Moyne Not An Anti-Zionist?

I hope to read an academic article soon. The subject is the fall-out from the Lechi assassination of Edward Guiness.  It is "Politics and Ideology: Lord Moyne, Palestine and Zionism 1939–1944" by Ronen Yitzhak published in Britain and the World, Aug 2017, vo. 10, No. 2 : pp. 155-169.  It is not his first treatment of the subject.

From the abstract it claims it

refutes the claim that Lord Moyne was anti-Zionist in his political orientation and in his activities and shows that his positions did not differ from those of other British senior officials at the time. His attitude toward Jewish immigration to Palestine and toward the establishment of a Jewish Brigade during the Second World War was indeed negative. This was not due to anti-Zionist policy, however, but to British strategy that supported the White Paper of 1939 and moved closer to the Arabs during the War.

So, in other words, Moyne wasn't that bad, he just went along with anti-Zionism because...?

Because why?

Lord Moyne displayed apolitically pragmatic approach and remained loyal to Prime Minister Churchill. He therefore supported the establishment of a Jewish Brigade and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in the secret committee that Churchill set up in 1944. Unaware of his new positions, the Zionists assassinated him in November 1944. The murder of Lord Moyne affected Churchill, leading him to reject the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

I wonder, if I injure someone because I am loyal, say, to my friend, am I liable for the consequences? Does this not apply to Moyne?

Are not politicians to be moral and independent thinkers?

But am I to think that the 1939 White Paper of 1939 which fundamentally altered the idea of a reconstituted Jewish homeland, and actually negated it completely, and moving closer to the Arabs during the War are not deep anti-Zionist elements rather than simply "policy"?  A politician would have to be anti-Zionist to adapt to those positions.

That later Churchill sought to alter them, however inadequately - and let us not forget the four-year delay in establishing the Jewish Brigade, not to mention the refusal to bomb the railways to Auschwitz or the camp itself, horrific anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish decisions - should not lessen Moyne's own personal proclivities which some think anti-Semitic.  In his first article cited above, Ronen claims

Lord Moyne was not anti-Semitic, and he did not support Zionism. 

Yitzchak Shamir, one of the Lechi commanders who ordered the assassination continued to believe until his last lucid days that Moyne was anti-Semitic, although that did not intrinsically affect the decision to kill him.  And in that interview, Joanna Saidel writes

British Foreign Office documents confirm that a plan for partition was set for proposal. It is questionable whether the plan would have been accepted. According to Eban the motives for the plan were pro-Arab but would, nonetheless, serve the Jewish cause. Winston Churchill’s November 4, 1944 memorandum to Chaim Weizmann noted that Moyne had come over to the Zionist cause, albeit for pro-Arab motives...As unclear as the plan was there is no doubt that Moyne’s motivation was not to further the Jewish plan for statehood. Even Eban agreed, telling me: “He (Moyne) did this for Arab reasons. In other words, he said that unless the British were able to stop immigration, which they were not able to do, then the only way to save anything for the Arabs was by seeing that some part of Palestine was reserved for them. So he reached what I would call a Jewish State solution for anti-Jewish reasons, namely that otherwise the Jews would take over the whole of the country, and, therefore, partition was a sort of defense of the Arab position.”

Here is from Moyne's speech on June 9, 1942:

If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis it is surely those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination. Lord Wedgwood's proposal that Arabs should be subjugated by force to a Jewish régime is inconsistent with the Atlantic Charter, and that ought to be told to America. The second principle of that Charter lays down that the United States and ourselves desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; and the third principle lays down that they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live.

Surely it is time for the Zionists to abandon this appeal to force, and to seek a settlement with the Arabs by consent. The Zionist leaders expect about 7,000,000 Jews to be surviving in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, and they reject the policy of re-establishing Jewish communities under civilized conditions in Europe... I hope the Government will give serious consideration to the possibility of negotiations with the neighbouring States of the Levant to take part in re-settling the Jews. It is obvious that the fear of political domination by immigrant Jews will be decreased if they can be spread over a wider area and shared among different Administrations. A Federation of the Northern Arab States might well assist such a solution, but federation may be long in coming, and we ought at once to discuss with the Governments concerned to what extent and under what conditions they could admit Jewish immigration without swamping their own nationalities and independence.

Did Moyne compare Zionism to Nazism in there?  

