The minister of state’s daily lunchtime ritual was on schedule. Moyne emerged from his office, accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Captain A. G. Hughes-Onslow, and his personal secretary, Dorothy Osmond. Lance Corporal A. T. Fuller, Moyne’s backup driver, held the rear door of the long black limousine open as they entered and seated themselves. Just after 1:00 p.m., the car turned in to the gravel drive leading up to Moyne’s redbrick villa. Osmond paid little notice to the two young men—one blond in appearance, who, she thought, looked like an Englishman, and the other dark like an Egyptian—whom she saw standing by the gate as the car drove by.23
The limousine glided to a stop in front of the house, and Hughes-Onslow was walking briskly to unlock the front door when he heard someone say in English, “Don’t move. Stay where you are. Don’t move.” The voice was Hakim’s. Fuller was standing beside the limousine and opening its rear door when he looked up to find Bet-Zuri coming toward him. Bet-Zuri later stated that he twice ordered Fuller to lie on the ground, but the driver instead lunged for the pistol in Bet-Zuri’s hand. Three shots rang out, and Fuller collapsed on the driveway, mortally wounded. Hakim, meanwhile, had approached the rear of the car from the other side. He looked in the window at Osmond and told her not to move as he opened the car door and pointed his revolver directly at Moyne. Hakim fired three times. The first bullet hit the minister of state in the neck and the second in the abdomen. Moyne raised his hand in a feeble effort to ward off the third shot, which sliced through his fingers before lodging in his chest. “Oh, they’ve shot us!” Moyne exclaimed, clutching his throat, before losing consciousness.24
Hakim and Bet-Zuri ran from the residence to the street, where they jumped on their bicycles and pedaled furiously away. Hughes-Onslow was running behind them at a distance of about forty yards shouting for help. The two assassins tried to evade him and ducked down a side street before rejoining the main road. They were fast approaching the Bulak Bridge and were on the verge of making good their escape when a motorcycle policeman caught up with them. Bet-Zuri stopped and wheeled around, firing several warning shots in the air. The motorcycle policeman also dismounted, drew his pistol, and ordered Bet-Zuri to drop his weapon or he would shoot. Instead, Bet-Zuri took aim and fired at the motorcycle’s tires, attempting to deflate them. But the Luger’s magazine was empty. He was struggling to reload when the Egyptian policeman returned fire. A bullet struck Bet-Zuri in the chest. Hearing the commotion behind, Hakim immediately circled back to help his fallen comrade. In minutes, another policeman who had been guarding the bridge was on the scene, and Hakim and Bet-Zuri were under arrest.25
By that time, an ambulance and a doctor had arrived at Moyne’s residence and were en route to the hospital with the grievously wounded minister. He was admitted at 1:40 p.m. Multiple blood transfusions were administered, and Moyne briefly regained consciousness. But then doctors discovered that he was bleeding internally from the bullet that had punctured his colon and large intestine, and Moyne was rushed into surgery. As his condition grew grave, King Farouk himself visited the hospital. Despite the ministrations of the king’s personal physician, Moyne died at 8:40 that evening.26
Barely an hour earlier, at 5:30 p.m. London time, Churchill had broken the news of the shooting to the war cabinet. Initial reports stated only that Moyne had been critically wounded by two unidentified gunmen, neither of whom was an Egyptian. Indeed, both Hakim and Bet-Zuri had refused to speak. “We are saying nothing. We are waiting for the Court,” they declared in Hebrew, according to a terse statement issued by the Egyptian police. This at least provided one key lead—both men were Jews. It was for this reason perhaps that the prime minister told the cabinet that the Irgun was most likely responsible. Stanley provided a brief précis of the Irgun and its place in the constellation of Zionist organizations before expressing the opinion that if the Jewish Agency really wished to put an end to the violence, it could do so. Churchill then asked the colonial secretary to meet with Weizmann as soon as possible and impress upon him this point.27
Weizmann arrived at the Colonial Office a few hours later. Stanley informed him that “unless the Jews could rid themselves of this murderous tail, people like [Churchill] who had done so much for them in the past would feel relieved of any responsibility in the future.” In the summary of the meeting that the colonial secretary gave to Churchill, he reported that Weizmann was “naturally horrified” by the news and realized “to the full that this sort of thing is fatal to his hopes.” The Zionist leader was returning to Palestine on Saturday, following a five-year hiatus imposed by the war. He promised Stanley that he would do everything in his power to convince the Jewish Agency Executive that there “must now be war to the knife against these extremists. There must be no longer any reservation or hanging back but complete cooperation with the Government in crushing them.”28
