"LECHI"
(FIGHTERS FOR THE FREEDOM OF ISRAEL)

THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Essays in a History of Trial and Error
Vol II

In Lieu of a Foreword

Lechi - The Formative Years is the fruit of a lasting research into the origins of modern Jewish underground movements, in course of the protracted hundred years war of the Jewish liberation movement for self-defense, independence and freedom. It swells in particular on the genesis and history of Lechi (The F.F.I. "Fighters for Freedom of Israel") the smallest of Israeli underground organizations, the first to hoist the banner and wage a relentless struggle against foreign, imperialist British rule.

The Lechi underground has been relatively short lived, and its history was probably the most tragic of all modern movements. An essay entitled 'What was Lechi, and who was Yair?' published in Sulam (February 1962), written by Professor Israel Eldad, one of Lechi top leaders, states: "Lechi and its struggle lasted seven years. Lechi was the smallest of all Israeli underground movements, but the most influential in thought and deed. Its decline and demise was shocking and painful. It disintegrated," writes Eldad, in a style reminiscent of one of Yair's poems, "on the torn remnants of a purple carpet."1

Painful as it certainly must have been to many of its members, Lechi vanished, and died a natural death as soon as it had completed its task and fulfilled its destiny. Its struggle lasted seven years from the time of its establishment, when it was born out of a split in the
"Etzel" (Irgun Tzvai Leumi - The N.M.O. National Military Organization) in June 1940. It knew times of failure, tragic entanglements, the death and imprisonment of the core of its leadership, the desertion of many others, and - the final blow - the tragic end of its leader, Avraham Stern, (Yair), murdered while handcuffed and disarmed, by the British police. Then came its revival at the end of 1942, through continuing strife and struggles, successes, climaxes, and painful losses and defeats, until its final disintegration with the establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, its former leaders are dispersed among almost all the shades and colors of the political spectrum from left to right, while one of its leaders, the man who organized and molded the crushed remnants into a powerful underground organization again, became in 1983 the Prime Minister of the Government of Israel. In a talk given at the Conference of the Fighters Party, held in April 1949, Yitzhak Shamir refers to the impossible task which he faced when he made his first escape from prison in 1942: "I have recently read Begin's reminiscences in which he relates how they started with 400 men, several machine guns, some tons of explosives and a hundred guns," says Shamir. "What did we have to start with? 400? - That would have been a dream for us. We didn't even have 40! Did we possess even one machine gun? Did we even have 10 kilograms of explosives?!"2

This, then, was the state of affairs towards the close of 1942. We also have Shamir's testimony of the state of affairs a year earlier, towards the end of 1941, a few days before Shamir was himself caught and arrested. In an interview in Ma'ariv of February 3, 1967, marking the 25th anniversary of Yair's death, Shamir relates how he met Yair on a dark, cloudy night during a wartime blackout, and how they strolled along the city streets which were their ususal meeting places. "Yair," said Shamir, "was talking with complete certainty of his imminent death. I shall never forget his words. 'When they catch me they are going to kill me straight away and resent the excuse that I tried to escape.' He was absolutely calm. I can remember every word of his. He said: 'Never mind! Our example will inspire many others to continue the struggle. I am absolutely confident that the struggle will not come to an end with my death, but will rather gain power.' He even explained something we were able to understand only after his death: 'Struggle does not dissipate strength; it engenders it.'"3

Avraham Stern the venerated ideologist, politician, leader of the NMO, then of Lechi, knew clearly and with certainty what lay ahead. He was aware of his fate many years before he encountered it, because he had chosen it. Stern was a poet. In Anonymous Soldiers, written in 1932, one of his first poems, later to become the anthem of the NMO, then of Lechi - almost all the elements of his future life and fate are revealed. The refrain runs, in a word-for-word translation, a s follows:

In the red days of the pogrom-riots and blood,
In the dark nights of despair
We shall raise our flag in villages and in towns,
Inscribing there: Defense and Conquest.4

Lechi arose in one of those darkest hours. Describing those times, the historian of the "Hagana" opens the chapter about the "post-White Paper" period: "In the few months preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, the Zionist movement and the Jews in Israel found themselves in a deep political crisis. Negotiations which had been continuing with the British Government, failed, and ended with the proclamation of the White Paper in May 1939. With this proclamation, 21 years of cooperation with Britain came to an end. The price of this breach of alliance," the historian continues, "was paid with the blood and soul of European Jewry and resulted in the elimination of the source of our national strength and the severance of any hope for the future."5 When I try to find a telling characterization of that tragic, desperate historical instance, I can find none better than that of Victor Serge, the anarchist revolutionary, who conjures: "Living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing left but to fight for an impossible escape."6

