Lenni BRENNER
ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF DICTATORS
Chapter 26
THE STERN GANG
Until Begin's election victory in l977, most pro-Zionist historians
dismissed Revisionism as the fanatic fringe of Zionism; certainly the more
extreme 'Stern Gang', as their enemies called Avraham Stern's Fighters
for the Freedom of Israel, were looked upon as of more interest to the
psychiatrist than the political scientist. However, opinion toward Begin
had to change when he came to power, and when he eventually
appointed Yitzhak Shamir as his Foreign Minister it was quietly received,
although Shamir had been operations commander of the Stern Gang.
'The Historical Jewish State on a National and Totalitarian Basis'
On the night of 31 August/1 September l939 the entire command of the
Irgun, including Stern, was arrested by the British CID. When he was
released, in June 1940, Stern found an entirely new political constellation.
Jabotinsky had called off all military operations against the British for the
duration of the war. Stern himself was willing to ally himself with the
British so long as London would recognise the sovereignty of a Jewish
state on both sides of the River Jordan. Until then, the anti-British
struggle would have to continue. Jabotinsky knew that nothing would
make Britain give the Jews a state in 1940, and he saw the creation of
another Jewish Legion with the British Army to be the main task. The
two orientations were incompatible and by September 1940 the Irgun
was hopelessly split: the majority of both the command and the ranks
followed Stern out of the Revisionist movement.
At birth the new group was at its greatest strength for, as Stern's policies
became clearer, the ranks started drifting back into the Irgun or joined
the British Army. Stern or 'Yair', as he now called himself, (after Eleazer
ben Yair, the commander at Masada during the revolt against Rome)
began to define his full objectives. His 18 principles included a Jewish
state with its borders as defined in Genesis 15: 18 'from the brook of
Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,' a 'population exchange', a
euphemism for the expulsion of the Arabs and, finally, the building of a
Third Temple of Jerusalem.[(1 )]The Stern Group was at this time a bare
majority of the military wing of Revisionism but by no means
representative of the middle class Jews of Palestine who had backed
Jabotinsky. Still less was the fanatic call for a new temple attractive to
ordinary Zionists.
The war and its implications were on everyone's mind and the Stern
Gang began to explain their unique position in a series of underground
radio broadcasts
There is a difference between a persecutor and an enemy.
Persecutors have risen against Israel in all generations and in all
periods of our diaspora, starting with Haman and ending with
Hitler... The source of all our woes is our remaining in exile, and the
absence of a homeland and statehood. Therefore, our enemy is the
foreigner, the ruler of our land who blocks the return of the people
to it. The enemy are the British who conquered the land with our
help and who remain here by our leave, and who have betrayed us
and placed our brethren in Europe in the hands of the
persecutor.[(2)]
Stern turned away from any kind of struggle against Hitler and even
began to fantasise about sending a guerrilla group to India to help the
nationalists there against Britain.[(3)] He attacked the Revisionists for
encouraging Palestinian Jews to join the British Army, where they would
be treated as colonial troops, 'even to the point of not being allowed to
use the washrooms reserved for European soldiers'.[(4)]
Stern's single-minded belief, that the only solution to the Jewish
catastrophe in Europe was the end of British domination of Palestine, had
a logical conclusion. They could not defeat Britain with their own puny
forces, so they looked to her enemies for salvation. They came into
contact with an Italian agent in Jerusalem, a Jew who worked for the
British police, and in September 1940 they drew up an agreement
whereby Mussolini would recognise a Zionist state in return for Sternist
co-ordination with the Italian Army when the country was to be
invaded.[(5)] How seriously either Stern or the Italian agent took these
discussions has been debated. Stern feared that the agreement might be
part of a British provocation.[(6)] As a precaution, Stern sent Naftali
Lubentschik to Beirut, which was still controlled by Vichy, to negotiate
directly with the Axis. Nothing is known of his dealings with either Vichy
or the Italians, but in January 1941 Lubentschik met two Germans
--Rudolf Rosen and Otto von Hentig, the philo-Zionist, who was then
head of the Oriental Department of the German Foreign Office. After the
war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement
and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy
in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself a 'Proposal of the National
Military Organisation (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the
Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War
on the side of Germany.' (The Ankara document is dated 11 January
1941. At that point the Sternists still thought of themselves as the 'real'
Irgun, and it was only later that they adopted the Fighters for the
Freedom of Israel --Lohamei Herut Yisrael-- appellation.) In it the Stern
group told the Nazis:
The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition
for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible
and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home
of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a
Jewish state in its historical boundaries...
The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the
German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist
activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of
the opinion that:
1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a
New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and
the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are
embodied by the NMO.
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed
volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and
3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and
totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich,
would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future
German position of power in the Near East.
Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under
the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the
Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German
Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side.
This offer by the NMO... would be connected to the military
training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the
leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would
take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be
decided upon.
The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the
New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be
linked with a positive-radical solution of the European Jewish
problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national
aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily
strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all
humanity.
