Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. This episode is sponsored by Andrea & Larry Gill, and by Tony Felzen in appreciation of his high school buddy, Connor Coffey, a native New Yorker, true mensch, and an avid Unpacking Israeli History listener down in Tennessee.
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Welcome to Episode 2 of our 2-part series on the Lavon Affair, known in Hebrew as esek habish: the rotten business, the complicated and often depressing story of Israel’s most embarrassing intelligence blunder.
So, let’s review. Last week, we opened with some background on the fast-diminishing status of Egypt’s Jewish community in 1954. Because most Egyptian Jews were not citizens, they were shut out of economic opportunities. Their prospects dimmed even further after the establishment of Israel in 1948. As bombs exploded in the Jewish quarter and angry neighbors harassed and intimidated Egyptian Jews, a significant number began making plans to leave for the Jewish state.
Including a handful of young idealists from a local – and illegal – Zionist youth group, which continued to operate in secret despite the harsh crackdowns on anyone suspected to be a “Zionist.” But when an Israeli emissary asked a handful of these idealists to put their aliyah plans on hold and serve the Jewish state from afar, they agreed. They were so completely in love with Israel and Zionism, they would do anything for the state!
So, beginning in 1951, Israeli military intelligence trained them to keep their ears close to the ground, in case they could be useful one day. That day came in 1954, as Egypt and Great Britain began negotiating Britain’s exit from the country it had more or less controlled since the 1880s. It’s a long time. Jerusalem eyed this development with alarm. The British troops stationed along the Suez Canal provided some measure of stability and deterrence in the region; once they left, nothing was stopping the Egyptians from cozying up to the USSR and marching across the Sinai to attack Israel.
So Israeli military intelligence hatched a plan. If they could somehow convince the British that Egyptian President Nasser was not in control of his country, that he was unable to safeguard their interests in the Suez Canal, then maybe the Brits would stay. And the best way to sow chaos? Set off bombs in strategic locations associated with Westerners, just like the Muslim Brothers had been doing for years. With any luck, the world would blame the radical Islamists, Nasser would look like a weakling without any control over his country, and the Brits would stay forever! It’s a pretty horrible story.
And in hindsight, when you’re a tiny and poor country without allies or even a dedicated arms supplier, it’s a pretty bad strategy to alienate even your fair-weather friends, like the US, by targeting Western infrastructure.
But the Israeli intelligence apparatus was young, untried, and desperate. So they decided to go for it. They were young. It would be easy enough to place a few tiny bombs in Western institutions and make it seem like the work of the Muslim Brotherhood. The bombs would be small, programmed to go off after hours so that no one would get hurt – but they would contribute to the country’s general chaos, convincing the Brits that leaving Egypt was a mistake.
Honestly, the most baffling part of this whole plan, in my opinion, was the fact that the Israelis truly expected the Brits to believe that the Muslim Brothers were setting off small, harmless bombs, because anyone even remotely familiar with the group’s MO understood that killing civilians was the point. That’s what they believed in.
For all its flaws, the plan might have worked – or at least not ended in failure, humiliation, and bloodshed – if the guy in charge were remotely competent. Or, at the very least, not a double agent.
But Avri Elad was both incompetent and a double agent. He swanned around Egypt like a king in his lime-green convertible, and Egyptian intelligence clocked him immediately. We don’t know how they convinced him to turn traitor, but whatever tactic they employed – threats, bribery, a baseball bat to the kneecaps – it worked. The young, idealistic Egyptian Jews who had volunteered for the mission had no idea that their every move was coordinated by the Egyptian authorities, and that four Jews would soon pay with their lives.
And that’s just the recap. Whew.
Today, you’ll meet the members of the cell whose lives were ripped apart. We’ll follow them through their show trial and their harsh sentences. Then, we’ll head across the border to Israel, as the Jewish state scrambled – and failed – to contain the fallout.
Part Two, Chapter One: Oh, Susannah
Victor Levy had loved Israel since he was little. At 11, he joined a Zionist youth group. At 13, he announced his plans to move to Palestine the second he was old enough. So when he was approached by an honest-to-God Israeli asking if he would be willing to do some work for the homeland, Victor jumped at the chance.
It was 1952, and the members of the cell had been sent to Israel to train for a mission whose parameters were unclear.
They were soaking up these last precious moments in the Holy Land before they returned to Egypt to await their instructions.
