The making of a martyr

 
4 April 2014

The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Face of the Promised Land by Patrick Bishop (William Collins, £20)

The morning of Thursday February 12, 1942, dawned warm and sunny. In Mizrachi Bet Street, in the centre of Tel Aviv, the cafés were full of people sipping coffee and reading the latest battlefield reports from Libya, Egypt and Singapore.

Just before 10 o’clock, at the little flat at the top of number eight, two British detectives knocked on the front door. A few moments later, one of them went into the bedroom and pulled open the wardrobe door. There, huddled behind the coats and dresses, crouched Avraham Stern, founder of the eponymous terrorist gang, and one of the most wanted men in the world. Minutes later, the neighbours heard three shots. Stern was killed instantly.

To many modern Israelis Avraham Stern is a hero. Decades after his death, two of his admirers, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, became prime ministers of Israel. In 1978 Stern was given his own postage stamp, and three years later a town in central Israel was even named after him. Yet during his lifetime, when his men were robbing banks and shooting policemen across the British colonial mandate of Palestine, Stern was regarded as a terrorist.

Born in Suwalki, Poland, in 1907, he emigrated to Palestine when he was just 18 and became an obsessive Zionist. Indeed, despite his reputation as a dandy and a playboy, there was always something a bit unsettling about him: his poems, for example, were full of images of death and suffering.

Even other Zionists thought Stern was too extreme: it says a lot about his judgment that even after the outbreak of the Second World War he tried to do a deal with the Nazis, asking for arms and money to help kick the British out of Palestine.

As Patrick Bishop, a veteran foreign correspondent and military historian, points out, Stern’s death was the making of him, transforming him from a murderous, self-destructive crank into a “prophet and martyr”.

Bishop has had the splendid idea of turning his story into a rousing detective thriller, its hero a solidly respectable British policeman called Geoffrey Morton. The son of a Lambeth dairy manager, Morton began his adult life as a clerk at Smithfield meat market, but joined the Palestine police force in 1930 after spotting a Colonial Office advert.

As the head of CID in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, he became infamous for his take-no-prisoners approach. “I am a police officer,” he said simply, after he had been accused of shooting captured Zionists in cold blood, “and I did my duty.”

On the morning of Stern’s capture Morton was the first senior officer to arrive on the scene. “In that cramped flat,” writes Bishop, he “was looking for the first time on the face of the man he had been hunting for so long.”

We will never know for sure what happened next. To his dying day in 1996, Morton insisted that he thought Stern was reaching for a bomb. In fact, it seems almost certain that Morton had cast himself as Stern’s executioner.

Afterwards, he became a police official in Trinidad and Nyasaland before becoming head of security at a Gloucestershire engineering firm. I wonder how many of Geoffrey Morton’s colleagues ever suspected that, years before, in the heat and light of a Middle Eastern morning, he had pumped three bullets into one of the most dangerous men in the world?

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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