From Contemptible Terrorists to National Heroes: The Reburial Ceremonies of Lord Moyne’s Assassins and the Shift in Israeli Collective Memory on the Eve of the “Upheaval”

Abstract

In June 1975, the State of Israel held a series of three state ceremonies as part of the process of transferring the bones of two members of the Lehi underground (the “Stern gang”). Thirty years after they were executed and buried in Cairo, coffins with the bodies of Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim were transferred from Egypt onto the Israeli army forces in Sinai and were reburied in Jerusalem. On 6 November 1944, in Cairo, the two assassinated Walter Guinness, First Baron Moyne, a cabinet member residing in Egypt and officiating as the British minister of State in the Middle-East. The deed was perceived at the time by most of the Jewish Yishuv circles in Mandatory Palestine as an ignominious, insane act of personal terrorism, in contravention to Jewish ethics and universal morality, as well as detrimental to the immediate and long-term Zionist interests. The consensus vis-à-vis the view of the two young Jews’ actions as negative and harmful encompassed the vast majority of Jewish circles in the country from left to right. And lo and behold, 30 years later, the Israeli government, led by the Israeli Labor Party, held state ceremonies in a process in whose denouement the assassins would be reburied on Mount Herzl, Israel’s official pantheon to heroism. This article seeks to examine the event and its import through a layered perspective based upon the research of collective memory, society, culture, and Israeli politics. The reburial of Bet-Zuri and Hakim summoned an affair from the past that had cast its shadow over the Israeli present of the mid-1970s. The event was fashioned according to the historical consciousness that was shaping during this period, which may be characterized as a crisis stage in Israeli society, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War (October 1973)—a phase whereby the hegemony of the Labor Movement eroded. I shall argue that the significance of this affair cannot be subsumed in the turnaround that manifested itself in the stance of the Israeli establishment toward the assassination of Lord Moyne and its perpetrators. It may be regarded, moreover, as a landmark for the shift that took place in the concept of heroism in Israeli consciousness. The modus operandi of the Yitzhak Rabin government vis-à-vis the affair was dual: on the one hand, it chose to render the event state-owned and acknowledge the assassins as legitimate Zionist heroes. On the other hand, the government did not offer a narrative that would clarify or elucidate the act. In fact, it left the arena open to other parties—Lehi veterans, rabbis, and journalists—for commenting on and casting content onto the ceremonies. I shall interpret the silence of the Rabin government as an expression of the weakening of the Labor Movement political center, as well as the erosion of its cultural role, and will argue that its attitude bespeaks an incipient manifestation of the privatization of memory in Israel.