The next afternoon, Churchill rose in the House of Commons to pay tribute to his slain friend. He and Moyne had worked closely together for more than thirty years. A selfless public servant, Moyne had served with distinction in two wars and had survived the carnage at Gallipoli, in France, and in Flanders, only to die, the prime minister mournfully observed, “at the hands of foul assassins in Cairo last night.” Britain’s affairs in the region had suffered a profound setback with his death. Over the previous year Moyne had devoted himself to finding an equitable “solution to the Zionist problem,” Churchill said. Then, echoing the same point he had made to Weizmann when they had parted only days before, the prime minister painted a picture of the minister of state that few in the Yishuv and no one in Lehi would have recognized: “I can assure the House that the Jews in Palestine have rarely lost a better or more well-informed friend.”29
Weizmann had sent a handwritten note to Churchill that same day: “I can hardly find words adequate to express the deep moral indignation and horror which I feel at the murder of Lord Moyne.” Carefully choosing his words, Weizmann also sought to shield the Yishuv from any retribution—and to salvage whatever he could of the prime minister’s encouraging words from just a few days before. The depth of Weizmann’s personal anguish is perhaps best evidenced by his observation that Moyne’s death hurt him more than even his own son’s. Michael Weizmann, age twenty-five, had been an aviator in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve when his plane was shot down over the Bay of Biscay in 1942. “When my son was killed it was my personal tragedy,” the Zionist leader later reflected. “Hashem natan, Hashem lackah [God gives, God takes]—but here [Moyne’s murder] is the tragedy of the entire nation.”30
The shock in Palestine was all the more profound because there had been no terrorist incidents since Wilkin’s slaying in September. Although this brief respite from a year of escalating violence had deceived no one into thinking that the terrorist threat had passed, the impact of the assassination was that much greater given the unusual quiet that it shattered. Moreover, like Weizmann, both Ben-Gurion and Shertok feared the worst—that the retribution inflicted on the Yishuv would be of a severity that would destroy all that had been achieved politically and diplomatically over the previous eighteen months. Ben-Gurion opened an emergency joint session of the Jewish Agency and Vaad Le’umi Executives the following day. “The situation is getting worse and we are facing the future in which our name will be execrated,” he declared. Shertok followed, criticizing both bodies for their previous failure to deal harshly with the dissidents. Dismissing arguments that cooperation with the authorities would lead to civil war, Shertok proclaimed that such a war “would be worth while, if it could save our future and salvage our chances, which are now clearly discernible on the political horizon.”31
Itzhak Gruenbaum, however, again rebuffed these arguments. The Yishuv’s cooperation on this matter, he reiterated, should be made conditional upon the government’s abrogation of the white paper. Eliahu Golomb exploded. The danger confronting the Yishuv, he stated, was far too serious to risk attempting to extract concessions from the British. Although Rabbi Yeh
uda Fishman and Emil Schmorak, who shared Gruenbaum’s views, were willing to countenance independent action by the Jewish Agency against the terrorists, they too remained staunchly opposed to any form of active cooperation with the government. After protracted debate, the matter was put to a vote: ten members supported full cooperation; five the Fishman-Schmorak course; with only Gruenbaum voting for his own option before resigning. The public statement that emerged from the joint session broke new ground in these official bodies’ willingness to go to war against the terrorists. “This revolting crime,” it declared,
committed outside the boundaries of our country under circumstances not yet cleared up, raises anew the growing danger of the continued existence of a terrorist gang inside Palestine. Terrorism in Palestine is calculated to wreck the chances of our political struggle and destroy our internal peace. The Yishuv is called upon to cast out the members of this destructive band, to deprive them of all refuge and shelter, to resist their threats and to render all necessary assistance to the authorities in the prevention of terrorist acts, and in the eradication of the terrorist organisation. Our very existence is here at stake.32
In Cairo, both Hakim and Bet-Zuri had remained silent despite being subjected to intensive interrogation, no doubt hoping to give the rest of the Lehi organization in Egypt time to flee or destroy any incriminating documents or evidence.33
