Summary
Aviezer Golan, the named author of the authorized collective memoir of four Operation Susannah prisoners — Operation Susannah (New York: Harper & Row, 1978; Hebrew original Mivtza’ suzanah, Jerusalem: ‘Edanim, 1976) — whose representation of Egyptian Jewish identity Chapter 2 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry sets against the Egyptian official account and against the prisoners’ own later writing (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484, 699-724).
Details
- The memoir was offered “in the name of four members of the Operation Susannah network — Robert Dassa, Victor Levy, Philip Natanson, and Marcelle Ninio — by Aviezer Golan, in their authorized collective memoir” (Chapter 2, note 1). The four reached Israel in the prisoner exchange after the 1967 war, after fourteen years in Egyptian jails; their presence in Israel was an official secret until 1971, and not until March 1975, when they told their story publicly on national television, did the Israeli government acknowledge they had been trained and directed by the Israeli army (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484).
- Golan explained that their actions did not constitute treason against Egypt: “[t]he foursome—like all the other heroes of “the mishap”—were born and brought up in Egypt, but they never regarded themselves—nor were they ever regarded by others—as Egyptians.…They were typical members of Egypt’s Jewish community.…It was a community with shallow roots. The Jews reached Egypt during the second half of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth.…[t]hey could not read or write Arabic, and spoke no more of the language than was necessary for the simplest daily needs.…All of Egypt’s Jews could have been considered Zionists—or, to be more precise, “lovers of Zion.”” (Chapter 2, note 2, ibid., pp. 5–6) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484).
- Beinin’s judgment: “Aviezer Golan’s desire to justify Israeli-inspired espionage and sabotage led him to overlook much that was significant, yet not easily contained by the Israeli national narrative,” and his attempt “to impose the Zionist representation of Jewish identity on the “heroes” of Operation Susannah obliterates the complex multivocality of Egyptian Jewish identities and histories” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533, 635-698).
- Robert Dassa’s own memoir, Be-hazarah le-kahir (Return to Cairo), written thirteen years after his 1979 return to Egypt, is presented as the repudiation of Golan’s containment: Dassa “seems schizophrenic in a modern political universe defined by the proposition that individuals must identify with only one state,” and admits he requires continuing contact with Egypt to feel free (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- Chapter 4’s closing section returns to Golan’s memoir: it unequivocally confirmed that the accused in the Cairo trial had engaged in espionage and sabotage on behalf of Israel, although Golan strained to avoid characterizing these acts as punishable crimes in Egyptian terms, and it “conspicuously deploys the trope of Nazi-like persecution as exculpatory evidence for the accused” — the German nurse in al-Muwassat Hospital, where Marcelle Ninio was confined after her suicide attempt, gratuitously described as a surly blonde “whose appearance and behavior made her resemble the SS women in the European extermination camps” (Chapter 4, note 77) — while Golda Meir’s preface associated the four’s story with the six million Jews of the Nazi camps and the Warsaw Ghetto fighters (Chapter 4, note 78) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1926-1936).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Operation Susannah, Robert Dassa, Moshe Marzuq