Again:

If a comparison is to be made with the Nazis...those who wish to force an imported régime upon the Arab population who are guilty of the spirit of aggression and domination

By the way, Lord Josiah Wedgewood had little compunction when describing the Mandate Administration and its supporters as being anti-Semitic:

My Lords, before I begin to lose your sympathy I should like to say a word...now that we are discussing a question which relates to Palestine.I think that the whole gist of the speech of my noble friend Lord Davies points to one self-evident truth, which is that the Administration in Palestine is Anti-Semitic. I think that all our troubles in connexion with that country have come from this constant Anti-Semitic bias of the Palestine Administration. The evidence of that Anti-Semitism has been given in the speech of my noble friend, and, in addition to the things which he mentioned, I should like to refer to certain other facts. I will quote as evidence the toleration shown by the Administration to the Arab side in the riots of four years ago, and the escape of El Fawzi and the Mufti from that country when the riots were suppressed and their capture could have been effected. Then there was the question of the imprisonment of those Jews who dared to drill. They attempted to drill with the rifles that had been issued to them. It was against the law. They were all sent to prison, with sentences which range up to seven years' imprisonment for merely drilling in order to learn how to defend themselves. Some of them are still in prison. That, I think, is evidence of Anti-Semitism.

Can't wait to read it.

^

Africa, Sackville and one Lord Moyne

Well, the book is out.

The book of the African set:

THE BOLTER, By Frances Osborne. Illustrated. 300 pp. Alfred A. Knopf.


In a previous post (here) I had noted the connection to Lord Moyne, a victim of a Lechi assassination in 1944 (*), to the outrageous British African set.

The book review doesn't mention him. Now I have to somehow flip through the book.


================

(*)

An MP for Bury St. Edmunds from 1907-1931, Walter Edward Guinness was raised to a peerage in 1932. The first Baron Moyne occupied the posts of Minister of Agriculture, Colonial Secretary, Leader of the House of Lords and finally Minister of State and British Government representative in Cairo.

The scene of the crime was Villa No. 6 Hassan Sabry Street (today al-Abd Bldg which houses the Four Corners Restaurants) belonging to entrepreneur Maurice Ades. Prior to Moyne, the Rococo villa had been occupied by General Sir Archibald Wavell and Brigadier John Marriott. According to Artemis Cooper, author of Cairo During the War, Wavel's wife-Momo Kahn-had "transformed the house adding opulent oak doors and paneling, an assortment of white furniture, large fishbowls full of white flowers, and a sunken bathtub fit for a Roman emperor."

But there was no Roman emperor at home on 6 November 1944, only the scion of the Guiness Beer empire and his young driver. They had just returned from Grey Pillars in Garden City where Moyne coordinated the British and Allied war efforts in the Middle East from his offices in the handsome three-story building at No. 10 Tolombat Street.

Hidden in the bushes just inside No. 6 Hassan Sabry were two young zealots. Having stalked the place for the past few days, they were familiar with both the surroundings and their intended victim's military-like routine. The quiet neighborhood consisted of a handful of villas and a tiny police complement where Hassan Sabry Streets intersects Gezira. It was over in a matter of seconds. The Right Honorable British Minister and his driver Lance-Corporal Fuller were shot at point blank range as they got out of their official car a few meters from Africa's foremost polo and cricket fields.

My Historical Curiosity

Found this here:

Samir Raafat
Cairo Times, 8 June 2000

Among the first batch of historic blue plaques to be mounted in Zamalek is one that says "Lord Moyne (1880-1944) British Minister of State was murdered on this site by two Stern Gang terrorists on November 6."


Plaque placed in Cairo Cathedral in 1945 in memory of Lord Moyne

An MP for Bury St. Edmunds from 1907-1931, Walter Edward Guinness was raised to a peerage in 1932. The first Baron Moyne occupied the posts of Minister of Agriculture, Colonial Secretary, Leader of the House of Lords and finally Minister of State and British Government representative in Cairo.

The scene of the crime was Villa No. 6 Hassan Sabry Street (today al-Abd Bldg which houses the Four Corners Restaurants) belonging to entrepreneur Maurice Ades. Like many prosperous Zamalek residents, Ades was quick to cash in on a booming wartime real-estate market.

Prior to Moyne, the Rococo villa had been occupied by General Sir Archibald Wavell and Brigadier John Marriott. According to Artemis Cooper, author of Cairo During the War, Wavel's wife-Momo Kahn-had "transformed the house adding opulent oak doors and paneling, an assortment of white furniture, large fishbowls full of white flowers, and a sunken bathtub fit for a Roman emperor."

But there was no Roman emperor at home on 6 November 1944, only the scion of the Guiness Beer empire and his young driver. They had just returned from Grey Pillars in Garden City where Moyne coordinated the British and Allied war efforts in the Middle East from his offices in the handsome three-story building at No. 10 Tolombat Street.