That’s how Victor Levy and Moshe Marzouk (mar-ZOOK) ended up at a farewell dinner in 1952, saying goodbye to his handlers and his fiancee, Susanne. And that’s where the operation got its official name, Operation Susannah: a semi-drunken dinner among friends who dedicated their secret mission to Victor’s fiancee.
They didn’t know that in just two years, their lives would be ruined. That instead of getting married in the summer of 1954, Victor would be abused and tortured in an Egyptian prison.
Getting caught seemed like a distant possibility. After all, they knew how to code and decode transmissions. How to identify ships. How to send secret messages and take photographs under the radar. How to make explosives.
No one had thought to teach them the other skills. Like how to withstand interrogation. How to create a cover. How to escape.
But they trusted their new handler, who they knew only as “Robert.” So when Philip Nathanson from the Alexandria cell asked about an escape route just in case of emergency, Robert swore he had arranged for false passports and a quick exit through Libya. This was a lie, of course, but Robert had an answer to every question, and the young people in both cells were dazzled.
After all, for the men and women of the so-called “spy ring,” Israel wasn’t just a country. It was an idea, a sort of cosmic justice after thousands of years of dispossession, of oppression, persecution built by the kind of men and women they wanted to be.
Avraham Seidenberg, aka Avri Elad, aka the traitor, had a way of spinning a highly convincing story from improbable details. He hinted that the string of small bombs they planned to set off was just a small part of the “real” work he was doing to destabilize the Egyptian regime and single-handedly save Israel from behind the scenes.
And because he was a real Israeli, and a war hero at that, they believed him.
And that’s how Victor, Philip, and Robbie Dassa, found themselves en route to the Alexandria post office on Friday, July 2, 1954, with tiny explosives, which were programmed to go off only once the post office closed. A post office might seem like a strange target, but “Robert” explained that an explosion in the center of the city, no matter how small, was sure to get people talking. The more people around, the harder it would be for the government to suppress the news of a suspicious explosion in a major metropolitan area. So they placed their packages, AKA primitive homemade bombs, on the counter and hurried out, hearts pounding.
My heart just started pounding imagining that.
Later that day, the boys took a stroll around the block to see the results of their handiwork. When they found the street cordoned off and swarming with police, they couldn’t stop grinning. No one had been hurt, and the bomb had barely even damaged any property – but it had been enough to send Alexandria police into a tizzy, and that was what mattered.
So when the time came for the second operation, the cell was more excited than nervous. This time, the targets were a little more pointed: the American cultural centers in Cairo and Alexandria. Remember: the whole point was to make Egyptians believe that another group was responsible. And the Muslim Brotherhood had a penchant for setting off bombs wherever Westerners congregated.
Once again, the plan worked perfectly. The bombs went off when the cultural centers were closed, injuring no one. And though only one newspaper reported the explosions, detailing a “short circuit” at the cultural center, both cells were elated. I can imagine the excited conversations that night, the conviction that they were making Israel safer.
The irony is heartbreaking. Because of course, they weren’t. They were putting themselves in danger while creating a moral quagmire – not to mention a PR nightmare – that lasted decades.
The piece de resistance of Operation Susannah targeted five locations: four Western-owned cinemas, and the railway station – targets chosen for what they represented. Neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the Communists were happy about all these symbols of the West digging their claws into Egypt. Of course the police would suspect them first.
So the agents split up, each targeting a different location. And then, everything fell apart.
Part Two, Chapter Two: Disintegration
By the time Philip Nathanson dropped off Victor at the Rio Cinema on July 23, he already had multiple explosions under his belt. So he did not expect a literal one.
But that’s exactly what happened when the tiny bomb in his pocket detonated earlier than expected, scorching his legs as he fainted from pain. When he came to seconds later, his entire lower body was screaming. So was everyone around him – ordinary people, lined up to see a movie.
Immediately, Egyptian police grabbed him, assuring the crowd, “Don’t worry, we got him, the hooligan responsible for all the explosions in the city.”
Philip hadn’t been trained for this, but he was smart enough to immediately deny. Deny, deny, deny. So as the police hauled him away, he kept up a stream of protest, yelling “get me a lawyer! How dare you treat an injured man this way!”
He only hoped that the other members of the cell had managed to escape in time. With any luck, the police would assume he was acting as a lone wolf.
