The Stern Gang’s “Let’s Make a Deal (with Hitler & Mussolini)”

On June 26, 1940, when Avraham Stern and his loyalists officially split from the Irgun Zvai Leumi (IZL, pron. “Etzel”)—an organization Stern helped found in 1929, when he and Avraham Tehomi, Abraham Krichevsky, Rabbi Hillel Kook (a future member of the IZL mission to the U.S.), and David Raziel split from the Haganah because it wasn’t militant enough—he and his new command issued a document called ‘High Command Communiqué No. 112’ in which was stated their central goal – the establishment, by force of arms, of the ‘Kingdom of Israel’ within its historic boundaries. To this end, it rejected the idea that a Jew in Palestine should serve in the British military, i.e. a “foreign army,” during the war against the Axis Powers (WWII), and that to achieve their central goal of re-establishing the ‘Kingdom of Israel’, military alliances would be made with anyone, or any power, willing to help them drive the British out of Palestine.(1)

The decision of Avraham Stern, Hanoch Kalay, Benyamin Zeroni, and others to separate from the IZL of the time (David Raziel, Haichman, and Lubinsky, et al.) was more of a split with the leadership’s particular direction than one with the fundamental ideological vision. They all still sought “the annihilation of the Diaspora” through a “full aliya” to Palestine.(2)

During 1940-41, the name that Stern and his followers used to identify their new Zionist paramilitary organization was Irgun Zvai Leumi-be-Israel (‘IZL in Israel’). Their opponents and enemies called them the Stern Gang, after the name of their leader and founder. Their supporters called them the F.F.I. (‘The Fighters for the Freedom of Israel’, which is the English translation of Lohamei Herut Israel, or LeHI, a name the group adopted in 1942).(3)

THE FIRST OPERATION
The first ‘IZL in Israel’ operation since their official split from the main IZL organization on June 26, 1940 was the robbery of £4,500 from the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Tel Aviv on September 16. Despite this initial success, the group’s later robbery of an Arab bank in Jerusalem was a failure (presently, of course, Zionists such as Ben Shalom Bernanke rob banks on a far larger scale). Their idea was to “liberate” bank funds to pay for their Zionist “war of liberation”(4)

This ideology of using armed robbery to “liberate” money from banks and businesses for “revolutionary” causes saw a rebirth in 1970s west coast America with a kidnapped, Stockholm-syndromed Patty Hearst (heiress to the Hearst media empire) holding up banks in San Francisco with the SLA (Simbionese Liberation Army).

Haganah Blows Up the S.S. Patria
Just over two months later, on November 25, 1940, the immigration ship S.S. Patria was blown up as it moored in Haifa harbour. It sank within fifteen minutes. Two hundred and fifty-two Jewish immigrants, who had just arrived from eastern Europe, lost their lives. After the British Mandatory government was initially blamed, a Commission of Inquiry discovered that the ship had been blown up by Jews, at least one of whom was on board the ship.

Eighteen years after the event, one of the operation’s participants, Dr. Herzl Rosenblum, editor of the Tel Aviv daily Yedios Achronos, revealed that the blowing up of the S.S. Patria was a false flag operation run by the Haganah, then headed by Eliyahu Golomb. The operation was designed to garner world sympathy for the cause of Jewish immigration to Palestine and to demonize the British, as well as protest the immigration limits set by the 1939 MacDonald White Paper.(5)

THE SECOND OPERATION
As a protest against illegal Jewish immigrants being deported by the Mandate government to the island of Mauritius, just east of Madagascar, the newly formed Irgun Zvai Leumi-be-Israel (‘IZL in Israel’) planted bombs at the government immigration office in Haifa and blew the place up on December 19, 1940.(6)

1940-1941: THE AXIS WAS WINNING THE WAR
The fall of France to Hitler’s forces in May-June 1940 signaled to Avraham Stern and his organization that the Germans would most probably emerge from WWII as the victors, and he decided at that time to try and position the Zionist struggle on the ‘winning side’.(7)