Hidden in the bushes just inside No. 6 Hassan Sabry were two young zealots. Having stalked the place for the past few days, they were familiar with both the surroundings and their intended victim's military-like routine. Any outside interruption was discounted. The quiet neighborhood consisted of a handful of villas and a tiny police complement where Hassan Sabry Streets intersects Gezira. At the worse of times this was manned by a bicycled constable.

For sure the victims never stood a chance. It was over in a matter of seconds. The Right Honorable British Minister and his driver Lance-Corporal Fuller were shot at point blank range as they got out of their official car. Two lives brutally terminated, not at the warfront but on a sleepy Zamalek Sreet, a few meters from Africa's foremost polo and cricket fields.

By the time anyone realized what had happened, the terrorists would have made it safely back to Palestine via a prearranged safe house on the other side of town.

But they didn't.

To their misfortune an out-of-district police constable was unexpectedly passing by on a motorcycle when he overheard gunshots. Sensing something was wrong he instinctively gave chase to two men rushing off on bicycles. The fleeing murderers were overtaken on Fouad Al Awal Bridge (a.k.a. Abou el Ela Bridge, now dismantled).

Confronted with irrefutable evidence neither assassin could deny his guilt. Nevertheless, they argued their case with a logic known only to diehard fanatics: they were carrying out orders from a Zionist terror network operating inside British Mandated Palestine. By finishing off Moyne they were sending a message directly to the highest echelons of the British Foreign Office: "Stop interfering with Jewish immigration into Palestine, or else..."

The two assassins, Eliahou Bet-Zouri and Eliahou Al Hakim, both in their early twenties, were members of the Stern Gang then under the control of Yitzhak Shamir--the same man who would later became Prime Minister of the new state of Israel. They received capital punishment and were subsequently hanged at the insistence of the British government.

As the mood changed and Western psyche increasingly imbued with a feeling of collective guilt regarding the atrocities of World War II, the two terrorists were eventually exonerated. They became the subjects of folk tales, books and poems. For Lord Moyne's assassination rather that stem the tide against the fate of Palestine and the Palestinians had instead hastened Britain's exit from Mandated Palestine.

In 1975 the bodies of the two assassins were exhumed from an empty corner of the Jewish cemetery of Bassatine north east of Maadi and sent back to Israel. No sooner had they arrived when the then-Prime Minister, a young general called Yitzhak Rabin, personally gave Moyne's assassins a military funeral of the type usually reserved for men of distinguished valor. Moreover, the Eliahous were buried at Mount Herzl in an area reserved for the nation's eminent citizens.

The Hassan Sabry Street terrorists had become champions in the eyes of the Israeli public.

Remember Lord Moyne? Assassinated by Lechi?

Well, he's popped up in a story about a fashion queen:-

Jock’s wife, Vera, went off with Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, and they travelled together around southeast Asia, the Pacific islands and the frozen north. Lord Moyne produced two books, with photographs by Vera Broughton – Walkabout and Atlantic Circle – before he became a government minister, and in 1944 he was assassinated in Cairo by Zionist extremists.

Who was Jock?

But Issie’s grandfather Sir Henry Delves Broughton, known to all as Jock, had indulged himself so much that he had been forced to start liquidating assets, selling off land in sizable chunks to finance his horses, his gambling, his estates in Ceylon, his travels in East Africa and elsewhere, and his idle life of bridge, croquet and extravagant weekend house parties, when he hired a band to entertain guests on the train up from Paddington. The parties were sometimes written up in Tatler. In those days the family appeared in Tatler rather than worked for it.

Jock was said to have raised and spent £1.5m, a colossal sum in the days before the second world war. By 1939 there were less than 4,000 acres left. Jock’s wife, Vera, went off with Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, and they travelled together around southeast Asia, the Pacific islands and the frozen north. Lord Moyne produced two books, with photographs by Vera Broughton – Walkabout and Atlantic Circle – before he became a government minister, and in 1944 he was assassinated in Cairo by Zionist extremists.

Jock and Vera had two children: a daughter, Rosamund, and a son, Evelyn, who would become Issie’s father. With Vera gone, Jock met and married an aspirant blonde socialite, Diana, who was younger than his own son, and together they went to start a new life in Kenya, joining the dissolute white aristocratic settlers known as the Happy Valley set, who drank, took drugs and swapped partners for sex, apparently oblivious to the fact the Nazis had begun a world war and the old days of empire were all but over. Within three weeks of Jock and Diana’s arrival in Kenya in late 1940, she had begun an affair with Lord Erroll. Less than two months later, on January 24, 1941, Lord Erroll was shot and killed in his car.

Jock was tried and acquitted of the murder and returned home to England. His son, Evelyn, confronted him about his excessive spending, which was effectively cheating Evelyn out of his inheritance. Jock was said to have chased his son out of his study with a riding crop. Jock was now also suspected of two insurance frauds, arranging for the theft of pearls and paintings he owned and claiming for them on recently enhanced insurance. He must have been desperately broke.

