this rare book has been made available in full online.here is the link and text of the last chapter.
http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad.html
THE STERN GANGTANGLED
ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF DICTATORS
Lenni BRENNER
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 (©) 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. This book
has been out of print for years.
It has been computerized, displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you as a
tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non commercial and
fair use basis, by the Internationl Secretariat of the War and Holocaust
Tales Ancient Amateurs' Association (WHOTAAAN) in 1996. The Email of the
Secretariat is <aaargh@abbc.com>
http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad.html
THE STERN GANGTANGLED
ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF DICTATORS
Lenni BRENNER
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 (©) 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. This book
has been out of print for years.
It has been computerized, displayed on the Net, and forwarded to you as a
tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non commercial and
fair use basis, by the Internationl Secretariat of the War and Holocaust
Tales Ancient Amateurs' Association (WHOTAAAN) in 1996. The Email of the
Secretariat is <aaargh@abbc.com>