In 1941 it seemed even more apparent to Stern and his men that the Germans would emerge victorious. In February and March of 1941 Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece fell to Hitler’s forces, and General Erwin Rommel arrived in Libyan Tripolitania. Between March 31 and April 4, Rommel and the combined German-Italian forces began driving the British out of Libya and back into Egypt where King Farouk and a group of pro-fascist Egyptian politicians plotted to rid Egypt of British control. On April 14, Rommel was on the outskirts of the strategic Libyan port of Tobruk. On April 21, the British suffered a major defeat in Greece against the Germans, but on April 29, British troops from India—on direct orders from Prime Minister Churchill—invaded Iraq and landed at Basra in order to remove from power one Rashid ‘Ali, head of the pro-Nazi military group the ‘Golden Square’ which had come to power in Iraq in March 1940. By May 30, 1941 the British had captured both Baghdad and Rashid ‘Ali. Despite this success, and several others, in 1941 the British were in such dire military straits in the Middle East that they were willing to remove from prison, for commando duties, convicted felons and terrorists like Moshe Dayan and the IZL’s David Raziel, who was killed during the Iraq invasion against Rashid ‘Ali.(8)

At the end of May 1941, the Germans had driven the British off of Crete, and by the time of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) in June, Rommel’s panzers were already progressing into Egypt on their way to taking Cairo.

ALLIANCE CONSIDERATIONS, MOTIVES, AND THE REAL ENEMY OF ZION
In one of Stern’s editorial comments made in the LeHI underground newspaper Ba-Mahteret he provided the ideological basis for his decision to make an alliance with Hitler:

“The desire to weaken the status of diaspora Jews, thus compelling them to migrate to another land does not harm the Hebrew freedom movement, and may even – in certain cases – assist it. A Jew-hater can in fact be pro-Zionist. A Judeophile may be anti-Zionist.”(9)

On the subject of who is the real enemy of Zionism, LeHI ideologue Israel Scheib (‘Eldad’) wrote, “From a purely Zionist point of view, pure and consistent, Hitler is not the enemy of the Kingdom of Israel and the return to Zion . . . but rather Britain alone . . .”(10)

Consciously and constantly misinterpreting the Balfour phrase “a Jewish homeland in Palestine” as “Palestine as a Jewish State,” the Zionist leaders (of all factions) felt that the May 17, 1939 MacDonald White Paper was a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration’s “intentions.” Because of this document, the militants of Revisionist Zionism felt that Britain had betrayed Zionism and was therefore disqualified as an ally. Rather than joining the British Army in WWII, it was felt amongst the Zionist underground that Jews should fight a “war of liberation” against the British, who were seen as ‘foreign conquerors’ of the ‘Hebrew homeland’. Avraham Stern, in his writings, constantly made the distinction between England as the “real enemy” and Germany as only a mere “persecutor.”

Stern’s line of thinking concerning a Zionist-Nazi alliance was that the anti-Judaic attitudes of Catholic Poland did not prevent its past military cooperation and support of the Irgun, so an alliance with the anti-Jewish Nazis against the British should, likewise, not pose a problem. In fact, as Stern was to point out in his communiqué to the Germans, both the Jew-haters and the Zionists held common goals and mutual interests. The Nazis wanted the Jews to leave Europe and emmigrate to Palestine (or Madagascar), and the Zionists sought the dissolution of the ‘Diaspora’ through mass emigration of European Jewry to Palestine as well.(11)

Contrary to the received mythology of Hitler wanting to ‘exterminate’ European Jewry, the German Chancellor in 1938 actually came up with a plan called the ‘Madagascar Option’ in which the Jews of Europe would be transferred (‘resettled’) to Madagascar, the large island off the southeast coast of Africa. In this way, the Arabs could remain on their lands in Palestine, and the Jews could have their own country in Madagascar. Hitler discussed this plan with Mussolini in their meetings of June 1940, and in July they formalized the plan. It remained as a viable Nazi strategy until it was officially abandoned in 1942.(12)

Because Avraham Stern and the ‘IZL in Israel’ were aware of Hitler’s ‘Madagascar Option’ by the autumn of 1940, their proposal of a Zionist-Nazi military alliance against Britain began with the understanding that Hitler had no intention of exterminating the Jews, but simply wanted them all to leave Europe and emigrate to either Palestine or Madagascar. It should also be remembered that in Der Judenstaat, Theodor Herzl’s originally proposed plan in 1896 was that of a mass exodus of world Jewry to Argentina. Stern’s secret proposal in late 1940 was meant to encourage Hitler to abandon his Madagascar plan and accept the Zionist plan of transferring the Jewish masses to Eretz Israel to live within their ‘historic borders’.

