A member of one of the Jewish underground militant groups that sought to end the British Mandate in Palestine and establish the State of Israel suggested that then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, should be assassinated, according to the British newspaper Telegraph.
Records of the British military intelligence unit MI5 reveal that a member of the Lehi pre-state militia confessed when captured by mandate authorities that a fellow Lehi member wanted to assassinate high-ranking British politicians, including Churcill and then-Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.
Winston Churchill.
Before the State of Israel was established in 1948, several Jewish underground military organizations operated in what was then mandatory Palestine, include the Hagana, the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, and the Lochamei Herut Israel, also known by its Hebrew acronym Lehi, and often called the Stern Gang after its leader Yair Stern.
The underground groups conducted military campaigns against symbols of British power and are partially credited with convincing the British government to withdraw its troops from Palestine and hand responsibility over to the United Nations, who then voted in 1947 to partition the country into Jewish and Arab states.
Eliyahu Ben-Zuri, the Lehi member that the Telegraph reports is said to have desired Churchill's death, was executed for the murder of another British official in the region, Lord Moyne, the U.K.'s minister resident in the Middle East. Ben-Zuri killed Moyne, a close confidant of Churchill, in Cairo.
The encrypted reports were sent by a British military officer to his superiors in London only after Ben-Zuri was hung in 1944. In a 1946 telegram, a major in the British armed forces wrote, "Stern Group are training members to go to England to assassinate members of His Majesty's Government, especially Mr. Bevin."
British officials apparently feared an assassination attempt on Bevin's life during a planned visit to Egypt to initial a diplomatic accord. "If a fanatic intended to carry out an assassination and was prepared to disregard his own safety there would be very little that he could not do," an MI5 memo stated.
The records reported on in the Telegraph reveal that the concerns held by British officials over Jewish nationalist suicide-assassins are not entirely dissimilar from the fears of Israeli government officials over the threat of Palestinian suicide bombers.
