Legacy of a dandy assassin
HISTORY
THE RECKONING
by Patrick Bishop (William Collins £20 £16)
LIKE a classic detective story, Patrick Bishop’s engrossing new book opens with a killing, before spooling back to examine the twists and turns of the events that left 34-year-old avraham Stern on the floor of a dingy attic i n Tel aviv with three bullets in his chest.
It was February 1942, with war enveloping much of the world, and Stern had been on the run for weeks, flitting from one safe house to another, his sharp features and deep-set eyes staring out of ‘Wanted’ posters across what was then British-ruled Palestine.
as leader of the eponymous Stern Gang, the most violent Jewish underground group, he had masterminded a string of assassinations, bombings and bank raids aimed at driving the British from the Holy Land and had a price of £1,000 — serious money at the time — on his head.
Bishop’s brisk narrative then switches to the man who cornered and shot Stern: assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, a blunt, brawny Londoner who had swapped a milk delivery round for service with the Palestine Police. as head of the Tel aviv CID, he was responsible for tackling the armed Jewish cells and had readily assumed the role of Stern’s personal nemesis.
Memorably described by Bishop as ‘a dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’, Stern was born in what is now Poland and packed off to Palestine by his parents at 18 to finish his studies.
a fervent Zionist, cultured and highly intelligent, Stern saw in himself someone marked down for greatness — though he was also something of a ladies’ man and liked his socks to be silk.
Poems he composed while on the run were heavily loaded with images of suffering and death.
So extreme were Stern’s views, Bishop reveals, that even as the Holocaust was engulfing Europe’s Jews, he was ready to cut a deal with the Nazis in which he would step up attacks on the British in return for weapons and cash.
Small wonder Palestine’s mainstream Jewish establishment — increasingly alienated by the Stern Gang’s random killing of innocent arabs — would occasionally cooperate discreetly with the security forces to avert bloodshed.
at the heart of this exhaustively researched and elegantly written book is a search for the truth of what happened when these two men, seemingly so different yet yoked by an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness, finally came face-to-face.
To the day he died Morton would swear that, after he and fellow detectives discovered their quarry hiding in a cupboard, Stern had tried to escape by throwing himself through a window. Morton said he had opened fire because he feared his prize captive might explode an ‘infernal device’, killing everyone in the room.
Unsurprisingly, many i n the Jewish community concluded that Stern had been summarily executed: as Bishop’s assiduous digging established, Morton had form, having previously gunned down t hree c a ptured a nd unarmed Stern Gang members ( two subsequently died of their wounds). In l ater years, t he controversy was re - ignited after a fellow policeman, who claimed to have been present when Stern was shot, testified t hat Morton had i ndeed killed their prisoner in cold blood. ‘ Rarely can such a single act have produced so many different versions of events’, Bishop observes, cannily side -stepping a ny pressure to provide a definitive view of his own.
What i s beyond doubt, he contends, is that only in death did Stern acquire ‘ the status of prophet and martyr he had
£40,000
How much the reward for Stern’s capture would be worth in today’s
money
yearned for when alive . . . his spiritual presence shaped events in a way that his physical one could never have’. From that point on, Bishop argues, Stern’s obsessive belief that the Jews would never have their own state until the British were beaten ‘became the prevailing wisdom’.
Today,-the man once denounced as a bloodthirsty gangster has a Tel-aviv street named after him, while his portrait has adorned a postage stamp.
as for Geoffrey Morton, whose shots helped set in train the process from which the state of Israel would eventually emerge, with such momentous consequences for the Middle East, he was quietly promoted, handed a gong and ushered off to more placid colonial service elsewhere.
Before his death in 1996, he won several successful libel actions over published allegations that he had murdered Stern.
Testifying in one, he perceptively described Stern as the architect of his own destruction. ‘I have always had the feeling that he intended it to happen in some such way.’