As far as motive for a Zionist-Nazi Alliance and the strategy behind it, Stern wrote:

“All we want of the Germans is to enable us to transfer this army [the 40,000 European Jews Stern hoped to recruit] to the coasts of Eretz Israel, and the war against the British to liberate the homeland will begin here. The Jews will attain a state, and the Germans will, incidentally, be rid of an important British base in the Middle East, and also solve the Jewish question in Europe . . .”(13)

Israel Scheib, known by his underground pseudonym of ‘Eldad’, a senior Betar officer who, aside from Stern, became one of LeHI’s main ideological formulators, agreed with Stern that Britain’s weakness against the Germans and Italians in 1940-41 should be exploited by making an alliance with anyone who wished to help the Zionist underground drive the British out of Palestine. This was in accordance with Stern’s concept of “establishing the Kingdom of Israel by force,” a notion also glorified in the messianic Zionist poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg, one of the three founders of Palestine’s original Zionist terror group, the League of Sicarii.(14) (see: FN 1 below)

“We shall not recognize any old or new order. We shall not permit a world order to be reached as long as our own question is not put in order by setting up our Kingdom in its promised land . . .” — Avraham “Yair” Stern (15)

STERN’S FIRST MISSION TO THE GERMANS
The IZL of Israel’s attempted military alliance with Adolf Hitler’s Germany against the British Mandate government of Palestine was Avraham Stern’s idea from the start and was fully supported by the two other leading members of the Stern Group’s high command – Hanoch Kalay and Benyamin Zeroni. Whether this was a complete abandonment of their original plan to militarily ally themselves with Benito Mussolini’s Fascista Italia against the British is still an issue being debated among historians of Zionist sedition and international treason.

Towards the end of 1940, Stern sent Naftali Lubenchik on a highly secret mission to Beirut for a meeting with Otto Werner von Hentig, the German Foreign Office emissary to the Italian armistice committee in Vichy Syria.

Naftali Lubenchik ran for the leadership post of the NZO (Vladimir Jabotinsky’s New Zionist Organisation) as the candidate of the ‘Faction of Allegation and Faith’ party (see: FN 2 below), so Avraham Stern and the ‘IZL in Israel’ command were not sending someone to the Germans inexperienced in the politics of negotiation.(16)

Lubenchik was aided in his trip to Beirut by a Maronite Christian and a Shi’ite Muslim from Ba’albek named Suleiman Kheidar, who later converted to Judaism. Kheidar was a friend of Avraham Stern’s ‘Arab expert’, David Siton.(17)

Lubenchik’s German contact, Otto Werner von Hentig, who died in 1984, was interviewed in the summer of 1983 by S. Shamgar for Yediot Aharonet, and in the interview he mentioned that LeHI’s Naftali Lubenchik proposed “to collaborate [with Germany] against his own people.”(18)

It should be mentioned that in the 1930s, Otto Werner von Hentig was a supporter of the idea of a “Jewish State,” but despite his being in charge of the Department of the Levant in the German Foreign Office, he had little influence over German policy concerning the issues of British or Euro-Zionist control over Palestine.(19)

THE ITALIAN CONNECTION
Like Vladimir Jabotinsky—who spent his university days in Rome—and like most Zionists of the Revisionist party, Avraham Stern was also a long-time admirer of Benito Mussolini and his Italian fascism. The Revisionist right wing of Zionism ideologically admired the cult of totalitarian power and jingoistic nationalism that had been developing and growing in Europe since the 1920s (Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919). From the time Hitler came to power in 1933 there was most definitely an undercurrent of members throughout the Revisionist party and its militant offshoots in the Zionist underground who admired both Hitler and Mussolini for their power and strong sense of nationalism. It is therefore no surprise that Naftali Lubenchik’s mission to Beirut seems to have also involved a meeting with the Italians, as well as with Von Hentig.(20)

