Pinchas Lavon and the "Ugly Affair"

By Richard H. Curtiss

Whether or not it's a media conspiracy, when there's good news about Israel or bad news about an Arab state, it's on Page 1. Conversely, bad news about Israelis or good news about Arabs is on Page 65. Editors who break the rule lose advertisers and, eventually, their jobs. Here's some information you may have missed if your local newspaper doesn't have a Page 65.

The fighting between Jews and Palestinian Arabs that preceded and followed the May 15, 1948 proclamation of the state of Israel secured Israeli independence. It also doomed three British-backed Arab monarchs who had sent soldiers to help the untrained Palestinians.

King Abdullah's Jordanians had defended their positions bravely, but the British officers who still commanded many of their units refused to pursue retreating Jews into areas awarded to Israel under the UN partition resolution. When the fighting ended, therefore, Israel held large areas awarded to the Arabs, but the Jordanians held virtually nothing that had been awarded to the Jews. Palestinians felt betrayed and King Abdullah was assassinated in 1951 in Jerusalem.

The well-trained Iraqis had withdrawn before the fighting ended, and 10 years later young King Feisal was killed and the monarchy overthrown by Iraqi officers who cited their withdrawal from Palestine as an example of strong western influence over the royal regime.

Egyptian soldiers had fought bravely and well, but faulty weapons and ammunition revealed sloth and corruption in the monarchy that had sent them to Palestine. In 1952, less than four years after they had returned, defeated and demoralized, from Palestine, a clique of officers organized by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser sent King Farouk into exile. By early 1954 President Nasser had emerged as the undisputed and dynamic leader of Egypt, determined to write an entirely new page in the history of that ancient land.

In the United States, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the liberator of Western Europe in World War II, had also assumed office in 1952, as the first Republican president after 20 years of Democratic administrations. He too, was looking for a new start in the Middle East, where President Truman's heavy-handed support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine had alienated all of the Arab and Muslim states. Eisenhower set in motion at least two separate missions by trusted American emissaries seeking Nasser's agreement to negotiate peace with Israel.

At the same time, however, the new leaders of both the US and Egypt were being carefully assessed in Israel. Since the fighting had ended in early 1949, Israeli leaders had been engaged in savage political fratricide. Rival leaders of Israel's military and political groupings found it even harder to cooperate in peacetime than in war. Feeling politically immobilized, the new state's patriarchal first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, carefully planted trusted lieutenants like Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and Golda Meir in key positions and then withdrew from the government for a time, hoping to be called back to dispel domestic political chaos. His moderate rival, Moshe Sharett, became Prime Minister.

The aims and methods of the two rivals were totally opposite. Ben-Gurion and his protege, Dayan, schemed incessantly to seize more of the Arab land and waters that had eluded them in the 1948 fighting, but which they believed Israel needed to support the huge Jewish population they hoped would pour into Israel from the Soviet Union and the United States. They predicted and prepared for a new outbreak of fighting in 1956, in which they planned to seize the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights, containing abundant water resources, from Syria.

Sharett, on the other hand, believed peace and eventual economic cooperation with its Arab neighbors was the only hope for long-range Israeli survival. Besides the Eisenhower initiatives, Sharett launched at least three separate peace probes on his own. Even Ben-Gurion had raised no objection to unsuccessful attempts by Israeli military hero Yigael Allon to re-establish personal contact with Nasser, with whom he had become well acquainted during the cease-fire and withdrawal negotiations that followed the 1948 fighting. When Nasser wanted to know what Ben-Gurion's concessions for peace would be, however, Ben-Gurion indicated that he could only reveal them in a face-to-face meeting. It was not the first time negotiations would bog down over Arab insistence on a pre-agreed agenda, and Israeli insistence on direct talks with no pre-conditions.

While peace envoys shuttled, however, a secret plan to disrupt US and Egyptian relations was launched from Israel that, despite seeming failure, would eventually shatter all of the peace initiatives for many years to come.

An Israeli hard-line rival to Ben-Gurion was Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon, a leftist who advocated immediate seizure of the Golan Heights from Syria. Although he was over-ruled on that, his army intelligence director, Benjamin Gibli, set in motion operations against British officers and British property in Jordan to create bad blood between the Hashemite Monarchy and its traditional British protector. The goal was to create a pretext to seize the West Bank from Jordan.

Now, with negotiations scheduled to begin in July, 1954, on Nasser's demand that the British evacuate the Suez Canal, Gibli launched still another operation to convince the British that Nasser could not control Egypt and that any treaty he signed with Britain would therefore be worthless. The operation also sought to convince Eisenhower that, under Nasser, Egypt was becoming anti-American.

Israeli spymaster Avri Elad traveled to Egypt posing as a German businessman named Paul Frank. He made contact with two cells of Israeli agents, one in Cairo and one in Alexandria. Members were young Egyptian Jews who had been secretly taught in Israel how to make explosives from locally-available materials, and returned to Egypt as a sabotage network to be activated during future Israeli-Egyptian hostilities. On July 14, 1954, while Egyptians were celebrating Bastille day as a symbol of the overthrow of monarchist tyranny, the young saboteurs exploded small fire bombs in US Government installations including the US Embassy (USIS) library in Cairo, and both the USIS library and US Consulate General in Alexandria.