Two outstanding personalities made almost identical statements at the time. They came from opposite political poles, and were for years bitter political opponents. Later they both became Prime Ministers of Israel: David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin. In September 1938, at the "Beitar" Conference in Warsaw, Begin contended the following: "The Jewish national Movement began with practical Zionism. Then came political Zionism, and now we stand at the threshold of military Zionism. Events will inevitably come to open confrontation, otherwise Zionism will be eliminated."7 In April 1939, Ben-Gurion made a similar statement: "After the era of Hibat-Zion (which means romantic, practical Zionism), and the subsequent era of political Zionism, we are now at the threshold of a new era: the era of militant Zionism." A year later, at the conference of the Zionist Executive Committee, he make his statement more explicit: "There is now only one hope for Zionism only if it becomes militant Zionism. The Zionism of lofty ideas and empty phrases will not last."8

The question thus was how to transform lofty Zionism into fighting Zionism against Britain, which at that crucial and most dangerous moment in the history of the Jewish people had betrayed and abandoned it to its tragic fate. However, simultaneously, Britain was the only power left, fighting Israel's bitterest enemy of all times - Nazi Germany. It was a tragic situation: Britain could continue to hunt Jewish refugees, expel them for the shores of their place of last hope, and still be certain that the Jews would continue to stand firmly at their side, because, as Malclolm MacDonald put it: "They had no choice."

Lechi arose out of that historical trap. In his illegal radio transmission of August 1941, Yair echoed Ben-Gurion and Begin: "The times of Mapai's Hibat-Zion, and the revisionist's political Zionism, are over. It is now the turn of fighting Zionism." For him, however, that meant that "the Hebrew Nation can be redeemed, and the Hebrew State revived, only if the nation itself will dare to begin fighting against the foes of Zionism."9

Yair felt that there could be no unconditional alliance, and that an unconditional alliance with Britain would bring about the physical extermination of the Jewish people in Europe, and the extinction of any hope for the future.

He stated clearly, "as much as a change in the British policy can induce us to mobilize all our forces in her favor - so, too, the continuation of her present policy can only bring about a terrible catastrophe."10

Thus, there started a desperate armed clash with all its tragic and inevitable results. To compare and assess the choice made, I can find no better example than that of the Russian revolutionary, Andrei Zhelyabov (one of the leaders and victims of the "Peoples Will" organization), who described their adoption of terrorism as "the worst possible alternative in the most impossible historical circumstances." In his choice, Yair knew with certainty that he was sealing his own fate and the fate of his closest friends. Was it a suicidal decision? It was, as far as his own life was concerned. "We know that our road will not be lined with roses; we know that we are going to face imprisonment and the gallows," he writes in one of the issues of Lechi's clandestine journal, In the Underground, "But we shall not retreat, because we are definitely convinced of the justness of our cause. We are certain of victory." Yet they also felt that victory was to come "over their dead bodies," as another Russian revolutionary, A. Mikhailov, had put it. In In the Undergound, No 5, of January 1941, the translation of a passage from P.S. O'Hegarty's book, The Victory of Sinn Fein (Dublin, 1924) was published. Though the passage dealt with the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916, they could strongly relate to the situation of Lechi in 1941.

"The rebellion exploded upon the Irish people. They did not expect it, neither did they want it ... If Ireland at that week of the rebellion could have laid hands on Tom Clark and his associates, they would have torn them to pieces ... The Rebellion of 1916 had been, from the start, a lost cause, and a voluntary sacrifice of their blood. Those who planned and led it did not hope for victory. They knew that they were not going to win. They knew that they might mount the scaffold. But they also knew that this would save the soul of the Irish people. Never did a group of people start on a more desperate road with a cleaner conscience and greater courage. They did it for Ireland's soul."11

While ostensibly dwelling on the Irish Easter Revolution of 1916, Lechi was of course alluding to its own choice and its own fate. In the Hanuka issue of December 1940, there was a "dated" essay on "Yehuda the Maccabee," written in 1884 by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the resurrector of the Hebrew language, "The Maccabees greatest exploit was his death in battle with the enemy," writes Ben Yehuda, and continues, "The valor of these heroes in their death will strengthen the spirit of the Jew in our desperate times."12 He had in mind the period of pogroms in Russia in the 1880s. This mood corresponded with the spirit of Yair's poem of 1934.13