In 1944, the British provided information to American intelligence on a representative from Avraham Stern’s ‘IZL in Israel’ who had met in 1940 with representatives from Italian intelligence in Beirut. In a document concerning the ‘IZL in Israel’ (the Stern Group/Gang, or LeHI) found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. there is a most interesting piece of information. It seems that the Italians had agreed to finance anti-British terror operations conducted by the Zionist underground by providing funding of $2,000 per month for such operations.(21)

‘THE BASIC OUTLINE OF THE PROPOSAL OF THE IZL IN ISRAEL CONCERNING THE SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE AND THE ACTIVE PARTICIPATION OF THE IZL IN THE WAR ON THE SIDE OF GERMANY’(22)
While German U-boats attacked the supply lines of British shipping during Hitler’s sustained series of bombing raids over England in September and October 1940—at the height of the Battle of Britain—Avraham Stern was planning to offer IZL of Israel’s “active participation in the war on the German side. On the condition that the aforementioned aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised.” Stern also tried to play the public relations benefits angle with Hitler, stressing that, “the moral effect of the participation of the Jewish liberation movement in the New Order . . . would strengthen its moral foundations in the eyes of all humanity.”(23)

THE THREE MAJOR POINTS OF THE ‘IZL IN ISRAEL’S’ PROPOSAL TO THE GERMANS:
1) There may possibly be a collusion of interests between the aims of the ‘New Order’ in Europe as interpreted by the Germans and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people represented by the IZL.

2) Co-operation between the new Germany and the reborn volkisch-nationalen Hebraertum may be possible.

3) The re-establishment of the Jewish state in its historic borders, on a national and totalitarian basis, allied with the German Reich, does not contradict the need for the protection and strengthening of the future German positions of strength in the Near East.”(24)

In January 1941 the ‘IZL in Israel’-German alliance proposal, presented by Naftali Lubenchik to Herr Roser of German intelligence and Otto Werner von Hentig of the German Foreign Office, was turned over to the German consulate in Beirut. Later in the year, British intelligence was tipped off to Lubenchik’s little treacherous mission to Vichy Lebanon, and he consequently ended up in the British prison at Acre. LeHI members have always suspected that the tip came from Israel Pritzker, who was suspected of being a British mole working for the CID (Criminal Investigations Division) inside the Irgun.(25)

STERN GANG RADIO
In 1941 the ‘IZL in Israel’ were convinced that the German conquering of Palestine was imminent, and on May 10, 1941 the organisation issued a provocative and highly controversial, underground radio broadcast which was monitored by British intelligence. Claiming to speak on behalf of IZL and the ‘Hebrew Freedom Movement’, Avraham Stern called the Jewish Agency in Palestine a “clique of ageing lobbyists” whose “authority is less than that of a Jewish community in territories conquered by Germany.” He criticized the Agency, saying that they had become “a government recruiting office,” sending 8,000 soldiers off to British war fronts as cannon fodder, while receiving nothing in return.

On this subject of fighting in the British Army during WWII, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s NZO (New Zionist Organisation) ordered, in a resolution made on September 25, 1940, that all their members, aged 20-30, should volunteer for duty with the British Army. This order of the NZO was then re-issued on May 2, 1941. The high command of the IZL and the LeHI completely rejected this directive, as was evident from their radio message of May 10.(26)

Stern, in this provocative underground radio broadcast, called on the Yishuv to prepare itself for Arab riots and a German invasion, saying, “We must not ignore the possibilities latent in the political and military events which have taken place and which will take place in the East in the near future.”

Stern called on the Jews of Palestine to give up their passivity and show the Arabs “the superiority of Hebrew force.” With all the romanticist bravado this terrorist group was famous for, Stern exhorted the Yishuv to prepare for “sacrifice and suffering as all the nations of Europe . . . have faced and are facing all these tribulations caused by the War. We may hunger, but we will not die! We may suffer, but we will not perish! Our numbers may decline, but we will not be destroyed! The Eternal One of Israel does not lie!”

