Israel’s future
Irgun followed his lead. Avraham Stern strongly rejected this approach.
Britain, he argued, had declared war against Nazi Germany, not to save the Jews but to defend its own national interests. Moreover, it was doing its utmost to bar the gates of Palestine to millions of desperate Jews trapped in Hitler’s Europe. In the summer of 1940, Stern signed Communiqué 112, regarded as the genesis of the group that the British labelled “the Stern Gang”, later known as Lehi.
Levstein enthusiastically followed Stern out of the Irgun into Lehi. Like Stern, he believed “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Could Nazi Germany therefore aid Lehi in driving the British out of Palestine? Before the onset of the Shoah, Stern understood Hitler as the latest in a long line of persecutors — not as an exterminator. Naftali Lubenchik was duly sent off to the German Legation in Beirut to explain Stern’s ideas — a visit facilitated and prepared by Ya’akov Levstein. Needless to say, Stern’s views failed to impress — Hitler was an ideological antisemite bent on destruction.
Out of prison, Stern needed funds. The Anglo-Palestine Bank was robbed in September 1940. Unlike the Irgun, which considered itself an underground army, Lehi had no such pretensions and promoted a policy of assassinations and killings. In January 1942 Levstein planned to kill leading British intelligence officers Morton and Wilkin by first creating a diversionary explosion. Levstein rationalised that the two men would turn up to investigate. Instead three Jewish officers, Schiff, Goldman and Dichter with another British inspector, Turton, reached the scene first. The young Lehi operator did not identify them and detonated Levstein’s mine. Their deaths in this botched operation turned the Jewish public in the Yishuv vehemently against Lehi.
A few days later an apartment in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street was raided and two Lehi members shot dead by
British police.
Levstein was wounded and imprisoned. The bombing of the King David hotel in 1946 Stern met his end a few days afterwards when surrounded by Morton and armed policemen. Conflicting explanations about the manner of his death still abound. Levstein was asked to identify the body which he decidedly failed to do. Only when Stern’s family identified him was he taken away for burial.
Levstein survived to continue his activities after his escape from prison. In May 1946 he planned to kill Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who had spent the war years in Berlin.
Levstein’s Lehi unit closely watched al-Husseini’s movements in Paris while the French deliberated whether to turn him over to the British. Levstein later wrote that “the best way was to blow up the Mufti in his car. I prepared a powerful mine that would not have left much of the Mufti”. Al-Husseini gave everyone the slip and escaped to Cairo.
Levstein and other members of Lehi, including future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, eventually came in from the cold and were recruited by the Mossad in the 1950s.
Levstein lived to die in his bed in 1985. The revelations of these archives once again pose the inimitable question: freedom fighter or unscrupulous terrorist?
Lehi looked to the IRA as the model for its actions. In 1882 the Chief Secretary, Lord Cavendish, was murdered in Dublin. Oscar Wilde astutely commented at the time that “when liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood, it is hard to shake hands with her”.
Colin Shindler’s latest book, The Hebrew Republic: Israel’s Return to History is published by Rowman and Littlefield