How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land

by Guest Sat Jul 12, 2014 1:26 am

The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land
Patrick Bishop
William Collins 299pp £20
The Stern Gang is perhaps best known to modern audiences for its brutal murder of UN special envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem in 1948. However the wider story of the group’s transition from fanatical splinter group to the status of primary martyrs in the cause of Israeli independence is a fascinating one and well told in this book.
Avraham Stern himself is the centrepiece of Patrick Bishop’s study. A charismatic character, even a dandy, he was a natural leader who inspired his followers to adopt his radical, violent prescription for Israel’s birth. Where most Jewish paramilitary organisations in Palestine agreed to scale back hostilities against the British, upon the outbreak of war in 1939 Stern spotted an opportunity. Sensing British weakness, he stepped up operations, deliberately targeting the Palestine police.
For all his later status as a martyr, Stern emerges from this account with little credit. Very much in tune with the fascistic zeitgeist of blood, soil, dubious poetry and direct action, he was someone whose violent methods – in his own lifetime – found little purchase with the majority of Jews in Palestine. He even approached the Nazis and Mussolini’s Italy with a view to cooperation against Britain in return for the transfer of imperilled Axis Jews to the Middle East. He seems to have sought the unlikely role of a Jewish Quisling.
Yet it was Stern’s death in 1942 that earned him immortality. Caught by police at a Tel Aviv safe house, he was shot in disputed circumstances: the authorities claiming that he was fleeing or attempting to detonate an explosive device, his supporters suggesting that he was unarmed and was simply executed. So, while the Palestinian police congratulated themselves on the removal of a wanted terrorist, Jews across the British Mandate were horrified at what they saw as a heavy-handed, extra-judicial killing.

http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/07/how-killing-one-man-changed-fate-promised-land