Lavon Affair
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The aim of the 1954 Israeli Mossad project, codenamed Operation Suzannah was to bomb United States installations in Egypt, such as the United States Information Service offices, and blame Arabs, hoping it would harm Egyptian-American ties. It became known as the Lavon Affair or the Unfortunate Affair (Hebrew: העסק הביש pronounce: haesek habish), after the Israeli defense minister Pinchas Lavon who was forced to resign because of the incident.
Israeli Mossad agents from "Unit 131" 1 planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and intentionally left behind evidence implicating Arabs as the culprits. The conspiracy was intended to disrupt U.S. relations with Egypt but one of the bombs detonated prematurely and the Egyptian police swiftly found one of the terrorists. This arrest quickly led to the capture of eleven of the thirteen members of the spy ring. Some of the spies were Israeli, while others were Egyptian Jews recruited by Mossad. Two of the conspirators were sentenced to death and executed. Six others were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Lavon claimed that he had no knowledge of the conspiracy and he attempted to scapegoat and fire his deputy, Shimon Peres. The Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, appointed a board of inquiry consisting of Israeli Supreme Court Justice Isaac Olshan and the first chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Ya'akov Dori. The board failed to uncover who had ordered the conspiracy yet Lavon resigned in disgrace from his position as minister of defense and David Ben-Gurion resumed the post under Sharett. Lavon became head of the Histadrut.
Six years later, a district court found the intelligence operations chief guilty of perjury and forgery during testimony presented to the Olshan-Dori board of inquiry. Lavon demanded that Ben-Gurion clear his name but Ben-Gurion refused. The controversy broke out into open Knesset debates, fatally wounding the ruling Mapai Party. Eventually the Mapai Central Committee voted to expel Lavon from his position in the Histadrut.
The legacy of the Lavon Affair was especially unpleasant for Egyptian Jews and for Jews living in other Arab countries. They faced suspicion as a potential Fifth column and even persecution (including having their banks accounts frozen). While the Lavon affair may have acted as one catalyst for emigration to Israel, it could add little to the overall persecution of Jews which started roughly at 1948, and which reached a peak in the wake of the 1956 Suez War, when the Egyptian government expelled almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscated their property, and sent approximately 1,000 more Jews to prisons and detention camps. The Lavon Affair also generated deep suspicion of Israeli intelligence practices and encouraged speculation and conspiracy theories that terrorist attacks against Arab and American targets could be the result of Israeli false flag intelligence operations or agent provocateurs working on behalf of Israeli intelligence, a belief that is still popular (especially in Arab countries).
See also
- History of Israel (under "Lavon affair")
- Moshe Marzouk
External links
- The Lavon Affair - Israel and Terror in Egypt
- Excerpts from David Hirst's book: The Gun and the Olive Branch
- About the Lavon affair
Footnotes
- Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 282