Stern rebuke
Sir: I was fascinated to read the extracts from the interview Nicholas Bethel! had in 1977 with Yitzak Shamir, present Prime Minister of Israel (`Sharp methods...', 28 January).
Lord Bethell quotes Mr Shamir as saying, 'Morton was quite different. He escaped and he's still alive, but now it doesn't interest us. We are not going to kill him now.'
Jolly decent of him! If only I'd known of this at the time of the interview I could have been spared 12 years of quaking in nlY metaphorical shoes. Perhaps I ought to write to Mr Shamir to express my apprecia- tion for his rriagnanimity in granting me this reprieve. Actually — and in this respect I was more fortunate than so many of my peers — the Stern Gang bungled every attempt they made to assassinate me. On one occasion they succeeded instead in killing Solomon Shift (the senior Jewish officer in the Palestine Police) together with two very senior Jewish inspectors and one British inspector.
On another they blew up my car by
LETTERS
means of a remote-control landmine, but because they detonated it a fraction too early my wife, my two 'minders' and I were able to climb out of the wreck virtually undented. We should, of course, have qualified for a very posh funeral, so they had a couple of landmines buried in the cemetery to give the cortege a warm welcome.
On their final attempt they sent two emissaries to New York to put out a contract on me. I was to be rubbed out in Trinidad, but by the time it was all arranged I had moved on.
Mr Shamir's picture of Abraham Stern as a 'gentle man, moderate in expression and manner' does not equate with the gentle man' I knew — the man who organised the cold-blooded murder of many people, both British and Jewish, and who actually sent a delegation to the Lebanon to offer his services to the Axis commission there as head of the puppet government to be established in Palestine When Rommel and his Afrika Korps cap- tured it.
However, the part of these extracts that I find most intriguing is Mr Shamir's frank admission that, 'Jews have a tradition from the diaspora that no Jew must ever help a Gentile against another Jew'. Well, well, well!
Geoffrey J. Morton
Address supplied
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