Photo: Wikipedia
avraham stern
founder of the lehi/stern gang, 1940
Avraham Stern (1907-1942) was the charismatic and ruthless founder of the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi), the extreme right-wing militant group of the Yishuv. Originally from Poland, he immigrated to Palestine at the age of 18. He joined the Irgun in the early 1930s, where he was known as a passionate, romantic fighter with a love for the Jewish homeland. But when the Irgun chose to support the British against the Nazis, Stern broke away to create the Lehi in 1940. He believed that the British were the worse enemies of the Jews, because of their foreign occupation of Palestine, and launched various operations against them. He saw himself as a romantic religious warrior, a kind of Messiah figure, who through acts of terrorism would galvanize Jews around the world to take up armed struggle against the British. His was the only true voice of the Jewish People in Palestine. Forced into hiding, he was discovered by British police in an apartment in Tel Aviv, and shot dead.