Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne - Aftermath

Aftermath

Although the group had been targeting British Mandate personnel since 1940, Moyne was the first high-profile British official to be killed by them (several failed attempts had been made to assassinate the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael). This was therefore the opening shot in the new Lehi campaign.

Jewish authorities in Palestine, fearful of British retribution, were quick to distance themselves from Lehi actions. On the news of Moyne's death, Chaim Weizmann, who later became the first President of Israel, is reported to have said that the death was more painful to him than that of his own son.

British prime minister Winston Churchill, who once described himself as a "Zionist", for the time being tempered his support for Zionism. Moyne had been sent to Cairo because of their long personal and political friendship, and Churchill told the House of Commons:

"If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of an assassin's pistol, and the labours for its future produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past". He also added "I can assume the House that the Jews in Palestine have rarely lost a better or more well-informed friend"

The Times of London quoted Ha'aretz's view that the assassins "have done more by this single reprehensible crime to demolish the edifice erected by three generations of Jewish pioneers than is imaginable."

Moyne's parliamentary friend and cousin-in-law, Henry 'Chips' Channon M.P. told his diary:

"I went to sleep last night with strange emotions. Walter Moyne was an extraordinary man, colossally rich, well-meaning, intelligent, scrupulous, yet a viveur, and the only modern Guinness to play a social or political role... He was careful with his huge fortune, though he had probably about three millions."

In November 1943, a committee of the British Cabinet had proposed a partition of Palestine after the war, based loosely on the 1937 Peel Commission proposal. The plan included a Jewish state, a small residual mandatory area under British control, and an Arab state to be joined in a large Arab federation of Greater Syria. The Cabinet approved the plan in principle in January 1944, but it faced severe opposition from the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden among others. "Moyne's position differed from that of nearly all the British civil and military officials in the Middle East: the consensus of British official opinion in the area opposed partition and opposed a Jewish state; Moyne supported both." The partition plan was before the Cabinet for final approval in the same week that Moyne was assassinated, but the assassination caused it to be immediately shelved and never resurrected. Moyne's successor in Cairo, Sir Edward Grigg, was opposed to partition. Some historians, such as Wasserstein and Porath, have speculated that a Jewish state soon after the war had been a real possibility.

The historian Brenner writes that the purpose of the attack on Moyne was also in order to show the efficacy of armed resistance and to demonstrate to the British that they were not safe in any place as long as they remained in Palestine. The assassination also seemed to have an impact on the Arab side, particularly in stimulating Egyptian nationalism. Brenner makes a comparison between Moyne’s death and the assassination of pro-British Ahmad Mahir Pasha. There were Lehi members who advocated the formation of a "Semitic Bloc" opposing foreign domination, and this made it possible for Arabs to actually join Lehi.

In 1975, the bodies of Ben Zuri and Hakim were returned to Israel in exchange for twenty prisoners from Gaza and Sinai. They were laid in state in the Jerusalem Hall of Heroism, where they were attended by many dignitaries including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Ephraim Katzir. Then they were buried in the military section of Mount Herzl in a state funeral with full military honors. Britain lodged a formal protest, but Israel rejected the criticism, referring to Ben Zuri and Hakim as "heroic freedom fighters". In 1982, postage stamps were issued in their honour.