But the gap between the FFI and other Zionists went further. Zionist officialdom reciprocated, condemning the Sternists as terrorist 'gangs' and calling for their 'liquidation.' The dissident Zionist movement led by Ze'ev Jabotinsky also opposed FFI's operations.

The Sternists, according to Golan, broke with the Irgun because they 'rejected the idea of obeisance' to Jewish leaders not sufficiently committed to a militant campaign for independence. 'It is permitted to liberate a people even against its will, or against the will of the majority,' then-Stern Group member Yitzhak Shamir would say many years later. What they had in common was the belief that a small vanguard group could liberate of the entire Jewish people. The territory's existing Arab population would be 'exchanged,' presumably for Jews in the Middle East and elsewhere.įFI leadership ran the political gamut from old-line socialists to hard line nationalists. Stern had a grandiose vision of a Greater Israel-from the Nile to the Euphrates!-that would be established by force. Such violence did not give the Stern Group second thoughts. Renegade British soldiers ran riot, shooting and assaulting Jewish passers-by and even murdering a Jewish constable. On November 17, FFI operatives detonated a mine that killed four and wounded several others over the course of the month, FFI gunmen sabotaged rail lines, shot at trains, blew up military vehicles, destroyed international telegraph lines, attacked police stations, robbed Barclays Bank in Tel Aviv, and set off an explosion at a British military base.īritish authorities retaliated with a heavy hand.

Golan's book appears precisely 65 years after the bloody November, 1946 FFI offensive that claimed a score of mostly British lives. It covers his break with the Haganah over its policy of 'restraint' in the face of murderous Arab riots against the Yishuv and Britain's breach of its League of Nations commitment to foster a Jewish homeland. It begins with Avraham Stern's 1926 arrival in Palestine, his student life at Hebrew University, and his developing commitment to Jewish observance. Golan's is a sympathetic narrative of an extremist and fringe movement that never numbered more than 900 members. In 1945, British officials in London feared that FFI’s assassination targets might include the prime minister himself.Ī new book by Zev Golan, Stern: the Man and His Gang, brings fresh focus to the nasty fight waged by FFI against British policymakers and security personnel beginning in 1940. Stern's Son Denies Plot to Kill Churchill Joshua Hamerman, Jerusalem Post.

Stern by Zev Golan