In Stern: The Man, the Gang & the State We Learn About the Mentality Behind the Nazi-style Genocide in Gaza Today
Last
summer I was contacted by Hossam Sarhan who asked if I would agree to be
interviewed for a program on Yair Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang
or Lehi, Loḥamei Ḥerut Yisrael (Fighters
for the Freedom of Israel).
The
Zionists have done their best since the Hitler era to suggest, on the basis of
the undoubted collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin
Husseini with the Nazis, that whereas they supported the
Allies the Palestinians supported Hitler.
In
fact there is no truth in this. It was the ardent Zionist British High
Commissioner Herbert
Samuel who appointed Husseini as Mufti despite the fact that he came fourth in
the elections to the post in 1921.
Stern did his best to form a pact with the above
The
British and the Zionists always preferred reactionary, feudal leaders of the
Palestinians to secular nationalists like the Istiqlal
Party which was severely repressed.
Husseini
was a minor war criminal compared to Walter
Rauff, the inventor of the gas truck which was used at
the first extermination camp Chelmno.
Rauff became an Israeli agent after the war.
This
did not stop the Mufti
playing a ‘starring role’ in Yad Vashem of
the Holocaust. The article on the Mufti is longer
than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined and longer than the article on
Eichmann. It is only
slightly exceeded in length by the entry for Hitler. [Peter Novick, The Holocaust in
American Life p. 158].
The Stern Gang was founded in 1940 from a split in another terrorist group, Irgun, which was commanded by former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. Lehi was a Blood and Fire Zionist group and its rehabilitation in Israel today says everything about the Zionist attitude to genuine terrorism.
Ilan Pappe
I
had just written a book, Zionism During the Holocaust, which contains
a section on The Zionist Group that was
openly pro-Nazi. This was probably why I was interviewed.Also interviewed by the program makers were Ilan
Pappe, the foremost historian of Zionism and its misdeeds
and Tom Suarez
who has written a couple of very interesting books on Zionism and its
antecedents, including its terroristic
proclivities. Another person who was interviewed was Yair Stern, the son of
Abraham Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang.
The
Stern Gang distinguished itself in 1940 by its offer, not once but
twice to Nazi Germany to form a military pact. The idea was for them to recruit
40,000 European Jews and thence, with help from Nazi Germany, to invade
Palestine and set up a Jewish State under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Stern was convinced at that point that
Germany was going to win the war and he wanted to be on the winning side.
The Program Interviewed Yair Stern, the son of Abraham Stern
Naftali
Lubenchik, from the Stern Gang met a senior representative of
the German Foreign Ministry, Otto von Hentig and Alfred Roser, a Military
Intelligence agent, in Beirut on 11 January 1941. Lebanon at that time was
under the control of Vichy France. The Nazis however ignored the proposal. The
Stern Gang had previously sought to work with Mussolini although they were not
alone in this.
Covering letter attached to proposed agreement between Stern Gang and Mussolini
The
Irgun’s youth wing, Betar,
had trained at the Italian naval base of Civitavechia as a result of an agreement with Mussolini, as had some of
Lehi’s cadre. The President of the Zionist Organisation, Chaim
Weizmann had made no less than 4 trips to see Mussolini. The
Zionist Organisation made it clear, in the words of Weizmann’s predecessor Nahum
Sokolow, who also visited Mussolini, that the Zionists had no
problems with fascism, just anti-Semitism (or rather too much anti-Semitism!).
Tony Greenstein being interviewed
On
11 January 1941, Vice
Admiral Ralf von der Marwitz, the German naval
attaché in Turkey, filed a report (the "Ankara document") conveying the
offer by Lehi to ‘actively take part in
the war on Germany's side’ in return for German support for ‘the establishment of the historic Jewish
state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German
Reich.’
Major Morton killed Stern
In
December 1941 Nathan
Yellin Mor was sent on another trip to Beirut to meet the
Nazis but this time he was intercepted in Syria by the British and arrested.
Thus ended the dreams of a greater Zionist and Nazi Reich. In February 1942 Stern
was killed by the British Major Morton.
The
Stern Gang became notorious for its bank robberies and assassinations. It had
an eclectic political philosophy which combined extreme racism (Arabs were to
become slaves under a Jewish master race) and yet an orientation to the Soviet
Union at one time and what was termed ‘National Bolshevism’.
In
November 1944 Lehi also assassinated the resident British Minister in Cairo, Lord
Moyne, who was a personal friend of Churchill. The
assassins were quickly caught and hanged.
A wanted poster for Stern
Churchill
had been a long-term friend of the Zionists and he declared that:
If our dreams
of Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labors for its
future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like
myself would have to reconsider the position we have maintained so
consistently.
In
fact this is exactly what has happened. Zionism has indeed produced a new set
of gangsters and they are led by the Al Capone of Zionism, Benjamin
Netanyahu. However this has not stopped
British or American imperialism from supporting the Israeli state unconditionally.