Even under torture, the Alexandria cell didn’t breathe a word about the operatives in Cairo. But Egyptian intelligence knew everything. And soon, they had every single operative, including two who were barely involved.
In 1954, Moshe Marzouk (mar-ZOOK) was 28, a brilliant doctor who had already accepted a position as an anesthetist at an Israeli hospital. Suspecting that “Robert” wasn’t all he pretended to be, Moshe had already cut ties with the cell.
He didn’t know that Avri Elad had already given his name to Egyptian intelligence. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t participated. He was still doomed.
And so was Max Binnet (bee-NET).
As a lone-wolf Israeli intelligence officer, Max should have been kept entirely separate from the Cairo cell. Any contact could hurt his cover as a German prosthetics manufacturer.
But – proving, again, how clumsy and inexperienced Israeli intelligence was in the state’s early years – Max’s handlers occasionally asked him to drop off money or run other errands for the cells – a flagrant violation of operational security. Max complained repeatedly that his handlers were putting him in danger. By the time anyone listened, he paid for their mistakes with his life.
By the fall of 1954, the Cairo and Alexandria cells were blown, every member in jail. And an innocent man was dead.
Marcelle Ninio was the only woman involved in Operation Susannah, and the Cairo police didn’t expect any difficulty picking her up. But when they stormed her apartment, she was not there. Somebody else was.
Ever since Marcelle’s father died, the family had struggled financially, and to make ends meet, their modest home had become a kind of boarding house for Cairo’s poorer Jews. In the summer of 1954, one tenant remained: Yosef Karmona, a kindly, middle-aged divorcee with a daughter in Israel. He had watched Marcelle grow up, a doting surrogate father to this fatherless girl.
He had no idea she was living a double life.
So when the police knocked on his door with wild accusations, he was confused. A Zionist agent? Bombs? What were they even talking about?
Yosef knew nothing. But it didn’t matter how much he protested. After all, he was a Jew, living with a known Zionist agitator, with a daughter who lived in Israel.
After a while, Karmona’s protests turned to screams.
But when the neighbors came to investigate, police turned them away. Eventually, the screams gave way to silence. When the neighbors slipped tentatively through the unlocked door the next morning, they found Yosef’s body hanging. The autopsy showed he had been murdered before the noose was looped around his neck.
Yosef Karmona was the first fatality of the rotten business, but he would not be the last.
Meanwhile, ten young, talented, idealistic Egyptian Jews and one seasoned Israeli operative awaited their trial from squalid prison cells.
I doubt I need to tell you that Egyptian prisons are not a pleasant place for anyone. Just know this: despite the torture, the cells refused to turn on one another or even to scream. The pain was so bad that Marcelle Ninio tried to throw herself out a window, to spare her battered body further abuse.
Their only comfort in those horrible days was the fact that “Robert,” their handler, had managed to get away. Even then, they barely suspected that they had been betrayed. They were just relieved that he didn’t have to stand trial along with them.
Are you surprised there was a trial? After all, the police had already killed Yosef Karmona based solely on suspicion.
But the world was watching. The UK was watching. Most importantly, Egyptians were watching. And Nasser couldn’t pass up the chance to make an example of the “Zionist agents” wreaking havoc in his country. And there was no better publicity than a show trial.
Because it was a show trial. The outcome was predetermined – a compromise between the various factions in Egypt’s government.
The hardcore nationalists wanted every Zionist to hang. But the moderates were thinking about the PR nightmare of executing nearly a dozen young Jews. The world was watching, and Egypt needed to look like a stable, functioning country that didn’t execute minorities willy-nilly – especially ones who hadn’t actually killed anyone or even done much property damage.
At the same time, someone’s head had to roll. Nasser’s government was executing Muslim Brothers in droves, and if he spared these Zionist traitors while quote-unquote “real” Egyptians were being hanged, he’d have an uprising on his hands. There were internal Egyptian politics at stake. And someone had to pay.
The trial opened on December 11, 1954. The defendants understood very little of it. Only Moshe Marzouk (mar-ZOOK) and Robbie Dassa could make heads or tails of Egyptian Arabic. The rest watched in stunned silence, their ashen-faced families praying and crying from the gallery.
But Max Binnet (bee-NET) didn’t need to understand formal Egyptian Arabic to know he was doomed. After all, he was an IDF veteran and Israeli intelligence agent: a highly attractive catch for the Egyptian government. So as the trial dragged on, he tried repeatedly to end his own life. The night before he was set to testify, he finally succeeded.
