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This was a French liner which the British intended to use to ship to Mauritius illegal migrants who had arrived off Haifa in the Milos and Pacific in November 1940. The Haganah determined to disable the Patria in Haifa harbour, but used too large a consignment of explosives. The ship sank in fifteen minutes, drowning two hundred and fifty refugees. While the British decided on compassionate grounds to allow the nineteen hundred survivors of the Patria to remain in Palestine - against, it has to be noted, the vehement protests of general Wavell - they resolved to deport a further seventeen hundred refugees newly arrived on a ship called the Atlantic. Only Churchill’s personal intervention saved the day for those on the Patria.

Although the leaders of the Yishuv and Haganah - and indeed Jabotinsky until his sudden death in New York in 1940 - supported the British war effort, this was not true of the outright terrorist groups. The poet-gunman and romantic elitist Avraham Stern - who adopted the name Yair in honour of the leader of the ancient uprising against the Romans at Masada - believed that ‘alliances will be formed with anyone who is interested in helping Eretz Israel’. Strategic realities and romantic fervour inclined him to strange alliances. With Italian and then German forces advancing through Egypt, an Axis victory seemed certain. To this end, Stern tried to contact Mussolini, in the hope that Italian conquest of the Middle East might expedite the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This was to have corporatist features, with Jerusalem placed under the authority of a Vatican which was not consulted about these schemes. Failing that, Stern put out feelers to Nazi Germany via Vichy authorities in Syria, with a view to securing a pact that would allow a ‘national totalitarian’ Jewish state once the Führer had defeated the British. Underlying these bizarre gambits was a specious distinction between the evanescent ‘enemy’ (Britain) and the historical ‘persecutor’ (Nazi Germany), and the delusion that the Jews could use the latter to see off the former. This was too clever by half. Efforts to reconstrue these contacts with the Germans as part of some ‘rescue’ endeavour on behalf of Europe’s Jews are unconvincing.13

Having already countenanced a modern Israeli postage stamp, Stern is also commemorated in the name of a small town populated by many of the current Israeli ruling elite. Admirers of the Stern Gang like to situate it within the deep stream of Jewish history, which made its violence seem both historically determined and divinely ordained: ‘Because there is a religion of redemption - a religion of the war of liberation/Whoever accepts it - be blessed; whoever denies it - be cursed’ ran one of Stern’s poems. The British were Nazis and the leadership of the Zionist Yishuv a latterday Judenrat (the councils that administered Jewish existence in the wartime ghettos).14

Deceitful mythologies apart, Stern was responsible for a handful of fanatics, perhaps three hundred at most, their identity oscillating between gangsters, guerrillas and terrorists depending on the nature of specific activities. Their favoured tactics were bank robbery and assassination; half of their victims were fellow Jews whom they regarded as collaborators with the British, a proportion reflected in the ‘disciplinary’ killings conducted by many subsequent terrorist groups such as the FLN in Algeria. Both the British CID and the Haganah endeavoured to track down Stern himself. Eventually he was surrounded in a house, where a CID officer called Geoffrey Morton found him hiding in a closet. Despite being unarmed, the handcuffed Stern was shot dead, although Morton claimed he was shot trying to jump out of a window. Many people think he was assassinated. Sternist death threats would haunt Morton’s future postings in the Caribbean and East Africa. The remnants of the Stern Gang, including the future (seventh) prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who adopted the nom de guerre ‘Michael’ in honour of