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 his colleagues considered the British empire to be the enemy of the Jewish people; subscribing to the philosophy of “my enemy's enemy is my friend,” they even attempted to win support from Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler for Palestine as a place of refuge for European Jews.

Beginning in 1940, Lehi waged a campaign against the British that included assassinations, bank robberies, and bombings; while the British were the gang's primary targets, Jews and Arabs also died in their attacks. Mainstream Zionists condemned the group, and British detectives hunted Stern, killing him in 1942. After Stern's death, Yitzhak Shamir took control of the gang, along with his colleagues Natan Friedman Yellin and Yisrael Sheib. Shamir, who was elected prime minister of Israel in 1983, took the nom de guerre Micail in honor of Irish Republican Army leader Michael Collins.

Shamir was a man of many disguises, including bearded Orthodox Jew, Polish soldier, and blind man. He was caught three times by the British, escaped from prison in 1942, and was deported to prison in Eritrea in 1943. He escaped from the Eritrean prison camp by digging a tunnel. While Shamir was in Eritrea, his cohorts in Palestine hunted down Sergeant T. G. Martin, the British policeman who had identified him, following him to a tennis court where they shot him to death.

According to Shamir's own account, the Stern Gang tried to assassinate Sir Harold MacMichael, the British high commissioner in Palestine, several times, failing at each attempt. The group was successful, however, with a 1944 plot to murder Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East.

In 1948, after the Israeli War of Independence was virtually finished, the group assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat appointed by the United Nations to mediate the dispute between Arabs and Israelis. Just three years earlier, Bernadotte had secured the release of 21,000 prisoners bound for extermination by the Nazis. After being appointed the U.N. trouble-shooter in the Middle East, Bernadotte, the former president of the Red Cross and a nephew of the king of Sweden, raised the idea of ceding Jerusalem to the Palestinians. According to statements made by former gang members, four Stern Gang men attacked Bernadotte in his car and then shot and killed both him and his French aide-de-camp.

Israel subsequently outlawed the group, and after 1949 members of both Lehi and Irgun drifted into fringe politics and relative obscurity until Begin rose to prominence as a national politician. He became Israel's prime minister in 1977 and paved the way for Shamir, who was elected in 1983.