And now, the court was in a tizzy. Because Max had been right: Egyptian authorities had planned to execute him. After all, they had agreed on two executions, a compromise between hardliners and moderates. But who could they hang in his stead?
They landed on Moshe Marzouk (mar-ZOOK), the brilliant doctor. It didn’t matter that he had distanced himself from the cell before any of the operations actually took place. Remember: the outcome was predetermined. If they couldn’t get Max Binnet, then Moshe Marzouk (mar-ZOOK) was the next best candidate.
Moshe didn’t know he would be executed until the verdict was read out. Until that happened, there was still hope. The cells waited for some kind of intervention from the State of Israel. A last-minute rescue, even an encouraging word slipped through the bars of their cells. But they got nothing. The State of Israel publicly disassociated itself from the so-called “spies,” afraid to risk even more embarrassment or diplomatic fallout.
Behind the scenes, the head of military intelligence, Benjamin Givly, was pulling every string he could with the French and German governments, begging for some kind of intervention. But the cells didn’t know that. So they faced their trial alone, without the backing of the state to which they had given so much, with no comfort but one another.
When the court reconvened on January 27, 1955 to read out the sentences, silence filled the room. No one had expected such harsh sentences.
Shmuel Azar and Moshe Marzouk: death by hanging. Philip Nathanson and Victor Levy: a life sentence of hard labor. Marcelle Ninio and Robbie Dassa: 15 years imprisonment. Meir Meyouhas (meh-YOO-chas) and Meir Zafran (zah-FRAHN): Seven years of hard labor. Two other members who had floated in and out of the cells were found not guilty and set free.
Even after the sentences were read out, some of the accused maintained hope of a miraculous stay of execution. So did the State of Israel. Though the two countries were sworn enemies, the Israeli government secretly made contact with the Egyptian authorities. Meanwhile, world leaders – including American president Dwight Eisenhower and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (juh-VAHR-halal NEH-ru) – flooded Nasser with appeals. But the Egyptians were resolute.
Four days after their sentence was read out, Shmuel and Moshe, two dedicated, idealistic men, were dead. Five more disappeared into the Nasser’s prisons, alongside Muslim Brothers, criminals, and sadistic guards.
The Egyptian media recounting every salacious detail with glee – whether or not they were true. Marcelle came in for especially bad treatment in the press, as headlines insinuated that she was not just a spy but a prostitute, who had debased herself and dishonored her family.
But the Israeli papers were curiously tight-lipped, reporting only that two Jewish men had been hanged and several more slapped with harsh prison sentences. And in the absence of substantive news that would explain what the heck was going on, rumors began to swirl around Israel.
Chapter Three: Fallout in Jerusalem
As the cells were being rounded up in the summer of 1954, Avraham Seidenberg, aka Avri Elad, aka “Robert,” aka the double agent who betrayed his fellow Jews, slipped back into Israel, where he received a hero’s welcome, the only participant in this caper who managed to get away.
But the celebration soon gave way to suspicion.
Because Elad’s debriefing took place behind closed doors, and the AMAN official conducting it didn’t take any notes. By the time Motke Ben-Tzur submitted his reports, the details had become hazy, and subsequent drafts were slightly different. But one theme remained consistent throughout each draft: Elad placed the blame solely on the members of the cell, disparaging them as rash and reckless. And in a moment of chutzpah, he even insinuated that they had turned on one another. Their failure, he implied, wasn’t his fault. That’s just what happened when you worked with amateurs.
Of course, the exact opposite was true.
But no one wanted to take the blame for this failure. Not the double agent who had betrayed the members of the cell. Not the handlers who had sent him on this mission in the first place. Not the head of military intelligence, Benjamin Givly, or any of his subordinates. So when the IDF Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, demanded to know what. just. happened., military intelligence went into overdrive trying to cover their behinds.
Early on, few people in AMAN were prepared to confront the possibility of a double agent in their midst. The possibility was too scary. Too dangerous. Too mind-boggling to even contemplate. Plus, he was a seasoned operative, and the cell members were amateurs. It wasn’t that hard to believe that they had messed up, despite his careful planning.
