Lord Moyne in 1929. Photo source: UK National Portrait Gallery
The Assassination of Lord Moyne
Cairo, 1944
Lord Walter Moyne was serving as the British Minister of State in the Middle East in 1944, when he was gunned down in front of his home by two members of the Lehi. Justifying the assassination as a legitimate attack on an official of the British government — a colonialist foreign occupier whose restrictions on immigration left Jews at the mercy of the Nazis in Europe — the Lehi claimed the attack as “a step towards forcing the British Government to leave Palestine.”
His assassination shocked and outraged both the Yishuv and the British. Coming at a time when the Zionists had the sympathetic support of Winston Churchill — Moyne’s friend and political ally — the killing iced the groundswell of political and diplomatic support for the Zionist Movement’s goals. It kicked off a bloody campaign of resistance from the Lehi and Irgun against British rule.
