‘for some reason which in retrospect I have never been able to understand, I decided to take Jack Bourne with me to Wadi Hawareth and to leave Wally Medler in charge in Haifa’.15 The eviction went off without incident. Morton returned from a long and dispiriting day to be told Medler and Ward were dead. The death of comrades was almost a routine event by now, but the news hit Morton very hard. Medler was not just a valued colleague but a close friend. He came from Norwich where his father was a wholesale fruit merchant and went to the city’s Junior Technical College, a pioneering academy for the sons of ordinary families, but left early to work in a solicitor’s office. Then, according to the local newspaper report on his death ‘the opportunity of seeing something more of the world and the prospects of advancement attracted him to the Palestine [Police]’. His hopes had been realized. In 1935 he became the youngest sergeant in the force. He was a good sportsman and the police welterweight boxing champion.16
Even allowing for the generosity shown to the newly (and violently) deceased it is clear that Medler was an exceptional man. ‘Trim and neat in figure, whether in charge of a traffic escort or on the sports field, in giving evidence in court or in the boxing ring, Walter Medler bespoke his character’ ran the appreciation by ‘BWF’ in the Palestine Post. He was ‘an omnivorous reader, yet not a bookworm, a popular messmate and comrade … the all-round athlete who had time for good books, good concerts, good contacts and wholesome entertainment’. Medler’s rank, BWF concluded, might be that of ‘second class sergeant’, but ‘his rank among his many friends was “prince”’.17
Morton, like most of his colleagues, took a cheerfully fatalistic view of life and death but the loss of his friend brought on an uncharacteristic fit of the blues. ‘Haifa lost much of the savour it had previously held for me,’ he wrote. ‘I was lonely and miserable and found it difficult to concentrate on my work.’18 After hearing the news he went to say his farewell to his friend in the mortuary. A silver pencil, splintered by the explosion, was sticking out of his breast pocket. He took it and kept it as a memento for the rest of his life.19 Among Morton’s papers is a photograph of Wally Medler. It is a well-framed shot showing him sunbathing with another policeman, Arthur Brument, next to the ruins of a Crusader castle on the Mediterranean at Athlit, just south of Haifa. Even though it is in monochrome you can almost feel the heat of the burning sand and admire the depth of the two men’s suntans.
Who had planted the bombs? The likeliest culprits were right-wing Zionists, angered by the campaign of murder and arson being waged by the Arab rebels against the Jews of Palestine. In the face of Arab aggression, the instinct of the Zionist establishment was to exercise havlagah – to show restraint and to suppress the desire to hit back. Such a stance was both moral and practical. Retaliation would almost certainly mean killing innocent Arabs along with the guilty, and undermine Zionism’s claim to high ethical standards both in its aims and in its conduct.
In showing restraint the leaders of Palestine’s Jews also hoped to gain political advantage. The great majority of Zionists, left and right, believed that their interests lay in cooperating with the empire. By holding back they were relieving the hard-pressed security services of an extra burden. Their good behaviour, they calculated, might persuade the British to look more favourably on their ambitions for statehood.
As the Arab revolt rumbled on and the murder of innocent Jews persisted, patience with havlagah began to wear thin. The political divisions of the Jews in Palestine corresponded to the politics of the countries they had left behind. The ideologies of old Europe were mirrored in the numerous parties and organizations that flourished in the Holy Land and the political spectrum contained communists, socialists and those whose aesthetic and beliefs bordered on fascism.
The ideological centre of gravity of the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine was known, lay firmly on the left. The dominant political force was the Mapai, in Hebrew the acronym for the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel, and the dominant political figure was its leader, David Ben-Gurion. He was born David Grün in 1886, in the Polish town of Płońsk inside the Russian Empire. His father, Avigdor, was a lawyer and enthusiastic Zionist and at the age of fourteen David founded a youth club to study the Hebrew language and promote emigration to Palestine. In 1906, after studying at Warsaw University, he practised what he preached by setting off to pick oranges on one of the earliest Jewish settlements in Palestine at Petah Tikva – the ‘gate of hope’. And it was hope, not fear, that drove him and the other young Zionists of Poland and Russia to Palestine’s shores. ‘For many of us, anti-Semitism had little to do with our dedication,’ he wrote. ‘I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution … we emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for positive reasons of building a homeland.’20
Ben-Gurion was an atheist but looked and sounded like an Old Testament prophet. He seemed to exude a pacific tranquillity, yet all his life was a fighter, starting from the day in 1908 when he took up arms to defend the agricultural settlement in the Galilee, where he was now living, from Arab attack. He was an idealist but also a superb political tactician. By 1935 he had established himself as both the head of Mapai and also the chairman of the Jewish Agency, which had been recognized five years earlier by the British as the legitimate representative of the Jews of Palestine and therefore the de facto government of the Yishuv.
His main ideological opponent was also brilliant, driven and charismatic. Whereas Ben-Gurion radiated calm, Ze’ev Jabotinsky hummed with restless energy. He had a chin that stuck out like the prow of a ship and a mouth like a downturned scimitar. His dark eyes scrutinized the world from behind wire-rimmed spectacles with ruthless intensity. He was a remarkable writer and speaker, expressing himself in statements and utterances that seemed to have been chiselled from stone.
He had been born Vladimir Zhabotinsky in 1880 in the lively cosmopolitan city of Odessa, in the Russian Empire. His parents brought him and his sister up with little reference to their Jewishness. He was converted to Zionism by an event that transformed the lives of many young Jews. In April 1903 in Kishinev,* a city on the south-eastern borders of the Russian Empire, Christian mobs embarked on a pogrom, killing forty-seven Jewish men, women and children while the tsarist police looked on. The incident was shocking not only for the amount of blood shed but because of the conduct of Jewish males, who ran away or hid when the rampage began.
The massacre taught Jabotinsky a lesson. It was summed up in a slogan: ‘Jewish youth, learn to shoot!’ He followed his own prescription, founding Jewish self-defence units across Russia. In the First World War he was a founder of the Jewish Legion, created to fight alongside the British against the Turks in Palestine. The move was designed to win British support for the establishment of a Jewish state. Jabotinsky admired the British Empire and would have preferred to work with it, but Palestine’s rulers regarded him as a troublemaker. They imprisoned him and finally banished him in an – inevitably unsuccessful – attempt to shut him up.
Jabotinsky’s style was emphatic and impatient. His vision of Zionism rejected gradualism and compromise and exalted action. He preached that every Jew had the right to enter Palestine, that only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and that only Jewish armed force would ensure a Jewish state.21
The need for some sort of military force had been recognized since Zionist settlers first began arriving in Palestine. After the anti-Jewish riots of 1920, a paramilitary organization, the Haganah (Defence), had been established under the loose control of Mapai and with the tacit acceptance of the British. The organization would eventually come under the overall control of Mapai and the Jewish Agency to form the ‘secret army of the Left’, as a British report put it.