By its desperate choice to fight against the government which implemented the White Paper of 1939, while Jewish people were slaughtered in Europe - and by making that choice in the face of an impossible dilemma - Lechi became, as Eldad has expressed it, "not only the first to open the struggle against the British Government; not only the sole fighting underground which never put down its arms, not even for a single moment; but also the only group that saw the British as a foe and a foreign ruler, against whom war was imperative and imminent."14 "Lechi," adds Eldad, "was also the first to make it clear, that the struggle was not against this or that White Paper, but against the foreign rule itself which had usurped authority and published White Papers. Not against a bad High-Commissioner, but against the very establishment of a foreign High-Commissioner, even if it were benevolent."15

The view, held by a tiny minority, was at that time, a crucial political and ideological turning point. Later, it became a generally accepted view, but only with the advent of the long-awaited, and seemingly "friendly" Labor government in Britain, which rapidly betrayed all its previous commitments to Zionism and to the Jewish people. The tiny Lechi underground party, which decided to carry out its concept of fighting Zionism by declaring war on the foreign ruler was soon beaten and almost liquidated. Isolated, despised and persecuted, they were losing their best men in hopeless and futile clashes.

This ordeal brought about two cardinal changes in the character and methods of warfare of the Lechi undergound. First came the structural and ideological transformation from a military underground organization into what they termed as an underground of revolutionaries. From soldiers of a hierarchical military body, subject to the authority of commanders, the Lechi fighter turned into a revolutionary, subject to loyalty to an ideal alone. The other crucial change consisted in the fact that Lechi abandoned its plans of armed military rebellion and abandoned even the idea of partisan warfare. They were too few and too weak. They now espoused acts of individual terror, as had been adopted in the past by Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, the Social Revolutionaries in particular. Another source of inspiration was that of the Polish Socialist Fighting Organization of 1904-1909, led at that time by Pilsudski, which resorted to what they termed "the armed deed." In the Lechi brochure of February 1944, dedicated to Yair, we find a passage of Yair's, which points to his sources of inspiration. "A fighting body, a revolutionary organization does not have to, and cannot, attach itself to establishing institutions. Did the Polish Fighting Organization have any, or did the Sinn Fein in Ireland, or the Russian Revolutionaries have any?"16

Individual terror as a method was not chosen by formal decision but rather evolved by trial and error, as a fatal escalation, typical of many other revolutionary underground movements. In a letter of June 2, 1970, to Boyer-Bell, responding to a draft of Boyer-Bell's research of the FFI, Eldad writes: "You state that it was decided to use terrorist rather than guerilla methods. This is simply not so. There was never such a decision. The fact that we chose this method was a direct consequence of the fact that we were so few; our numbers grew, we also resorted to guerilla tactics."17

If pressed to state my own position vis-a-vis this dilemma, I would argue that if there was no formal decision, there remained an ideological background to this choice. There were, as I have stated above, the Russian social-revolutionary example and the Irish and Polish revolutionary experiences. In August 1943, we find in one of the first issues of Hechazit (The Front), Lechi's illegal ideological organ, an article entitled ""Terror," whose author remains unknown (despite all my efforts and investigations), which runs as follows:


There was a time when the question of terror was hotly debated in the land of revolutions - Russia - but the period of those debates has long since receded into past. An argument can arise from incorrect presentation of the question. If the question is: Is it possible to start a revolution or to bring about liberation by means of terror? - The answer is NO! If the question is: Do these actions help to bring revolution and liberation nearer? - The answer is YES! Firstly, terror is for us a part of contemporary political warfare, and it plays a very large role. In a language that will be heard throughout the world, even by our wretched brothers beyond the borders of this land, it is a proof of our war against the occupier. It is not aimed at persons, but at representatives, and is therefore effective. And if it also shakes the population out of its complacency, so much the better. Thus, and for no other reason, the battle for liberation, will commence."18

I find it helpful to cite this anonymous article because of its emphasis on adopting "individual terror," which "is not aimed at person, but at representatives." There lies the distinction between modern blind, indiscriminate, and brutal terrorism - of the Palestinian or Baader-Meinoff brand - and the individual terror of the Russian Social Revolutionary brand, as adopted by Lechi.