But on November 8 both men suddenly admitted their crime. In a brief statement Hakim and Bet-Zuri declared simply, “We are members of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel movement and what we have done we have done on the instructions of this organization.” The text was revealed in a dramatic press conference given that afternoon. It was distributed to the Egyptian and foreign journalists in attendance along with a second handout containing further statements made by Bet-Zuri to the effect that he was pleased that their trial would take place in Egypt. He believed that the Arabs were friendly to Lehi and that he and his accomplice would therefore be either acquitted or given light sentences. Bet-Zuri’s fantastical views on Lehi’s popularity outside Palestine were only matched by his inflated accounts of the widespread support that he claimed the group enjoyed from the Yishuv and his conviction that the assassination would both let loose a deluge of financial contributions that would revitalize Lehi and shortly prove to be the opening shot in a “universal uprising” against British rule. Upon further reflection, British censors intervened and belatedly sought to suppress the information revealed in the second handout.34
Not until the following evening, however, did the authorities finally learn Hakim’s and Bet-Zuri’s real names. In addition, Bet-Zuri more specifically disclosed their motive. “We are fighting the British Government because it is bad,” he explained.
No calculations were made as to whether Lord Moyne was a good man or a bad man. It was considered only that he was the key man for Britain in governing the Middle East and as such [he] is responsible for what is happening in Palestine …
The reason for killing Lord Moyne is that it is a step towards forcing the British Government to leave Palestine.
Upon also being asked why the minister of state was singled out for attack, Hakim stated only, “I was sent by the organization expressly to kill Lord Moyne.”35
Shortly afterward, police discovered the apartment that both men had rented. It contained a veritable cornucopia of all the essential accoutrements required for a terrorist operation: two British army uniforms, two counterfeit army pay books, a forged navy pay book, and six blank leave passes, along with six cases of TNT and 612 rounds of Luger ammunition.36
From London, meanwhile, pressure was building on the Palestine administration to take precisely the sort of punitive action against the Yishuv that Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and Shertok so desperately feared. Stanley raised this on November 8, telling Gort that he wanted to be able to present to the war cabinet a menu of possible punitive courses of action. Britain’s “immediate and spectacular” response twenty years before when an Egyptian nationalist assassinated Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar (person in command) and governor-general of the Sudan, and Egypt had been fined £500,000 and humiliatingly compelled to withdraw its military forces from neighboring Sudan was prominently in his thoughts. The colonial secretary accordingly fastened on two options in particular: implementing the long-delayed operations to seize all illegally held Jewish arms and temporarily suspending Jewish immigration to Palestine. He regarded the latter option as ancillary to the former and more as an insurance policy designed to ensure the Yishuv’s active and continued cooperation beside the government against the Jewish terrorist organizations. It also had the virtue of being relatively straightforward to implement. Stanley recognized that the arms search option was far more problematic. “To be effective,” he wrote, the searches “would have to be done on the largest scale and it would be essential that there should be an overwhelming military force available both for the actual searches and for maintaining order throughout the country.” The colonial secretary concluded his message by emphasizing that any measures taken “should be immediate and that every effort should be made to dramatise them in the public eye. We have to consider the effect not merely upon Palestine but upon the Middle East and the world in general. Some striking display will be required in the interests of British prestige. Troop movements on an impressive scale would clearly be one of the best measures to achieve this end.”37
Gort agreed with the logic behind the arms search option. It would clearly demonstrate British resolve and also eliminate a long-standing challenge to the government’s authority. But, he cautioned Stanley, it ignored the consequences of failure. The high commissioner feared that should such an operation be less than an unqualified success, the damage to Britain’s prestige would be even greater than that already wrought by Moyne’s assassination. And with military forces in Palestine already understrength, he continued, success was far from certain. An operation along the lines envisioned by the colonial secretary would require the transfer of an additional infantry division to Palestine—which was unlikely given wartime priorities. In the circumstances, Gort suggested to Stanley that the arms search option be abandoned completely. Instead, he advocated a return to the policy that had been in force before the 1943 incident at Ramat Ha-Kovesh, when a search of that Jewish settlement provoked widespread rioting and had led to a prohibition on further such operations so as not to impede the war effort. Under those terms, the high commissioner would again be permitted to authorize limited operations against specific locations on a case-by-case basis—but with one new, critical proviso: that these searches would only be conducted in circumstances when there was sufficient likelihood of their unqualified success. Stanley accepted Gort’s glum assessment and duly apprised the war cabinet.38