A week later, during the July 23 Egyptian national day celebrations, the same Israeli agents planted more fire bombs in the Cairo railway station and in the lobbies of movie theaters in both Cairo and Alexandria. In Alexandria, however, as 19-year-odl Philippe Nathanson stood in front of a downtown theater, an incendiary device exploded prematurely in his jacket pocket and he was seized by police.

Within days, members of both cells and the liaison between them, Victorine Ninio, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Alexandria, were arrested. Their radio equipment, code books, and remains of their home-made explosives all went on display when they went on trial the following December. Only the spymaster escaped.

When he learned of the catastrophe, Gibli began covering his tracks. He had informed his immediate superior, Moshe Dayan, that Defense Minister Lavon had given the "green light" to the plan. Dayan, who had been in the US at the time, had not demurred. Upon his return, however, he asked Gibli for written proof that Lavon had authorized the plan so that blame for the debacle would fall upon Lavon, not himself. Gibli had no written proof. So he, Dayan, and Shimon Peres set out to create it. Gibli's secretary altered her message files, as did spymaster Avri Elad. When Dayan and Peres approached Lavon's secretary, Ephraim (Eppi) Evron, however, he refused to insert false orders into his files. Evron's rapid subsequent rise to director of Israeli intelligence in the United States, director of the defense ministry's foreign department, and finally Israeli Ambassador in Washington was certainly not impeded by his loyal refusal to implicate his boss, nor by his knowledge of who had asked him to do it.

Strangely, however, the subterranean scramble among Ben-Gurion's proteges and rivals to implicate each other apparently left Prime Minister Moshe Sharett ignorant of the Israeli origin of the Egyptian affair. When the trial opened, the broken Victorine Ninio had to be helped into the court room because of injuries she suffered while twice trying to throw herself through windows in police headquarters. Another Israeli spy, not affiliated with the saboteurs but known to Miss Ninio, succeeded in committing suicide midway in the proceeding. The Israeli press indignantly treated it as a show trial designed to intimidate Egypt's large Jewish community.

British and French politicians assumed the same thing, first begging Nasser to halt the proceedings and then to commute the sentences, but to no avail. Most outraged of all was the first, and last, moderate Prime Minister in Israel's history. On the trial's second day, Moshe Sharett angrily denounced "these calumnies designed to strike at the Jews of Egypt." Later, when death sentences were about to be carried out against the two ring leaders of the two cells, Sharett proclaimed: "We will not negotiate in the shadow of the gallows."

Nasser, never dreaming that Sharett might still be ignorant of the origins of the plot, was furious at the apparent hypocrisy of Israel's "moderate" prime minister.

From that moment all Eisenhower and Sharett-initiated efforts to set up an Israeli-Egyptian dialogue began to unravel. Ben-Gurion soon returned to the Government as Defense Minister and almost immediately launched large scale "punitive" raids into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The headlines distracted Israelis from domestic embarrassments, but the Egyptian casualties stunned Nasser. He demanded that the US sell him defensive arms. When Eisenhower refused, Nasser bought them from Czechoslovakia, setting in motion a chain of events that led inexorably to the Israeli-French-British attack on the Suez Canal in 1956.

Though the plan to sabotage US-Egyptian relations had misfired, literally, it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Israeli architects in extinguishing all hopes of moderation on both sides of the cease-fire line. It also took on a life of its own in Israeli domestic politics.

It is known as the "Lavon affair" to western journalists, who have given it virtually no American press coverage in all the years since. To Israeli journalists it is the "Haessek Habish," or "Ugly Affair." They have written thousands of words about the coverup, which resulted first in the disgrace and later in the rehabilitation of Pinchas Lavon. But the original act, an Israeli provocation against American diplomatic and cultural offices for which Egypt was to be blamed, is seldom mentioned. And, when Philippe Nathanson, Victorine Ninio, and the other surviving members of the two Israeli sabotage rings were released to Israel after 14 years in Egyptian prisons as part of a 1968 exchange of prisoners, their return was studiously ignored by most of the Israeli media.

Lavon's dismissal had paved the way for Ben-Gurion's return to government. But Lavon's insistence, through the years, that he had been framed by members of Israel's ruling establishment ensured that the scandal was not forgotten. Some years later, when Dalia Carmel, Gibli's remorseful secretary, confessed to Ben-Gurion that she had falsified the evidence that implicated Lavon, Ben-Gurion refused to make her confession public. Instead he continued to hound Lavon, and protect Dayan and Peres. The story seeped out in bits and pieces, however, and the resulting public revulsion had much to do with the 1977 fall of Israel's Labor Coalition, by then led by Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and other Ben-Gurion heirs. Labor's fall, after 19 years of rule, did not purify the Israeli political atmosphere, however. Instead it brought to power the Likud bloc extremists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both veterans of Israel's pre-independence terrorist underground and each of whom, before and after the "Lavon Affair," has perpetrated many an "ugly affair" of his own.

(The Lavon affair has been widely covered in Israel's Hebrew language press. A full account in English is contained in Chapter 7, "An Israeli Dreyfus Affair," of The Untold History of Israel by Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel, Grove Press, 1979, pp. 101-28.)