So when Dayan started asking questions in the fall of 1954, Givly told him that the Defense Minister, Pinhas Lavon, had authorized the mission on July 16, 1954. Which meant that the cells – who placed the first bomb on July second – had acted without authorization… further proof of their incompetence! Of course, no one thought to blame Avri Elad.
Lavon was furious. He claimed that he never gave the order, and in fact had only learned about the operation after it had all gone wrong. It was one man’s word against the other’s, and despite months of inquiries and investigations, no one was sure who was telling the truth.
Givly reminded the committee that military intelligence needed authorization for missions of this scope. There was a chain of command, after all. He suggested, delicately, that the scheme had been hare-brained, but since he was just a loyal soldier, a subordinate, he didn’t feel like it was his place to question his boss.
Lavon’s only recourse was to deny, deny, deny. But how do you prove a negative? How do you prove that you didn’t know, didn’t authorize, didn’t learn about an operation til much later? Especially when your opponent has documentation that you authorized the order?
Because Givly had written evidence on his side. Over the course of the inquiry, he produced a letter he had written to Moshe Dayan, the IDF Chief of Staff, in which he claimed that Lavon had authorized Operation Susannah three days before.
The letter was dated July 19, 1954.
Of course, Dayan didn’t have a copy of the letter, since he destroyed these updates immediately after reading for security reasons. And since it was now months later, he had no memory of what was written. But Givly’s secretary kept copies of everything. And there it was, in black and white: On July 16, a week before the first members of the cells had been caught, Lavon had given Givly the green light.
Lavon insisted the letter was forged. It’s not real, it’s not real. Maybe Givly had written a letter to Dayan on July 19, but there was no way the original letter had included that paragraph about Lavon giving the order, because he hadn’t. He hadn’t!
But it didn’t matter.
Lavon understood that heads needed to roll. And he knew that he wasn’t going to find any sympathy or support in the ranks of the military or the government, who just wanted to put this whole affair behind them. 1955 was an election year, and they had optics to think about.
So Lavon resigned, protesting the entire time that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, came out of his retirement to take over as interim Minister of Defense.
It was insult on top of injury. Because Lavon, who maintained his innocence, was a rival of Ben Gurion’s. And their rivalry, which continued even after Lavon’s resignation, tore their party apart.
Today, Israel’s Labor party is small and increasingly marginal. Back in the 1950s, though, Mapai ran everything. Mifleget Poalei Yisrael, aka the backbone of what later became the Labor Party, controlled the government as well as the labor unions that employed much of Israel. For all intents and purposes, Mapai was the state. So a split within the party was a big deal.
And the party was very split.
On the one side were Lavon’s supporters, including some big names, like Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol, two future prime ministers who viewed this whole affair as a witch hunt conducted by the military establishment. As far as Lavon’s camp was concerned, the entire military apparatus had totally messed up this operation. And now that the chickens were coming home to roost, the military establishment needed to throw someone under the bus. They weren’t going to sacrifice any of their own guys, it wasn’t going to happen, but they were all too happy to pin the whole thing on a patsy and call it a day. As they saw it, Lavon was the patsy the military establishment had chosen, a seemingly convenient victim who ended up being a total pain in the neck.
Because Lavon may have resigned. But he became obsessed with clearing his name, demanding new inquiries, new investigations, new committees – anything to demonstrate that he hadn’t even known about the order.
On the other side of the party was – you guessed it – the military establishment itself, with Ben Gurion at its head. Like Lavon, he also had some heavyweights on his side, including Moshe Dayan and future Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
It’s easy – at least for me – to think of Ben Gurion as a kindly old grandpa with funny hair and a penchant for randomly doing headstands. That’s how I think about him, sometimes. But his age, his headstands, and his iconic hairstyle could not obscure the steel in his spine or the ruthlessness required to build a country.
Don’t forget: just a few years before, Ben Gurion had commanded the Haganah, the pre-state paramilitary that would become the core of the IDF. The IDF was his baby, and he would absolutely NOT allow anyone to tarnish its name – especially not a political rival.
As so often happens, Ben Gurion and Lavon became the perfect foils – both equally obsessed with reopening an inquiry, but for such different reasons.
Lavon wanted to clear his name. Ben Gurion wanted to ruin Lavon – and prove that his army was beyond reproach. A remarkably petty vendetta – especially once he was re-elected Prime Minister in the election of 1955. So even as everyone else moved on, both two men agitated constantly for a new inquiry that would prove once and for all what really happened.