Speaking also on one of Zionism’s favourite themes—national redemption—Stern called upon the Yishuv to “fight under all conditions for this redemption . . . a Hebrew in Zion is no bound slave, nor human dust . . . It is our Massada.”(27)

To add still more provocation to their underground radio broadcast, the ‘IZL in Israel’ proclaimed that they would continue to raise money through “revolutionary expropriations” for an armed revolution of national liberation against the British occupier of the Jewish Homeland. They were not pulling bank jobs, store robberies, and engaging in extortion. They were “liberating” money for their war of terror against the British, and later, the Arabs, in order to liberate the Jewish Homeland from all “foreign occupiers” of “their land.”

Avraham “Yair” Stern and his group of Zio-terrorists, whether the German Nazis or Italian Fascists would come to their military aid against the British or not, were certainly announcing in this May 10, 1941 broadcast their preparations for a Last Stand against the Empire and the Arabs of Palestine.

Within 24 hours of Stern’s provocative broadcast, British police began rounding up and arresting members of the ‘IZL in Israel’. Owen Tweedy, the director of the British Mandate press office in Jerusalem spoke of the need for seriously dealing with a dangerous, operational underground of ‘Fifth Column’ Jewish terrorists.(28) Future LeHI High Commander Yehoshua Zetler was arrested at this time, along with Y. Polani and M. (‘Tova’) Svorai (29), in whose Tel Aviv flat Avraham Stern would later be fatally shot in the back of the head by British CID Inspector Geoffrey J. Morton on February 12, 1942.

At this time, even members of the Irgun, who were all avowed terrorist enemies of the British, were shocked by the Stern Gang’s pronouncements and actions. Driving the British out of Palestine through guerilla warfare and terrorism was one thing, but making an alliance with Hitler in 1940-41 to accomplish such a goal was seen as extreme even to the extremists of the pre-Menachem Begin era Irgun. As Betar, and later, Irgun high commander Menachem Begin wrote to S. Yunitchman on January 8, 1940, “You are well aware that the hater of those who hate me is not always automatically my friend . . . There is a large gap between a common denial and a positive approach.”(30)

On the subject of British military recruitment, Begin was firmly against Jews volunteering for ‘mixed units’ (battalions of Jews and Arabs training and fighting together). Begin also felt that any Jew fighting for the British was akin to their giving assent to the 1939 MacDonald White Paper in which immigration of Jews into Palestine would be allowed to continue for another five years (1939-1944) up to a total of 75,000 Jewish immigrants, or 1/3 of the population of Palestine. After this five year period (ending in April 1944), no more Jewish immigration would be allowed unless the majority Arab population assented to it.(31)

On the military recruitment issue, there was also certainly no love lost between the right-wing, Zionist, anti-Arab ‘IZL in Israel’ and the Marxist, anti-Zionist, pro-Arab PKP (Jewish ‘Palestine Communist Party’). When they began calling the British military ‘armed brother of the Red Army’, Stern attacked the PKP for their sudden, hypocritical about-face on ‘British imperialism’ as they exhorted the Jewish youth of Palestine to join the British army after Hitler invaded their beloved Soviet Union.(32)

Two days after the Stern Gang’s controversial May 10 radio broadcast, Irgun commander Yaakov Meridor wrote to his friend Shu’ali that Stern and his group were:

“ravenous for power, only for power, and hope to achieve it by all means and in all ways. Yair [Avraham Stern’s underground pseudonym honoring his hero Elazar Ben Yair] clearly hopes that when the Germans get here he will be deputy governor of the Jews by virtue of his conspiracy, but he forgets only one thing: just how little the promises of the Germans can be relied on at all. Meanwhile, Radio Berlin has already announced that the Jews in this country have already surrendered to the Germans, and that the Jews are praying for the Germans to get here. I am only looking for the logic in all this, but I cannot find it . . . [Arab] Riots are only started under the influence of German money and arms. If the IZL in Israel is also linked to the Axis, then they must be natural allies of the Mufti and his gang; logic can find no other solution. We always condemned the defeatists and the supporters of the idea of an Arab federation with the Jewish state in the middle. And here a new axis is developing in the Near East: the Mufti, Yair and Rashid Ali in Iraq. I am still walking about in a dream and I cannot believe my eyes.”(33)

