The Reckoning

October 20, 2014
Avraham “Yair” Stern, the head of the eponymous gang of anti-British terrorists in Mandate Palestine, was shot and killed in a Tel Aviv apartment by police inspector Geoffrey Morton on the morning of February 12, 1942. But did Morton shoot a man who was attempting to flee or did he kill Stern in cold blood? Military historian Bishop (Wings: The RAF at War, 1912–2012) unravels the mystery, providing important biographical information on both figures, particularly Stern, the man who was so vitriolically opposed to the British that he was prepared to cooperate with Italian fascists and Nazis. Morton is portrayed as a hard-working, dedicated civil servant, yet one who, during several libel suits in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, repressed—or possibly willfully distorted—what happened that February day. Bishop also devotes the last quarter of the book to what happened to the Stern Gang after Stern’s death. Among its actions that helped drive the British out of Palestine was the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, the British minister of state for the Middle East. Bishop’s fast-paced, well-written work sheds considerable light not only on how and why Stern was killed but on the final, violent years of the British mandate in Palestine.