They got their wish. But it didn’t go the way Ben Gurion had planned.
In 1960, a new investigation uncovered that Givly and his secretary had forged the incriminating letter that claimed that Lavon had given the go-ahead on July 16th, 1954 – just as Lavon had claimed all along.
The plot thickens. Six years after the rotten business, Lavon was vindicated, though his career would never recover. But Prime Minister Ben Gurion – who probably had more important things to worry about – refused to accept the verdict. And this absolute obsession eventually cost him his party.
By 1960, most of Israel’s leadership just wanted to move on. And when it became clear to the party elites that their own Prime Minister either did not believe or did not care that Givly had forged documents, that he would pursue this vendetta to the ends of the earth, well, it was curtains for Mapai.
So when Ben Gurion resigned three years later, everyone understood that his excuse of “personal reasons” was mostly a cover for the fact that he had lost control of his own party, more interested in petty vendettas than justice.
And the injustices kept piling up. Because the whole story was so embarrassing, so awful, that members of the Israeli government tried to simply forget it. Even the young Egyptian Jews rotting in Nasser’s dungeons were tarred by their association. Sure, they’d given everything for Israel, but the government didn’t want to be reminded of their existence.
And so, in perhaps the worst part of this already horrible story, the Israeli government passed up its first chance to bring Philip Nathanson, Victor Levy, Robbie Dassa, Marcelle Ninio, Meir Zafran (zah-FRAHN), and Meir Meyouhas (meh-YOO-chas) home.
As you might remember from our three-parter on the Suez Canal crisis, check it out out by the way, that’s a good one to know, the British did end up leaving Egypt, completing their withdrawal in 1956. Shortly afterwards, Nasser shook the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal. And in response, Israel – along with England and France – attacked Egypt, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake and capturing thousands of Egyptian soldiers, including the president of the tribunal that had sentenced the members of the cells.
He admitted what the Israelis suspected: the verdict, which had been predetermined, had nothing to do with justice. And now that Israel had thousands of Egyptian POWs to use as bargaining chips, the Israeli government could finally rectify the grave injustice against their young operatives and bring them home. But they didn’t.
Moshe Dayan – who, as you might remember, was on Ben Gurion’s side of this whole disaster – felt it would be too embarrassing to reopen the whole rotten business, especially given how sensitive relations were with the United States. He had no desire to remind the US government, which was already pretty ticked off about this whole Suez Canal caper, that the Israelis had attacked an American library. And, let’s be real: he was military through and through. Like Ben Gurion, he had no desire to make the army look bad.
So the Israeli government exchanged close to 6,000 POWs for a handful of Israeli soldiers and a pilot, leaving the cell to rot for another 12 years.
In that time, Meir Zafran (zah-FRAHN) and Meir Meyouhas (meh-YOO-chas) served all seven years of their sentences, emigrating quietly to Israel the moment they were free. And though ordinary Israelis considered them heroes, the government slapped them with a gag order and forbade them to talk to the press. No one wanted a reminder of the whole caper, after all.
But in June of 1967, more than a decade after the whole debacle, the humiliation was forgotten. Israel had just won the Six Day War. The tiny Jewish state was riding high on a wave of euphoria. And with Egyptian POWs once again in Israeli hands, perhaps it was finally time to bring Philip, Robbie, Victor, and Marcelle home.
Despite the terrible betrayal they suffered at the hands of their government, the four managed to live productive, fulfilling lives in Israel. They married. They had children. They worked and traveled and contributed to the state of Israel. And in case you’re wondering, Victor did eventually marry his beloved Susanne, nearly two decades after their engagement. Somehow, despite the loss of 16 years of his life, he had no anger towards the state, proclaiming that “To me, being here today is the major reward for everything I did”.
Avri Elad never faced justice for what he did. But his actions did catch up with him. In 1956, he was caught trying to sell state secrets to the Egyptians while on assignment in Germany. (Yes – he was still being given assignments after the whole debacle.) And though he was strongly suspected to have betrayed the cells, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Plus, a trial would just reopen the old wounds. So he was charged with quote, “unauthorized contact” with the enemy and sentenced him to ten years. He maintained his innocence in the affair for the rest of his life.
That’s the story of the Lavon affair, and here are your five fast facts.
- Though they were mostly considered “foreigners,” the roughly 80,000 Jews of Egypt enjoyed a century of benign neglect, but by 1950, half the community had fled to Israel due to increasing persecution.
