Stern Gang

The period between the end of World War One and the decision of the United Nations to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state after World War Two was a time of roads not taken. Chaim Weizmann rejected the position of American Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that the emphasis of the Zionist movement should be restricted to raising funds for developing a Jewish “national home” in Palestine rather than establishing the Jewish Agency into a de facto government or using its funds for enabling mass emigration of Jews from Europe. Weizmann viewed Brandeis and his fellow American Reformed Jews as “assimilationists,” who viewed Judaism as a religion, not a nationality. David Ben-Gurion rejected Weizmann’s proposals that it was necessary to maintain good relations with Great Britain, which had been given the mandate to Palestine by the League of Nations, by compromises to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine and land purchases from Arabs. Both Weizmann and Ben-Gurion rejected the position of Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, who wanted the immediate establishment of a Jewish state comprising both sides of the Jordan River in accordance with the original British mandate prior to 1922 when Winston Churchill separated Transjordan from Palestine and placed the Saudi Hashemite king Abdullah Hussein on its throne. And all of them rejected the ideas of Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and the Brit Shalom that the only alternative to perpetual war with the Arabs was to create a secular, bi-national states consisting of Arabs and Jews rather than a Jewish state. Of all the roads not taken, that of a secular, bi-national state probably was the one that should have been taken.

This period also contains a lesson about the so-called “War on Terrorism.” Terrorism was a tactic of asymmetrical warfare used by both Arabs and Jews. It was used by the Arabs in their protests against Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1920, 1929, and 1936.  Most notably on the Jewish side it was used by the Stern gang that in November 1944 assassinated the British Lord Moyne in Cairo, Egypt, and the Irgun that bombed Arab markets places and in July 1946 bombed the King David hotel in Jerusalem. Menachem Begin, who as the conservative, Likud-Party prime minister of Israel in September 1978 signed the Camp David Accords, but who also in 1982 launched the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, was the leader of the Irgun at the time of the King David Hotel bombing. Yitzhak Shamir, who in the early 1980s as the Likud-Party prime minister of Israel promoted Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza, was the chief of operations of the Stern Gang. Thus, for Israel later to refuse to negotiate with the Palestinian Yassir Arafat because it considered him a terrorist was just an excuse not to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization. And for the United States to adopt the concept of a “War on Terror” (an idea that in its modern incarnation was first proposed by Israel’s current Likud-Party prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, see the Introduction) masks the underlying issues of ethnicity and self-determination that are the cause of many of the conflicts in the world today.

This article discusses the global aspect of Zionist terrorism against Britain during 1944–47, relying on recently declassified documents and Hebrew records. Britain struggled against a global terrorist campaign which attacked British targets in Palestine, Egypt and the wider Middle East, continental Europe and the United Kingdom. This article refutes claims by other authors that British rule in Palestine failed because of intelligence failure. Intelligence failure was limited, but so were successes. British intelligence produced reasonable assessments on Zionist politics, but could do little to prevent violence without the cooperation of the Jewish Agency. Success was driven by a combination of signals intelligence, secret agents, one key defector, interrogations and intelligence shared by the Jewish Agency. Failure resulted from a weak understanding of the Zionist underground and from lack of cooperation by Agency authorities. Normally Britain's junior partner, the Jewish Agency was, by 1945, struggling against British restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Its militia, Haganah, turned to cooperation with terrorists. British intelligence predicted that such developments could occur, but failed to identify them as they unfolded. Britain's dependence on Zionist security intelligence was a key vulnerability that never was addressed by policy-makers. The Jewish Agency leveraged its cooperation, applying it to prevent terrorism in Egypt and the United Kingdom, where violent incidents would harm the Zionist cause. It had little reason to prevent terrorism in the key battlegrounds of Palestine or Europe, and so terrorism harmed Britain's will to continue fighting. The root cause of Britain's failure was at the policy level. Despite known weaknesses, government never assessed its own will and ability to uphold restrictions on Zionist immigration, or to fight terrorism, as against the Yishuv's will and ability to struggle against Britain.