Summary
Marcelle Ninio, the only woman among the Operation Susannah defendants, sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1955, whose treatment by the Egyptian prosecution and press, and by the Israeli and Western press, Chapter 4 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry reads as a case study in how gender representations served both sides’ narratives (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 1789-1813).
Details
- At the January 1955 sentencing, Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa were condemned to life in prison, between the death sentences for Sami (Shmu’el) Azar and Moshe Marzuq and the fifteen-year sentences for Victor Levy and Philip Natanson; her lodger Armand Karmona, interrogated though apparently not involved in the network’s operations, died in interrogation, by suicide or by beating (Introduction, note 31) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
- The Jerusalem Post’s first substantive account of the affair discussed extensively Ninio’s torture and attempted suicide, as part of a report whose every significant assertion the chapter judges “totally fictitious or highly questionable” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1735-1745).
- The Egyptian prosecution portrayed Ninio as a beautiful and seductive Mata Hari who acted as chief liaison between the Cairo and Alexandria branches of the spy ring: al-Ahram featured her picture on its front page three times during the first week of the trial and described her as “a young Jewish woman with a great deal of intelligence, shrewdness, and spirit of self-sacrifice” (Chapter 4, note 31), and al-Musawwar held that she “used her femininity to influence and control her abettors. She was the brains of the ring, which operated under her direction and instructions” (Chapter 4, note 32), noting her admission that she had frequented the Alexandria operations flat and occasionally spent weekends there (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1799-1813).
- Because Ninio had attempted suicide, the Egyptian authorities were especially anxious to demonstrate how well she fared in prison: her diet was said to include string beans, meat, cheese, winter cress, and tangerines, and her only complaint to be that she was not allowed a pen and paper to write about her jailers’ generosity — a description the chapter calls obviously staged and unconvincing (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1809-1813).
- In Israel and the West, by contrast, focusing on Ninio feminized all the defendants and made them appear less threatening to Egypt and more vulnerable as victims; the same effect recurs in Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon’s reprinting of Felix Harari’s claim that “Victorine [Marcelle Ninio] was entirely innocent” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1805-1813, 1905-1915).
- After fourteen years in Egyptian jails, Ninio was released with Dassa, Victor Levy and Philip Natanson in the prisoner exchange following the 1967 war — Israel having made no request for the network’s release in the post-1956 exchange, although Egyptian officials expected one and were prepared to grant it. The four’s presence in Israel was an official secret until 1971, when Prime Minister Golda Meir announced, after a cabinet meeting, that she would attend Ninio’s wedding, the first official admission that the four were in Israel (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1881-1888, 1926-1936).
- In March 1975 Ninio appeared on Israeli television with Dassa and Levy and declared that they had acted on orders from Israel; she pushed right against the limit marked by the censor’s pen in asking why they had not been allowed to publish their book. The collective memoir that followed, Operation Susannah, as told to Aviezer Golan, unequivocally confirmed the espionage and sabotage, although Golan strained to avoid characterizing the acts as punishable crimes in Egyptian terms; Ninio was confined after her suicide attempt in Alexandria’s al-Muwassat Hospital, whose German nurse the memoir gratuitously describes as resembling “the SS women in the European extermination camps” (Chapter 4, note 77) (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, Aviezer Golan, Lavon Affair