PALESTINE: Stern Gangsters

Palestine’s new High Commissioner, Field Marshal Lord Gort, drove ceremonially through Jerusalem’s tortuous, tipped-up streets. Crowds shouted (in Hebrew) “Shalom”; (in Arabic) “Salaam.” Both words meant peace. But the words were only words: the Holy Land was tense again with trouble. Jews and Arabs had given up open fighting for the duration. But through the Palestine censorship, tightest in the Middle East, trickled tales of Jewish terrorism against the British.

Gangs of Jewish gunmen, often disguised in British battle dress, blew up police stations, shot at policemen, had even tried (unsuccessfully) to assassinate Lord Gort’s predecessor, High Commissioner Sir Harold MacMichael. The Arabs looked on with the aloofness of camels.

Israel’s Freedom Fighters. The troublemakers were not the majority of Jews in Palestine but chiefly a fanatical group of Semite saboteurs who called themselves “Israel’s Freedom Fighters,” were believed to number about 400 men. Founder of the Fighters was a slender, moody, Lithuanian-born philosophy student named Abraham Stern. When not philosophizing, young Stern wrote poetry, brooded on the unhappy lot of his people. The British Government’s White Paper (1939), limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine, convinced Philosopher Stern that the Jews must force concessions from the British at rifle point. He recruited a gang of young Jews from Yemen and ganovim from the ghettos of Poland and Lithuania. They were pledged to “sell their lives dearly.” British censorship blanketed many of their achievements. But enough stories of arson, murder and destruction seeped through to show that the Stern gang had succeeded in combining effective sabotage with an ability to evade capture in one of the most closely policed countries in the world. In 1942 the police killed Stern. But his followers continued to enrage the British and outrage responsible Jews. The British placed a $4,000 price on the gang leaders’ heads.

Anchorites and Dynamite. Then, to augment the Jewish terrorists, there arrived a surprising ally—the Nazis. Three Luftwaffe officers parachuted by night, probably from Crete, into the stony wilderness west of the Jordan Valley. Their twofold mission: to hamper the British war effort, to discredit the Jewish cause. They were discovered a fortnight ago when Arab urchins reported that a low-flying plane had dropped a bag of British money. In a cave once frequented by medieval anchorites police arrested three husky Germans, confiscated their radio sets, machine guns, explosives, and 14 German-made maps of Palestine.

A few days later British police swooped down on 250 Jewish terrorist suspects, whisked them out of Palestine by plane to an undisclosed destination. As the 27th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration* came & went last week, the air was thick with rumors and recriminations. It looked as if trouble-shooting Lord Gort would soon have plenty of trouble on his hands.

Last week the shooting spread to Cairo. Two civilians, not Egyptians, shot & killed Britain’s resident minister in the Middle East, Lord Moyne.

*In which the British Government guaranteed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”