Menachem Begin - Irgun leader
As
I argued in the film Lehi was not a break with Zionism anymore than Begin’s
Irgun had been. Their differences with the mainstream Labour Zionists were ones
of tactics not principles. Indeed at times they were very useful for the Labour
Zionists who could at one and the same time dissociate themselves from Lehi’s
actions whilst at the same time supporting them.
This
was true of the first and most famous massacre of Palestinians in the Nakba, in
the village of Deir
Yassin (now Givat Shaul) which lies literally a stone’s
throw away from the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem.
Although
Haganah
dissociated itself from the massacre of over 100 Palestinians in a forerunner
of what is happening in Gaza today, to the extent of David Ben-Gurion sending
a letter of apology to Transjordan’s King Abdullah, they had in fact secretly
agreed to the massacre, as Ilan Pappe explained in the program.
Supporter of the Stern Gang
Haganah
had also agreed to the assassination
of UN mediator Count Folk Bernadotte in 1948 although in public they had
condemned it to the point of making Lehi a banned organisation, describing it
as a terrorist group.
The
Zionists today say that it was the Palestinians who had rejected the UN
Partition Plan of November 29 1947 (UN Resolution 181). But this is one more
Zionist lie. Not only did they expand beyond the boundaries of the Jewish State
that the UN had agreed before May 1948 but they had also rejected the UN
proposal that Jerusalem, being the home of all 3 religions, should be
internationalised.
After Stern's death, the Stern Gang was led by a triumvirate including Yitzhak Shamir
This was rejected by all wings of the Zionist movement, hence the assassination of Bernadotte.
As
Tom Suarez pointed out in the programme Bernadotte has personally saved
20,000 Jews from the concentration camps when he reached an agreement with
Himmler that 100 white buses with Red Crosses on their roofs took Jews and
other prisoners from the concentration camps in February 1945.
Bernadotte
had single-handedly rescued more Jews than the Zionists (whose collaboration
with the Nazis has since become notorious) yet that was no reason for them not
to murder him. See Newsweek’s The Swedish Schindler: How Count
Bernadotte Saved Thousands of Jews From Death
How you might ask has Israel remembered the Stern Gang and its founder Yair Stern. Bearing in mind that Israel considers itself at the forefront of the fight against ‘terrorism’ you would be forgiven for assuming that mention of his name would be verboten in Israel today. Not a bit of it.
Abraham Stern Who Was Killed by the British
The
street where Stern was killed by the British has been renamed Stern Street. "Avraham Stern” streets are ubiquitous across Israel. The town of Kochav Yair was established in his memory. Even the Israeli
Postal Service got in on the act issuing a stamp commemorating him with
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naming his firstborn son Yair.
In
How should Avraham Stern be remembered? Mark Regev, the former Israeli Ambassador to
London, noted that the first Israeli Prime Minister,
Ben-Gurion found some positive words with which to describe Lehi’s founding
commander:
There is no
doubt that Avraham Stern was one of the greatest and most admired people to
emerge during the Mandate. I venerate… his steely courage and boundless dedication
to Israel’s liberation.
Regev
wrote‘the once Zionist renegade is now Israeli
mainstream’.
So
when Zionists tell you that they oppose terrorism, it is worth remembering that
they only oppose ‘terrorism’ when it comes to Palestinian violence. Terrorism
committed by Zionists is fine because it serves their objectives, notably the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Yitzshak Shamir
The
fact that Stern had tried to negotiate a military pact with Nazi Germany, of
which Ben-Gurion was all too aware, was irrelevant. The fact that he was a
racial supremacist was even more irrelevant. Regev asks innocently if
Ben-Gurion was ‘
retrospectively
whitewashing a Zionist terrorist merely because Stern was a committed Jewish
patriot, seemingly confirming the dictum that “one man’s terrorist is another
man’s freedom fighter”?
Regev’s
conclusion was that
Stern’s
attacks against the organs of British subjugation – officialdom, military and
police – should be viewed as justified insurgency. Even in the politically
questionable case of Lord Moyne, was not Lehi’s chosen victim the senior
representative of British colonial rule?
Being
a myopic Zionist Regev is unable to see why Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is equally
justified if not more so since the Zionists were the catspaws and creation of
the British state. Their fight against the British was not about a fight for
freedom but about their right to expel and subjugate the Palestinians.
This
is the hypocrisy that is now playing out in Gaza where Palestinian
organisations like Hamas are deemed ‘terrorist’ but the actions of bombing
schools and hospitals, cold-bloodedly killing civilians including children is
seen as justified.
Zionism
was born in blood and fire and it is likely to end that way too.
Tony
Greenstein
See https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2024/8/13/stern-the-man-the-gang-and-the-state