It was during the days of a previous attempt to find a "road map" for peace and things were relatively quiet in the Middle East. As we sat on two rickety chairs outside a small café in one of Jerusalem's old quarters, Mea She'arim, chatting on a languid early summer evening, we were frequently interrupted.
The proprietor/waiter/chef vigorously fanned the charcoal of his pavement barbecue to a red glow with a piece of cardboard. It was not the kind of dinner I had anticipated when my host, a senior executive of Israel's national television service, invited me to join him for a "real Jerusalem meal", after a meeting in a downtown hotel of a committee of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). While we waited for our steaks to grill the street became busy with Orthodox Jews, dedicated to observing the rigorous tenets of religious law, in their black suits, hats and hair done in ringlets.
The number who stopped to shake the hand of my friend, Yair, and mutter a few pleasantries surprised me; he was a behind-the-camera man and his face would not have been known from the screen. "Have you had a death in the family?" I inquired between handshakes. "No," he said, "They just know me."
I had known him for years through meetings of the EBU. Although not part of the continent, Israel and the other countries on the southern fringe of the Mediterranean are full members of the union. It was rare for a meeting to be held in Israel because the Arab members would not attend. But the small, specialist news committee of which I was a member was made up entirely of northern Europeans, so there was no difficulty in inviting us.
While the EBU operates strictly as a non-governmental, multinational broadcasting alliance, it is occasionally afflicted with the thorns of politics, and not only of the Middle East variety. Yugoslavia had been a single member of the union but when the country disintegrated the new independent states applied for individual membership. All were admitted without question, bar one. Greece objected to Macedonia - not on the grounds of its eligibility, but because of its chosen name. Macedonia, the Greeks argued, was a province of Greece and there could be no other Macedonia. There were months of stalemate but eventually the new applicant was admitted as the Former Yugoslavian Province of Macedonia.
Back on the street of Mea She'arim it was politics which soon provided the answer to my bafflement at the many handshakes. Yair asked: "Does my name not bring any thoughts to your mind now that you here in Jerusalem? Does the name Stern not mean anything. . .Stern?" I had known for years that he was called Yair Stern but it was only among the Orthodox Jews of Mea She'arim that I finally made the connection: the Stern Gang.
Zionist resistance to the British administration in Palestine had many similarities to the struggle in Ireland against British rule. It was conducted mainly by the biggest Jewish militant group, the Irgun Zvia Leumi. When the Irgun suspended its attacks on the British at the outbreak of the second World War and decided to support the Allies in the fight against the common enemy, Nazi Germany, Abraham Stern set up a splinter group with about 40 hard-liners to continue the Zionist struggle.
Stern was born in Poland in 1907 and went to Palestine in 1925. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and won a scholarship to study Greek and Roman literature at Florence University. Returning to Jerusalem in 1933, he became an active member of the Irgun, taking the nom de guerre of "Yair" after the leader of the Jewish zealots who made the last stand against the Romans at Masada following the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. He wrote a manual on the use of the revolver and many articles advocating armed action against the British. Stern was also a poet of some repute and his poem Unknown Soldiers became the anthem of the Irgun.
He called his splinter group Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel); the British quickly dubbed it the Stern Gang. Stern believed in the creation of a Greater Israel based on the ancient Biblical lands stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.
He blamed Britain for not admitting more Jews to Palestine. Stern, indeed, regarded Britain as a greater enemy than Nazi Germany and there is evidence that he flirted with the Axis powers and received funds from Italy to buy arms. He had no sympathy for the Arabs and while an activist with the Irgun he was suspected of planting bombs in marketplaces to kill as many Arabs as possible.
The Stern Gang operated in small cells and concentrated on attacking government officials and sympathizers. One of the first actions was the assassination of a Jewish detective-constable, followed quickly by the ambush and murder of a Jewish deputy superintendent of police. Banks were raided to raise funds and in one incident two Jewish bystanders were killed when the escaping raiders fired on police.
Abraham Stern soon had a price on his head and in February 1942 British forces forced their way into an apartment in Tel Aviv where he was hiding. He was shot dead, allegedly while attempting to escape.
Stern became something of a martyr and instead of fading away the gang regrouped and increased its membership. Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel, became director of operations and was believed to have been involved in the gang's two most notorious assassinations. In 1944 the Dublin-born Lord Moyne, a member of the Guinness family, who was the British minister in the Middle East, was gunned down in Cairo. Four years later the gang killed Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN's mediator in Palestine.
In the same year the state of Israel was created and the Stern Gang, which had always been condemned by Jewish moderates, was suppressed. Unlike other terrorist groups, it did not spawn a political wing to further its objectives. But, as the handshakes for the son of Abraham Stern in the streets of old Jerusalem demonstrated, he and it have not been forgotten.