A cat-and-mouse game between terrorist and policeman in Tel Aviv has a potent legacy
Ed O’Loughlin
In a world of murder, treachery and war, where no one is exactly what they seem, a by-the-book cop and a fanatical terrorist stalk each other through the ruins of other peoples’ lives. Only one can survive. Because this time it’s personal.
Apologies to Hal Douglas, the veteran Hollywood trailer voice-over artist who died last week. But the story of the cop and the killer who form a mutual obsession and hunt each other down has become a cliché in popular culture: Manhunter, Seven, The Fall – a full list would be long.
It’s a good plot device, but a silly one. It wouldn’t happen in the real world. Except that it did. Once upon a time in the Middle East.
In the dark days of the Second World War, with Axis troops advancing through Egypt, the police in British-run Palestine found themselves fighting on an unexpected front.
A splinter group of radical Jewish terrorists, led by a dandy poet named Avraham Stern, defied the mainstream Zionist leadership to launch a private war on the Mandate police, who had tried to curb their killings of innocent Arabs.
So fanatical was Stern in his totalitarian racial ideology that he sought an alliance with the same Nazi thugs who were already murdering the Jews of Europe.
The chief tormentor of the “Stern Gang” was Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, London-born head of the Tel Aviv district CID, who personally blamed Stern (incorrectly) for the 1938 killing of one of his closest friends. In 1942 Morton was himself the intended target of an elaborate Stern Gang booby trap that succeeded in killing three other senior policemen – two Palestinian Jews and one Briton.
Mainstream Jewish opinion was outraged, and the Zionist underground quietly helped to mop up most of the active terrorists. Finally, detectives found Stern hiding in a closet in a rooftop apartment in a run-down part of Tel Aviv. They arrested him without fuss and sent for Morton, who rushed to the scene.
Minutes later, Stern was dead, shot several times as – Morton variously claimed – he tried to jump out of a window, or was feared to be about to detonate a (non-existent) hidden bomb.
Patrick Bishop’s excellent new book The Reckoning is the enthralling story of this bloody vendetta, and of its long and fateful aftermath. Did Morton murder Stern in cold blood? The evidence, although never quite conclusive, suggests strongly that Morton’s account – which he successfully defended three times in the London libel courts – was a lie.
But then, “cold blood” is a relative concept. Bishop’s detective story offers a vivid portrait of the fraught, doomed world of the Palestine Mandate, in which policemen and soldiers were given an impossible job – keeping out hordes of desperate Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, whose arrival would threaten the native Arabs, while at the same time placating the formidable Palestinian Jews and their supporters in London and Washington DC.
Facing Stern in that tiny apartment, Morton would have known that there was little chance of convicting him of his friends’ murders, and that politically motivated moves were already afoot to appease Jewish underground activists and terrorists (though not Arab ones).
Stern, on the other hand, was a mystic nationalist who had predicted and even welcomed his own violent death. By shooting him, Morton snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Stern’s movement flourished in the wake of his killing, and even mainstream Zionist opinion began to swing against the police force. Morton himself was kicked upstairs then transferred; the scandal dogged him for the rest of his long life. In 1948 the British abandoned Palestine.
Stern, widely reviled in the Leftist embryonic Jewish state, is now a hero of modern Israel’s Right-wing Likudnik mainstream. Two of his contemporaries and admirers, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, went on to become Likud prime ministers.
Shamir, who ordered the 1948 shooting of UN peace envoy and Holocaust hero Folke Bernadotte, had been morally outraged at Stern’s death, and vowed to avenge his dead leader. Begin, who killed 91 people with the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, later managed to write angrily of how Stern had been “foully murdered”. It is part of Stern’s legacy – and Morton’s – that for some people “murder”, like “cold blood”, and “terrorism”, is also a relative concept.
The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land by Patrick Bishop
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 360; Price: £20