In a essay entitled "Four ways of Struggle," by I. Eldad, and published in No. 4 Hama'as (The Deed), March 1946, there are repeated calls to attack the main arteries of the foreign rule - the staff and the headquarters. He also states: "We shall not attack British women and children in the streets of London."19 Again and again this is the message, and it should be borne in mind that Eldad was one of the most extreme and radical of the Lechi leaders. In his aforementioned letter to Boyer-Bell, Eldad also refers to the question of the moral justification of "individual terror." He writes: "In justification of individual acts of terror against central figures of the administration, we frequently raised the question of whether history itself might not have been changed if only, between 1933 and 1939, someone had succeeded in assassinating Hitler."20 A similar argument was also raised by the left-wing Lechi leader Yelin-Mor, when he was interviewed by a London Thames Television journalist in 1977. When asked, if he found revolutionary violence of the kind used by Lechi justifiable, he retorted that he did not know of the history of any nation that had achieved its freedom without resorting to violence. Yet, he contested, the brand of violence that Lechi had used was more justifiable and more moral, because it had concentrated on objects and on persons who were directly responsible for the crime perpetrated. If, at the close of World War II, he told the journalist, you had been forced to choose between assassinating the Mikado or dropping the atom bomb, you would surely have chosen to assassinate the Mikado."21

In his brilliant and reliable work on history of Lechi, Yelin-Mor talks about his meetings in the underground with Eliyahu Golomb, head of the Hagana. When Eliyahu Golomb posed the question, why Lechi had resorted to such drastic actions, as the assassination of Lord Moyne, or the repeated attempt on the life of the High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael? Yelin-Mor's reply was: "In our view the political impact of an action-of-war is the product of two factors: the extent of the fighting force, and the intensity of the action." (He meant, that if one had a larger fighting force, its operations would not need to be so dramatic or so intensive.) "We are a small group in comparison with the Hagana, and therefore our actions have to be spectacular and intensive," he said.22

There is another element which distinguished Lechi's principle of individual terror from the brutality of modern, indiscriminate terrorism. To make this distinction clear, an example will best serve the purpose. Camus, in his book The Rebel, in which he attempts to point out where the limits of terror lie, can arrive at no clear cut doctrinal solution but resorts, instead, to an example chosen from the history of the Russian Social Revolutionaries. Ivan Kaliayev refused to throw his bomb at the carriage of the Grand Prince Sergei, because he had noticed at the critical moment that it was also occupied by his innocent wife and children. Later Kalaiyev succeeded at a second attempt, which, unlike the first attempt, occurred at such a time when his presence was so conspicuous that his attack was rendered suicidal.23

One can point out in the history of Lechi numerous examples of this kind. One of them, only much later disclosed, involves Yehoshua Cohen, among the boldest and most representative Lechi leaders, later to become Ben-Gurion's closest friend at Sde-Boker. On January 20, 1942, a dangerous and vital assignment was entrusted to Yehoshua Cohen, namely, the elimination of two brutal and much hated heads of the Jewish Department of the British CID: Morton and Wilkin. Neither time, nor energy, nor sophisticated planning had been spared for this operation. In the instructions which he received and accepted, Yehoshua Cohen was ordered to carry out the attempt by any means, even at the cost of his own life. Then, as he was about to detonate the explosion, following a previous explosion, which had served as a snare, Yehoshua noticed that numerous innocent bystanders were assembled at the target area for the blast. He felt that he could not accomplish his assignment and so cause their wanton death. Risking his own life, he then withdrew and did not carry out the commission. Forty years later, when this could all be brought to light, he said that it had been one of the hardest decisions of his life; But were he to be presented once again with a situation of this nature, he would have again chosen the same path. In fact, Morton and Wilkin, whose lives were spared by Yehoshua's split-second decision that had been guided by his conscience, later personally killed unarmed Lechi prisoners; and it was Morton who murdered Yair, the leader of Lechi.24

There were two predominant factors inherent in this kind of warfare, which determined what I would term its moral limits. One was direction and planning from the center. Here I shall cite Yitzhak Shamir from his speech at the Fighters' Conference of April 1949. When someone accused him of excessive concentration of power in the Lechi Center, he retorted, "If there was in fact an excessive concentration of power, and if we did sometimes watch carefully over everyone's moves, and often clipped overzealous wings, there were serious reasons for doing so. You should remember that we started after failures, which were caused by anarchy, and by many a desire to act independently; and terrible catastrophes befell us on this account."25

Individual terror had to be carefully planned, watched and directed. On the other hand, there was a second factor inherent in this method of struggle, namely the individual fighter's decision, which as can be seen from the example of Yehoshua Cohen, was indeed sometimes crucial. The fact that the moral standard of most Lechi fighters was exceptionally high was a safeguard that the delicate, thin line of moral limits would not be overstepped.

