actually made the achievement of Zionism conditional upon Arab acquiescence.²³

Towards the end of 1931 Jabotinsky began secretly to look for an alternative country to put pressure on England. Achimeir had already openly talked to Italy the previous May. One did not have to be a fascist to admit that fascism had succeeded in removing distasteful social theories such as communism in the West. The Italian and the Jewish peoples had much in common — they each had high hopes of immigration, they were each proletarian and each possessed a superfluous population.²⁴

The seventeenth Zionist congress, convened in July 1931 in Basel, would, for Jabotinsky, determine who would hold sway in the Zionist organisation, he or those he termed 'the band of spiritual bastards', a group 'I despise coldly and greatly'.²⁵ The refusal of the majority at the congress to accept the resolution proposed by the Revisionists concerning the declaration of a Jewish state as Zionism's final goal was to cause Jabotinsky and his organisation to secede from the Zionist organisation within less than five years. Meanwhile the gap between Jabotinsky and his maximalist disciples in Palestine widened. He still relied upon the 'innocent' (his term) belief in 'the integrity of the world, in the power of justice'.²⁶ They, however, were becoming more radical. At Basel, Greenberg delivered a speech in full symbolic messianic strain in which he accused the congress itself of making a mockery of the Jewish people and of placing them at the mercy of their English and Arab enemies.²⁷ In October 1931 Achimeir's circle of Betar youth established the 'League of Sicarii' as an expression of direct action.²⁸

The radical trio — Achimeir, Greenberg and Yeivin — had indeed now reached a crisis in their relations with Jabotinsky. According to Achimeir, the difference between Jabotinsky and Weizmann was nothing more than an 'atmosphere of pressure'. Nevertheless Jabotinsky might yet be freed from the political functionaries of the Revisionist movement. According to one of the participants (Yaakov Orenstein, later a close aide of Avraham Stern) the first meeting of the League of Sicarii discussed whether to take up arms. Those who felt that the hour had not yet come, left. Decisions were then taken to recruit members, hoard arms and plan operations. Practically speaking, the League was a failure, though it played an important role in the formulation of Revisionist maximalist ideology, which was later to be expressed in practice by the IZL and the Stern group. The inner circle of the League adopted the view of Yosef Katznelson, a close associate of Achimeir (and later of Stern) who argued that the British constituted the greatest stumbling-block to the Jewish state and that the Arabs were merely an instrument in their hands. The other members were, like Jabotinsky, still of the opinion that Great Britain supported the Arabs because of their fighting spirit and that if the Jews attacked the Arabs, the British would change their minds.²⁹

But despite the loud proclamations, no further anti-British activities were launched. The glorification of the League stems from the later nostalgia of its veterans and their jealousy of the propaganda...