The war cabinet considered the issue of response and reprisal on November 13. Although there was broad agreement that the Yishuv should be punished, there were sharp divisions over what form this should take and against whom it should be directed. Ideally, the people and organization responsible for the crime should bear the full weight of any punitive action. But because Lehi was a small, enigmatic underground movement, it was impossible to single it out for retribution and avoid punishing the rest of the Yishuv. This is why Churchill opposed suspending immigration, arguing that it would “play into the hands of the extremists” and thereby prove entirely counterproductive by undermining “the efforts being made by the Jews themselves to suppress the terrorist organisations.” The war cabinet generally concurred but was reluctant to take the immigration option completely off the table. Accordingly, it proposed that the Jewish Agency be warned that if the Yishuv’s full and unstinting cooperation against terrorism was not forthcoming, the government would be forced to reconsider this particular punitive measure. With regard to arms searches, the war cabinet decided to postpone further consideration of this option until the Joint Planning Staff had time to complete its own analysis of the proposed operation and the forces required to imple
ment it.39
Across the Middle East the initial shock over the assassination was giving way to widespread bewilderment and anger. Earlier that same day the first reports began to arrive in London from British legations across the region. They painted a disquieting picture of disbelief and astonishment that a week had elapsed since Moyne’s killing and still the British government had done nothing. From Baghdad, the British ambassador to Iraq, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, wrote of a country in shock. “General reaction,” he reported to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden,
seems to be one of expectancy that Britain will do something drastic or dramatic against [the] Zionists comparable [to the] sanctions which followed the Stack murder with which this crime is inevitably compared …
The assassination of Lord Moyne has brought murder to the fore as [a] political weapon, which in itself is bad enough in [a] country where violence is never far from men’s minds. But ultimate effect of the crime will depend largely on what action is taken to punish the assassins, and—equally important in Iraqi eyes—their masters.40
From Cairo, Brigadier Sir Iltyd Clayton, Moyne’s adviser on Arab affairs, wrote a lengthy memorandum laying out the dire consequences of continued inaction. After four single-spaced pages of typescript, which didactically recapitulated the government’s previous spinelessness in the face of repeated Zionist terrorist provocation in Palestine, Clayton got to the point. “All well-informed authorities in the Middle East,” he wrote, “agree that the murder of Lord Moyne is not the end of the terrorist campaign but only a stage in its development.” Indeed, he spuriously noted, “there are some grounds for believing that a ‘black list’ of British officials and personalities marked down for assassination is in existence.” British authority was being undermined and its prestige eroded, Clayton warned: “Already the Arabs in Palestine are reported to be saying that when the Sirdar [Stack] was shot in Egypt in 1924, the British turned the Egyptians out of the Sudan; when the District Commissioner of Galilee was shot by Arab gangsters in 1937, the British rounded up and deported to the Seychelles every important Arab leader in Palestine; but when the Jews shoot a member of the British Cabinet, nothing happens.” Inevitably, the notion that violence and terrorism pay in pressuring Britain would gain further currency with the effect that Palestine’s Arabs will “be driven and encouraged to adopt similar tactics, in the hope of a similar result.” Clayton’s message was clear. Failure to severely punish the Jews would have dire consequences. But, equally significantly, in his opinion, Britain had been presented with a timely opportunity to further circumscribe the Jewish national home and decisively claw back its nearly three-decades-old commitment to Zionism. “H.M.G. must publicly make it plain,” he warned, “that they do not support the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration and the creation of a Jewish State, which it is the avowed aim of the terrorist organisations to achieve. This involves a clear understanding that H.M.G. regard any obligations towards the Jews contracted as a result of the Balfour Declaration as having been already more than adequately discharged.”41
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