When Eliahu Hakim, one of Lechi's two assassins of Lord Moyne, was already out of danger, he noticed that his comrade Eliahu Betzuri had been wounded and caught. No instructions, no previous planning could have guided him how to act in this split-second - he made his own decision. He returned from his position of safety to help Betzuri and to share his lot with him - together they went to the gallows.26 This illustrates yet again that thin line, that distinguished the Lechi fighters from the indiscriminate, cold-blooded terrorist of the modern ilk. The Lechi fighter would resort to a violence that he hated, knowing as he did so, its limits and its moral risks. In this sense he could be seen as following in the tradition of the Social Revolutionaries of Russia and of their leader Grigori Gershuni, who, in a bitter dispute with Lenin once contended, "Only a revolutionary party which does not breach the revolutionary morality - the highest morality to be implemented in life - only such party contains the force of life. A socialist party can win only by moral integrity and not by physical predominance."26 On another occasion Gershuni stated: "Means that do not befit the aim can pervert the aim forever, and this being so, terror must be treated as a drug, that while it can cure, may also kill. Only one who has mastered the anguish of terror and revolution, only he who knows the moral contradictions inherent in them, is armed against slipping and falling."27

Yelin-Mor stated his intentions towards the Yishuv (the Jewish community in the land of Israel), as: "We desire to be the catalyst, the accelerator of the historical process, until the majority of our people stand up in arms to fight foreign rule." On another occasion, meeting the Hagana leaders - Eliahu Golomb, Israel Galili and Moshe Sneh - in April 1945, Yelin-Mor declared on behalf of Lechi, that Lechi was ready to dissolve its separate organizational existence and carry on as an ideological faction, only if the Hagana would offer an active-Zionist line of action, in which Lechi members could be given an outlet for their determination to fight.

The State of Israel emerged out of the common struggle by the three underground movements. Although they had come into conflict and often even confronted one another, they did finally, by a fortunate turn of fate, which Hegel would have called "the cunning of history," in fact complement one another. When Lechi had fulfilled its historical destiny, there was no longer any need for its separate existence; and though many of its members vehemently deplored the fact, Lechi merged into the varied political fabric of Israel.

Zeev Ivianski

NOTES
1. Sulam, No. 4, February 1962, p. 5 (in Hebrew).
2. The First Conference of the Fighters' Party, March 1949, Ramat-Gan: Publ. p. 39.
3. Ma'ariv newspaper, February 3, 1967, pp. 7,8.
4. Avraham Stern (Yair), Collected Poems (in Hebrew), 4th ed., 1967, p. 19.
5. History of the Hagana (in Hebrew), Am-Oved publishers, Tel-Aviv, 1973, pp. 9-11.
6. Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, London, 1953, pp. 1,2.
7. Op. cit. 'Undser Welt,' Warsaw, September 23, 1938, (in Yiddish), History of the Hagana.
8. History of the Hagana, Vol III, op. cit. pp. 20-21.
9. August 1941, illegal transmission, Lohamey Herut Israel (Fighters for Freedom of Israel), Collected Works, Vol. I, Tel-Aviv, 1959, p. 91.
10. Ibid., pp. 91-94.
11. Cited in In the Underground, No. 5, February 1941, Lechi: Collected Works, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 53-55.
12. In the Undergound, No. 3, December 1941, Lechi: Collected Works, Vol. I, p. 38.
13. Yair, Poems, (in Hebrew), op. cit., p. 33.
14. Sulam, monthly, cit., 1962, pp. 29-32.
15. Israel Eldad, Ma'aser Rishon ('First Tithe') (in Hebrew), 1976, Tel-Aviv, pp. 107-108.
16. Yair, Lechi: Collected Works, Vol. I, pp. 397-398.
17. I. Eldad, Letter to Boyer-Bell of June 2, 1970, ibid.
18. Hachazit, July 1943, "Terror", Lechi: Collected Works, Vol. I, op. cit., pp. 141-144.
19. Hama'as, No. 4, February 1946, Lechi: Collected Works, Vol. II, pp. 99-100.
20. I. Eldad, Letter to Boyer-Bell, June 2, 1970, ibid.
21. Interview with Yelin-Mor, on January 19, 1978, Beit Yair Archives.
22. Nathan Yelin-Mor, Lechi: People, Ideas and Deeds, Tel-Aviv, 1974, pp. 237-238.
23. Albert Camus, The Rebel, London, 1967, Penguin, pp. 248-251.
24. See: Y. Eliav, Wanted, Jerusalem, 1983, op. cit., p. 39.
25. The Fighters Conference, 1949, op. cit., p. 39.
26. N. Yelin-Mor, Lechi: People, Ideas and Deeds, op. cit., pp. 220-221.
27. V. Chernov, Grigori Gershuni (in Yiddish), ed. Workmens' Circle, New York, 1934, pp. 33-34.
28. N. Yelin-Mor, Lechi: People, Ideas and Deeds, pp. 245, 263.