‘A dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’

Eschewing the biblical advertising of ‘the promised land’ or indeed ‘a land of milk and honey’, the Conservative colonial secretary William Ormsby-Gore presented a far grislier picture of Palestine on the eve of the second world war when he described it as ‘full of arms and bitterness, and there are few who do good and many that do evil’. That précis is proved sadly accurate many times over in Patrick Bishop’s gripping The Reckoning, about the fatal shooting and subsequent martyrdom of the Zionist freedom fighter (or terrorist — take your pick), Avraham Stern.

As characters go Stern is compelling in a car-crash kind of way. Bishop — a former Middle East correspondent for the Telegraph who now writes engrossing 20th-century histories — sums him up quite marvellously as ‘a dandy aesthete with visions of sacrificial violence’.

Born in Suwalki, Poland, on 23 December 1907, Stern’s comfortable upbringing as the son of a surgeon was thrown into chaos when his home town fell to the Germans in 1915. For the next six years he lived more or less as a refugee beyond the control of adults. Highly intelligent and an accomplished poet, he was also ‘a show-off, with a compulsion to perform’. When the family eventually reunited, Stern’s Zionist parents decided to send him to Jerusalem to finish his studies. After landing in Palestine on New Year’s Day 1926, Stern gradually grew more radical politically, to the point where he joined the Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary group, in 1932. In August 1940 he founded his own breakaway militant group, Lehi, which the British colonial authorities in Palestine dubbed the ‘Stern Gang’.

Like a good detective novel, Bishop’s account begins with Stern’s shooting in a Tel Aviv apartment on 12 February 1942, and works its way, Rashomon-like, back through the events which led up to the fateful day.