Jock killed himself just before Christmas in 1942, overdosing on the barbiturate medinal at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool, where he had evidently gone to commit suicide, asking not to be disturbed in his room. The writers Cyril Connolly and James Fox wrote about the murder of Lord Erroll in this magazine in 1969. Connolly referred to medinal as oblivion’s boarding card. Fox went on to publish an account of the case, White Mischief, which became a film with Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi, and Joss Ackland playing Issie’s grandfather Jock.

Who is Issie?

Isabella Blow she is, er, was.

Helen gave birth to Issie in 1958, followed by Julia in 1961, John in 1962, and Lavinia in 1965. John died in a freak accident in 1964 at the age of two, which Issie always described as a drowning but, according to the records, was actually a result of choking on food. Somehow the boy fell in some shallow water – possibly fresh rainwater in an otherwise empty pool – in the garden of his house on the estate, while his parents were elsewhere. The water caused him to regurgitate his lunch of baked beans, and one or more beans lodged in his throat so that he choked to death.

According to Issie, John died in her arms while their mother, Helen, had gone to put on some red lipstick for a family photograph, and this was the origin of her own fascination with red lipstick and vivid overdressing. Helen has never given her version of events except to say it was different from Issie’s remembering. Helen would not talk to me for this article.

Issie became a fashion person, more exactly, the fashion director at Tatler, arranging and styling photo shoots and spreads (Isabella Blow, a British fashion editor, aristocrat and aesthete whose gift for identifying and promoting new talent was occasionally overshadowed by her own Surrealist plumage, as the NYT has it), but her end was sorrowful:-

She escaped again from the Harrow clinic, using her old Condé Nast taxi account to call a cab to take her to Cheshire, near her old family home. She went to a hotel, undressed, took pills and vodka and lay naked on the bed – “like Marilyn Monroe”, as she later put it – waiting to die. Frantic phone calls by Philip and others traced her via the taxi firm to the hotel. The manager was called. As she described it, she was interrupted by this gentle knocking at the door and a weak little English voice: “Isabella, Isabella, is everything all right in there?”

“Everything’s fine, thank you. Go away.” But the manager persisted, and she eventually had to abandon suicide and get up and open the door. She ended up being taken by the police back to hospital in Harrow, furious with Philip on the phone at one in the morning for stopping her.

She texted friends from her mobile and signed herself “Miserabella”. She sometimes started to walk off Tube platforms, and would have to be pulled back. She once filled a sink and tried to drown herself by immersing her face in the water. “Oh God,” she would say. “I so want to die.” Then she would burst out laughing. She repeatedly asked one friend to get her a gun. Sometimes, he told me, he became so exasperated with her that he just wanted to give her a gun and say: “Go on, go ahead, do it.”

...She went to Kuwait for a shoot with Sheikh Majed al-Sabah, the owner of the Villa Moda fashion stores. The assignment became difficult and, rather than being the easy return to work her friends had hoped, it led to a new suicide attempt and a spell in hospital, during which a suspected cancerous growth on her ovaries was discovered. Back in England the doctors decided there was no cancer, only cysts that needed to be removed. During that operation a widespread ovarian cancer was identified after all. Many people believed Detmar had made up or exaggerated the cancer to disguise Issie’s true cause of death, but he insists she was “riddled” with it, and though it was not necessarily life-threatening it would have needed chemotherapy.

“It wasn’t caused by smoking,” said Issie, a confirmed B&H smoker when the cancer was discovered. She loved the Cigar Bar at Claridge’s, and was never happier than when sitting there in a revealing black dress with a glass of champagne, wreathed in smoke, holding forth on her latest theme or obsession. “She was clever, eccentric, elegant. She would have amused every century,” said Kamel Belkacemi, a French stylist who was close to Issie in her last months. “She was really an artist.” Issie would have liked hearing that. She planned a party at Hilles for the first weekend in May. Haluk was invited but couldn’t go. Otherwise it was just Detmar, her sister Lavinia, and Philip Treacy with his boyfriend, Stefan Bartlett. Issie decorated the rooms with flowers and placed a book on Wallis Simpson by Philip’s bed. But by the time he arrived she was in hospital, having swallowed weedkiller on Saturday morning, just as Detmar’s father, Jonathan, had done in the same house 30 years earlier.

Detmar spoke to Issie on the Sunday for about two hours. “We both knew, but talked of art, fashion, cooking, a white pony and sunshine. It was very special.”

She died on Monday morning.

Ah, the English, the eccentric English.



Source