Stern Gang

aka Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, Lehi, Lohami Heruth Israel

In the years immediately before and after 1948, the year Israel became an independent nation, Avraham Stern's extreme Jewish nationalist group used terror tactics to fight against British control of Palestine. British detractors called the group the Stern Gang, while members called their organization Lehi, a Hebrew acronym for Freedom Fighters of Israel. The gang was the smallest and fiercest of the underground groups fighting the British.

In 1940, Stern and other members of the Jewish group Irgun Zvai Leumi broke away to form Lehi because they disagreed with the Irgun leaders' decision to stop the struggle against the British and join the war effort against the Nazis. (Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, is most notorious for bombs placed in Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 that killed many British administrators.) Stern and ...