ANOTHER ‘IZL IN ISRAEL’ PROPAGANDA EXERCISE
On June 14, 1941, just eight days before the Germans invaded the USSR under Operation Barbarossa, the ‘IZL in Israel’ launched yet another propaganda exercise in which a communiqué was sent to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposing a political and military alliance with Britain under the following conditions:

1) Cancellation of the 1939 MacDonald White Paper.
2) Hebrew self-government.
3) The establishment of a Hebrew army in Eretz Israel.
4) A guarantee of full independence following the war.(34)

ABBA ACHIMEIR BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON STERN
In mid-July 1941 the ‘IZL in Israel’s’ robbery (“expropriation”) of the Arab Bank in Jerusalem failed, and the arrest of Naftali Lubenchik and his failed mission to the Nazis became known. With the pride of a devout disciple who had done well by his master, Avraham Stern revealed the ‘IZL in Israel’ contact with the Germans to his ‘spiritual/revolutionary’ mentor Abba Achimeir (founder of the League of Sicarii). Achimeir, however, no longer saw Britain as the number one enemy of the Jews, and at the end of the summer of 1941, aghast at Stern’s choice of an ally, Achimeir alerted the Yishuv to what Stern and the ‘IZL in Israel’ were up to.(35)

THE ‘IZL IN ISRAEL’ GETS A NEW COMMAND STRUCTURE
In the autumn of 1941, Yaakov Lavstein (‘Eliav’) and Benyamin Zeroni were pressuring Stern to drop the bank robbery tactic and commence direct operations against the British. The idea of possibly rejoining the Irgun was also being seriously considered by Stern’s commanders, such as his second-in-command Hanoch Kalay. Zeroni even met with the Irgun’s Yaakov Meridor to discuss this. Stern rejected the idea and then put together a new high command comprised of Yaakov Lavstein, Yitzhak Zelnick, and new chief-of-staff Yehoshuah Zetler, the master planner of LeHI’s bank robbery operations.(36)

THE STERN GANG’S SECOND MISSION TO THE GERMANS
At this time, Stern envisioned the strong possibility that Germany would certainly win the war, and he proposed yet another secret mission to the Germans. In December 1941, Stern confidant Nathan Friedman-Yellin, also known as Yellin-Mor, was sent as an ‘IZL of Israel’ emissary to German Reich representatives north of Aleppo. Part of the proposed plan this time involved the Germans facilitating a massive emigration of the Jews of the Balkans and central Europe. Friedman-Yellin writes:

“The idea this time was that these Jews would overrun the country [Palestine]; Britain could not expel them because of a lack of shipping, and Germany would profit from this cleansing of Europe of Jews.”(37)

Friedman-Yellin, however, did not make it to his rendezvous with German intelligence, for the British arrested him near Aleppo in northern Syria, just before he was to make the final leg of the journey to the Turkish border for his rendezvous with the Germans. Friedman-Yellin claims his arrest occurred just a few days before Avraham Stern’s fatal meeting with British CID (Criminal Investigations Division) inspector Geoffrey J. Morton on February 12, 1942.(38)

THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AVRAHAM STERN
On December 26, 1941, while Nathan Friedman-Yellin made his way towards Aleppo and Turkey, the Stern Gang successfully held up two stores in Jerusalem in broad daylight, but during their next “revolutionary expropriation” on January 9, 1942, the tellers at the Histadrut bank in Tel Aviv refused to surrender their cash drawers, and this ‘IZL in Israel’ “revolutionary” robbery turned into a gun fight, at the end of which, two Jewish bank employees were carried out on stretchers to a morgue truck. The Yishuv-directed Tel Aviv police, headed by Deputy Superintendent Schiff and his principle deputy, Inspector N. Goldman, after numerous searches and interrogations, finally arrested two ‘IZL in Israel’ members – Yehoshive Becker and Nissim Reuven.(39)

The Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and the British were both outraged and horrified over this latest Stern Gang bank robbery and gun fight. At this point, both the Yishuv and the British looked upon Avraham Stern’s group (‘IZL in Israel’) as a gang of criminals and terrorists, hence their moniker “the Stern Gang.” Alongside the IZL being mentioned as a dangerous and formidable, criminal anti-Arab terrorist organization “which executed vengeance with no pangs of conscience or morality,” it was in an October 1941 report of the High Commissioner to the Colonial Secretary on illegal Jewish organisations that the Stern group was first mentioned:

“With the Stern Group, ideology, responsibility and any pretence of helping to build up the National home are left behind. The moral translation is from a plane on which the utter destruction of the sinners of the Amalekites is a divine command, to the plane on which guys are merely bumped off, rubbed out, or put on the spot.”(40)

The inspector-general of the Palestine Police Force considered Avraham Stern to be a “meglomaniac, fifth column gangster” and the worst of the Zionist leaders among the secret left and right-wing military organizations in Palestine.(41)

Summing up the situation following the Stern Gang’s disastrous January 9, 1942 robbery of the Histadrut bank in Tel Aviv, J Bowyer Bell writes:

“The revolutionary tactics of Stern, now a man on the run with a thousand-pound price on his head, had come down simply to the murder of Jews during commission of a robbery. [Deputy Superintendent] Schiff, a Jew, hoped that the arrest of Becker and Reuven would be the beginning of the end [for the Stern Gang], and in a way it was.”(42)

Just a few days after the second secret mission of the ‘IZL in Israel’ to the Third Reich failed, ending in Friedman-Yellin’s arrest, Avraham “Yair” Stern was shot in the back of the head on the morning of February 12, 1942 by Palestine Criminal Investigations Division (CID) Inspector Geoffrey J. Morton as he pushed Stern toward the balcony of his hideout in Tova Svorai’s attic flat at 8 Mizrachi B Street in the Florentine quarter of south Tel Aviv.

It may have been the physical end of Avraham Stern, but his terrorist organisation would recover and re-ignite itself in late 1942 as Lohamei Herut Israel (LeHI) under the leadership of future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Coming Up: Part II, The Trap-bomb on Yael Street, Killing Jewish Cops, and the Last Days of Avraham Stern

(FN 1) The League of Sicarii
Originally, Sicarii was the name the Romans gave to a group of Jewish nationalists in Judaea who used small knives (sicari) to stab Roman soldiers wading through the large crowds of pilgrims who would come to Jerusalem during the High Holy Days in the 1st century CE. In the 20th century, however, the members of the League of Sicarii were the original formulators of militant, direct action, Zio-Revisionist ‘maximalist’ ideology. They were a splinter group of Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky’s Betar Zion military youth group, and were formed in October 1931 by Abba Achimeir, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Yehoshua Heshel Yeivin. Abba Achimeir’s terrorist ideology was expressed in his infamous document “Scroll of the Sicarii,” written in 1926. The League of Sicarii were the forerunners of IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) and LeHI (Lohamei Herut Israel), who were both considered its ideological and “revolutionary” heirs.

Considering the British to be the greatest obstacle to a Jewish state, at their very first meeting in 1931, the League of Sicarii decided to take up arms against the British in a full-on, IRA-style armed revolution, but they never did much more than talk and have meetings. Nevertheless, inspired by Gandhi, they began the Zionist underground’s ideological ‘cult of imprisonment’, whereby the road to the ‘Kingdom of Israel’ went through the prison dungeons of the British.

Avraham Stern’s ‘spiritual/revolutionary’ mentor, Abba Achimeir, was a proponent of ‘individual terrorism’. In 1924 Achimeir supported the June 30th assassination of Jacob de Haan, leader of Agudat Israel, the political arm of traditional Orthodoxy. In 1932 he praised Pavel Gorgulov’s assassination of French President Paul Doumer, and in 1933, the League of Sicarii (Achimeir, Yeivin, Lichter, Svorai, Dviri, Orenstein, and Yosef Katznelson) went to trial for the June 16, 1933 murder of Hayim Arlosoroff, a member of the Administrative Committee of the Jewish Agency and a leader of Mapai (Labour Party of Eretz Israel [Social Democratic Party]). They were all acquitted of the Arlosoroff murder, still unsolved to this day, but were imprisoned, nonetheless, for being members of a terrorist organization.(43)

