Towards the end of the Second World War the unenviable task of trying to sort out Britain’s problems in her mandated territory of Palestine – problems involving Jewish determination to populate the Holy Land more speedily than the British Government thought wise – fell to Lord Moyne, Minister of State for the Middle East.

Moyne was based in Cairo, where a Jewish terrorist group, the Stern Gang, decided he was a “legitimate” target. Two of the Stern’s young members, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, were sent to Cairo to assassinate him. They shot the minister and his driver, Lance Corporal Fuller, in Hassan Sabry Street on November 6th, 1944, but were almost immediately arrested by an off-duty policeman.

Both men refused to take part in the proceedings at their trial in early 1945 and when the testimony was completed Hakim stood to make a statement. “We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represents with murdering thousands of our brethren, and of seizing our country and looting our possessions,” he said. “We were forced to do justice and fight.”

On being sentenced to death they sang a Jewish anthem. On Friday, March 23rd, 1945, they were dressed in the traditional ill-fitting red suits of condemned men in Egypt, marched barefoot to the gallows, blindfolded at the scaffold and hanged at Cairo Central Prison.