- This mass exodus meant the new State of Israel needed to build new intelligence networks, and in 1951, military intelligence operatives arrived to build up a cell of Jewish informants who could be “activated” when needed.
- In 1954, as Britain prepared to withdraw from the Suez Canal zone, the cells were asked to plant small bombs in Western cultural institutions in Cairo and Alexandria, creating chaos and making the Brits think twice about withdrawal.
- The cells were compromised by an Israeli double agent, arrested, and given a show trial. Two were executed. The rest, imprisoned.
- The double agent escaped justice, but the fallout reverberated through Israel for decades, as government and military officials pointed fingers and tried to distance themselves from the whole embarrassing affair.
Those are your five fast facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
I was very bummed out by this episode of Unpacking Israeli History. And at first, I struggled to find an enduring lesson that would tie it all together. How could I put a neat bow on this story of Israel just doing something just crummy?
And then I realized something. Maybe I didn’t need to put a neat bow on anything. Maybe my desire to wrap it all up was the real problem.
Because history is messy. People are messy. Especially a people learning to control their own story, instead of merely letting it happen to them.
For nearly two thousand years, Jews were often the objects in someone else’s story. Without a state, without institutional power, we were the world’s perpetual unwanted guests.
The powerful wrote history. We Jews only experienced it, usually from a passive position, usually powerless to change what was happening to us.
But sovereignty changed everything for us, the Jewish people.
For the first time in almost two thousand years, the Jewish people had to remember what it felt like to wield power. How to have a government, an army, an intelligence apparatus. How to handle petty political rivalries and embarrassing failures. How to carry the responsibility that comes with failure. How to balance security and liberty. Secrecy and morality.
In 1954, the Jewish people were only six years into this trial by fire. No one gives you a manual when you declare a country into being after the worst genocide in history. No one tells you how to lead, how to fight, how to win, how to wield power responsibly.
You learn those things for yourself – hopefully, without too much blood spilled along the way. And the Lavon Affair – as messy, as depressing, as sad and pointless as it was – was exactly that kind of learning experience.
It was a test of mettle, of leadership, of accountability. And Israel failed it.
There’s no room for failure in mythology. Myths serve a purpose. Unite a nation, keep a people going, even fight off the darkness when it threatens to consume.
But real life is far more complicated. The so-called “spies” at the heart of this tragedy had fallen in love with a myth. Sacrificed themselves for it. Believed they would be repaid in some way.
They were wrong. And they kept believing anyway.
The Israelis who trusted, who believed in the myth of a Jewish state that would always protect them, that would never fail – they were wrong too.
But once Israel became a real country, it ceased to be a myth.
Instead of shining armor, it shrugged on a frayed uniform. Instead of perfection, it offered reality. Unglamorous, sometimes petty, sometimes incompetent, sometimes heroic, sometimes ugly, always messy reality.
And when the six spies finally came home, they understood that. They had been betrayed. They had paid the highest price for believing in the myth.
And instead of bitterness, instead of rage, hatred, they chose reality anyway.
Before he was led away to be executed, Moshe Marzouk told his comrades that when it was all over, they had to leave Egypt, and go to Israel, and that’s exactly what they did. They built beautiful, productive, meaningful lives in the Jewish state – not lives of myth, or great heroism, or fairy tales, but real lives. Messy lives. Lives of gratitude and acceptance and faith.
Because despite, or maybe because of, their hellish stint in Egypt’s prisons, they understood something profound.
The Israel they had imagined did not exist. In its place was a real country.
A country with people who did marvelous things and who screwed up, who made mistakes, who – like all peoples – had its fair share of opportunists and traitors and slimy politicians and people blinded by their own power and ambition.
A country that operated like many others, with one exception. This country, for all its flaws, was a miracle. Their miracle.
Not because it was perfect. Not because it fit the myth. But because for the first time in millennia, Jewish people could write their own story. Be the masters of their own destiny, subjects of history rather than its playthings.
Sometimes, the story they wrote was tragic. This story is tragic. But the fact that Jewish people were able to write it at all – that was a miracle.
Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a rating on Apple or Spotify, it really helps other people find our show. And one more time, I love hearing from you. So email me at noam@unpacked.media.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode includes Adi Elbaz, Rob Pera, and Ari Schlacht. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here, see you next week.