Ahead of the 25th of Shvat, we remember Avraham Stern – the warrior poet who ignited the armed struggle against British rule in Palestine.
By synthesizing the radical political education he received from his Komsomol (All-Union Leninist Young Communist League) youth movement with the revolutionary vision of Jewish destiny put forward by Palestine’s Chief Rabbi Avraham Yitzḥak HaKohen Kook, Stern created a tendency that would ultimately become known as “Sternism.”
He was the first to identify the British Empire as an enemy of the Jewish people and founded what would become the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Leḥi) underground.
Seeing his movement as a 20th Century expression of the same force that manifested as the Sicarii rebel fighters in ancient times, Stern took for himself the underground name “Yair” after Sicarii leader Elazar ben Yair – best known for leading his Masada-based followers in taking their own lives rather than be conquered and enslaved by Rome.
Like the fearsome Sicarii guerrillas of antiquity, Leḥi fought a bitter armed struggle to free the land of Israel from foreign rule. But unlike the Sicarii, Leḥi actually succeeded.
By that time, however, Yair had already been taken from the world. On the 25th of Shvat, 5702 (1942), he was shot dead while handcuffed by British detectives in Tel Aviv.
The British had actually made a fatal error when they murdered Yair because in doing so they freed the spirit of revolution and allowed it to permeate the Jewish people until even Yair’s political opponents took up arms against the empire.
Following his assassination, Yair’s comrades regrouped and continued the struggle. After several successful prison breaks and daring actions, they successfully antagonized the contradictions between the Zionist organizations and the British Mandate regime in order to drag many Zionists into the anti-British struggle.
Leḥi also identified British imperial interests in Palestine and struck at those interests until the price of occupation became more expensive for the British than the benefits of exploitation. When the empire finally terminated its mandate over Palestine, official British documents revealed the decision to be a direct result of the Jewish anti-colonial struggle.
Yair was one of the most revolutionary Jewish visionaries of the modern age and should be remembered as the figure most directly responsible for the liberation of Eretz Yisrael from foreign rule.