(FN 2) The ‘Faction of Allegation and Faith’ (F.A.F.)
Within the militant ‘maximalist’ wing of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist NZO (New Zionist Organisation), the ‘Faction of Allegation and Faith’ was a political adjunct of the Irgun (IZL), over which, Jabotinsky was considered by the membership as their Supreme Commander. The three founders of the League of Sicarii (see: FN 1 above), Abba Achimeir, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and Yehoshua Heshel Yeivin, were also members of the ‘Faction of Allegation and Faith’, in fact, Yeivin was not only a member, but the party’s political leader. In the summer of 1939, following the May 17th issuance of the Zionist-despised MacDonald White Paper, the maximalist ‘Faction of Allegation and Faith’ began to have considerable political influence over the IZL.(44)

(1) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 71.

(2) Ibid., p. 77.

(3) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, FN 1, p. 101.

(4) Ibid., p. 66.

(5) Sami Hadawi, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine, New York: Olive Branch Press, 1991, pp. 54-5.

(6) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 66.

(7) Ibid., p. 64.

(8) Ibid., p. 69.

(9) A. Stern, “Jew-haters and Zion-lovers,” Ba-Mahteret, Issue 4, pp. 48-9. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 84.

(10) I. Scheib, “At a Junction (A Hebrew Battalion at this Hour),” Ha-Medina (Kovna), Nos. 1 and 2, Feb. 17 and 23, 1940. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 92.

(11) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 64.

(12) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, FN 46, p. 317.

(13) Ibid., p. 87.

(14) Ibid., pp. 92-3.

(15) Ibid., p. 84.

(16) Ibid., p. 85.

(17) Y. Eliav (Yaakov Lavstein), Wanted, New York: 1984, pp. 187-8; David Siton, In Light and in Secret (Pages from the Diary of a Detainee), Jerusalem: 1978, pp. 128-31.

(18) “When the Reich Representative in Beirut met with ‘a Jewish Terrorist from Palestine’,” Yediot Aharonet Supplement, ‘7 Days’, 15 July 1983, p. 22.

(19) O.W. Von Hentig, Mein Leben. Eine Dienstreise, Goettingen: 1962, pp. 338-39. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, FN 39, p. 317.

(20) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 65.

(21) Research and Analysis Branch, ‘R&N. No. 2717, Aims and Activities of the Stern Group in Palestine’, 1 Dec. 1944. Secret. (National Archives, Washington). Cited in L. Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab World, Tel Aviv: 1965, pp. 95-103.

(22) Title of Appendix 11 containing the Lubenchik-Von Hentig Memorandum text in D. Yisraeli, The Third Reich and Eretz Israel, Ramat Gan: 1974, pp. 315-17. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, FN 40, p. 317.

(23) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 86.

(24) Ibid., FN 41, p. 317.

(25) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 69.

(26) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, FN 48, p. 318.

(27) Ibid., pp. 87-8.

(28) Ibid., p. 88.

(29) Ibid., FN 49, p. 318.

(30) “Yunitchman Files,” Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, p. 106. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 92.

(31) Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents, 4th Edition, Boston-New York: 2001, p. 166.

(32) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, pp. 89, FN 48, p. 318.

(33) Meridor to Shu’ali, 12 May 1941, ‘The Galili Archives’, Haganah Archives (Tel Aviv). Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 88.

(34) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 89.

(35) Ibid., p. 86.

(36) Ibid., p. 90.

(37) N. Yellin-Mor (Friedman-Yellin), The Fighters for the Freedom of Israel. People, Ideas, Deeds, Ramat Gan: 1974, p.78.

(38) Ibid., pp. 23-33, 78-9.

(39) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 70.

(40) ‘A Note on Jewish Illegal Organisations, their Activities and Finances’; Secret. Enclosure in MacMichael to Moyne, 16 Oct. 1941. FO/371/31378/E2026. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, pp. 99-100.

(41) Monthly Summary, 16 March 1942, 1-31 Jan. 1942. WO/169/4334. Cited in Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, p. 100.

(42) J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out of Zion: Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine Underground, 1929-1949, New York: 1977, p. 70.

(43) Joseph Heller, The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940 – 1949, London: 1995, pp. 15-18.

(44) Ibid., p. 52.