The Sternists again emphasised: 'The NMO is closely related to the
totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.'[(7)]
Lubentschik told von Hentig that if the Nazis were politically unwilling to
set up an immediate Zionist state in Palestine, the Sternists would be
willing to work temporarily along the lines of the Madagascar Plan. The
idea of Jewish colonies on the island had been one of the more exotic
notions of the European anti-Semites before the war, and with France's
defeat in 1940 the Germans revived the idea as part of their vision of a
German empire in Africa. Stern and his movement had debated the Nazi
Madagascar scheme and concluded that it should be supported, just as
Herzl had initially backed the British offer, in 1903, of a temporary
Jewish colony in the Kenya Highlands.[(8)]
There was no German follow-up on these incredible propositions, but the
Sternists did not lose hope. In December 1941, after the British had
taken Lebanon, Stern sent Nathan Yalin-Mor to try to contact the Nazis
in neutral Turkey, but he was arrested en route. There were no further
attempts to contact the Nazis.
The Stern plan was always unreal. One of the fundamentals of the
German-Italian alliance was that the eastern Mediterranean littoral was to
be included in the Italian sphere of influence. Furthermore, on 21
November 1941, Hitler met the Mufti and told him that although
Germany could not then openly call for the independence of any of the
Arab possessions of the British or French --out of a desire not to
antagonise Vichy, which still ran North Africa-- when the Germans
overran the Caucasus, they would swiftly move down to Palestine and
destroy the Zionist settlement.
There is rather more substance to Stern's own self-perception as a
totalitarian. By the late 1930s Stern became one of the ring-leaders of the
Revisionist malcontents who saw Jabotinsky as a liberal with moral
reservations about Irgun terror against the Arabs. Stern felt that the only
salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of
totalitarianism and make a clean break with Britain which, in any case,
had abandoned Zionism with the 1939 White Paper. He had seen the
WZO make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the
Ha'avara; he had seen Jabotinsky entangle himself with Italy; and he
personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists, dealings with
the Polish anti-Semites. However, Stern believed that all of these were
only half-measures.
Stern was one of the Revisionists who felt that the Zionists, and the Jews,
had betrayed Mussolini and not the reverse. Zionism had to show the
Axis that they were serious, by coming into direct military conflict with
Britain, so that the totalitarians could see a potential military advantage in
allying themselves with Zionism. To win, Stern argued, they had to ally
themselves with the Fascists and Nazis alike: one could not deal with a
Petliura or a Mussolini and then draw back from a Hitler.
Did Yitzhak Yzertinsky --rabbi Shamir-- to use his underground nom de
guerre, now the Foreign Minister of Israel, know of his movement's
proposed confederation with Adolf Hitler? In recent years the wartime
activities of the Stern Gang have been thoroughly researched by one of
the youths who joined it in the post-war period, when it was no longer
pro-Nazi. Baruch Nadel is absolutely certain that Yzertinsky-Shamir was
fully aware of Stern's plan: 'They all knew about it.'[(9)]
When Shamir was appointed Foreign Minister, international opinion
focused on the fact that Begin had selected the organiser of two famous
assassinations: the killing of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident
for the Middle East, on 6 November 1944; and the slaying of Count
Folke Bernadotte, the UN's special Mediator on Palestine, on 17
September 1948. Concern for his terrorist past was allowed to obscure
the more grotesque notion that a would-be ally of Adolf Hitler could rise
to the leadership of the Zionist state. When Begin appointed Shamir, and
honoured Stern by having postage stamps issued which bore his portrait,
he did it with the full knowledge of their past. There can be no better
proof than this that the heritage of Zionist collusion with the Fascists and
the Nazis, and the philosophies underlying it, carries through to
contemporary Israel.
Notes
[(1.)] Geula Cohen, Woman of Violence, p. 232.
[(2.)] Martin Sicker, 'Echoes of a Poet', American Zionist (February
1972), pp. 32-3.
[(3.)] Chaviv Kanaan (in discussion), Germany and the Middle East
1835-1939, p. 165.
[(4.)] Eri Jabotinsky, 'A Letter to the Editor'' Zionews (27 March 1942),
p. 11.
[(5.)] Izzy Cohen, 'Zionism and Anti-Semitism', (unpublished
manuscript), p. 3.
[(6.)] Author's interview with Baruch Nadel, 17 February 1981.
[(7.)] 'Grundzuege des Vorschlages der Nationalen Militaerischen
Organisation in Palastina (Irgun Zwei Leumi) betreffend der Loesung der
juedischen Frage Europas und der aktiven Teilnahme der NMO am
Kriege an der Seite Deutschlands', David Yisraeli, The Palestine
Problem in German Politics 1889-1945, Bar llan University (Ramat
Gan, Israel) (1974), pp. 315-17.
[(8.)] Kanaan, Cermany and the Middle East, pp. 165-6.
[(9.)] Interview with Nadel.
++++++++++++++++++
This text is a chapter of <Zionism in the Age of the Dictators - a
Reappraisal>, by Lenni Brenner.
The copyright (c) belongs to the author. It was published by Croom
Helm, Kent (Great-Britain) and Laurence Hill, Westport, Conn. in the
USA, 277 p. ISBN (GB) 0-7099-0628-5; USA (paperback)
0-88208-164-0 in 1983. |
