Summary
The July 1954 campaign in which an espionage network of Egyptian Jews, formed three years earlier by Israeli military intelligence, firebombed Egyptian and American targets in Cairo and Alexandria; in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry it is “the most salient symbol of the transformation of the status of Jews in Egypt” and “the most salient political event in the life of the Jewish community of Egypt from 1949 to 1956” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 470-484). The Israeli political scandal it later generated is the Lavon Affair.
Details
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“In July 1954, Israeli military intelligence ordered an espionage network of Egyptian Jews it had formed three years earlier to launch Operation Susannah — a campaign to firebomb the main Alexandria post office, the United States Information Service library in Cairo, the Cairo train station, and several movie theaters in Cairo and Alexandria.” The saboteurs “(today they would be called terrorists, especially if they were Arabs or Muslims acting against Israel or the United States)” were quickly apprehended and tried in December 1954 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
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The verdicts and sentences of January 1955 “spanned the full range of options”: Sami (Shmu’el) Azar and Musa (Moshe) Marzuq were sentenced to death, along with the Israeli handlers John Darling (Avraham Dar) and Paul Frank (Avraham Seidenwerg), tried in absentia; Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa were condemned to life in prison; Victor Levy and Philip Natanson received fifteen-year sentences; Me’ir Meyuhas and Me’ir Za’fran seven years; Caesar Cohen and Eli Na’im were acquitted. Max Binnet, a major in Israeli military intelligence apprehended with the network but not directly involved in its operations, committed suicide in jail; Armand Karmona, Ninio’s lodger, interrogated though apparently not involved, “either committed suicide or was beaten to death by his interrogators” (Introduction, note 31) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
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Two possible objectives are canvassed. One: to convince the British government, then negotiating the withdrawal of its garrison from the Suez Canal Zone, that Egypt was an unstable, radical, nationalist state, so British forces ought not to be evacuated. The other: that activist elements in the Israeli military and Ministry of Defense loyal to David Ben-Gurion “intentionally initiated and then exposed Operation Susannah in order to break up secret Egyptian-Israeli negotiations then going on and eliminate the possibility of a face-to-face meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, which was under consideration” (Introduction, note 32 — Avri El-Ad’s Decline of Honor, 1976, and Stephen Green’s Taking Sides, 1984, are cited for the exposure thesis) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 294-467).
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“Many of the documents pertaining to Operation Susannah have apparently been destroyed by the governments of Israel, the United States, and Britain or are unavailable to researchers. No Egyptian government documents for the 1950s are yet available to researchers. Consequently, it is impossible to construct a traditional political history of the operation” answering “Who gave the order?” — the question that became the focal point of the scandal labeled the “Lavon affair” or ha-‘esek ha-bish (the dirty business), “commonly further obscured by English translation as “the mishap.”” (Introduction, notes 33–34) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
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The four surviving prisoners — Dassa, Levy, Natanson and Ninio — reached Israel in the prisoner exchange following the 1967 war after fourteen years in Egyptian jails; their presence was an official secret until 1971, when Prime Minister Golda Meir announced her intention to attend Marcelle Ninio’s wedding, and only in March 1975 did the Israeli government acknowledge they had been trained and directed by the Israeli army. Their authorized memoir by Aviezer Golan denied their acts were treason on the ground that Egyptian Jews were never Egyptians at all — against which Egyptian Minister of Interior Zakariyya Muhyi al-Din, at the press conference announcing the arrests, stressed that the majority of Egyptian Jews were loyal citizens and vowed to continue “to treat the non-Zionists with the kindness and respect due to every decent citizen,” and the prosecutor Fu’ad al-Digwi closed: “The Jews of Egypt are living among us and are sons of Egypt” (Chapter 2, notes 1–6) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484, 699-724).
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Beinin’s framing: the operation “has become an important symbolic marker connecting the fate of the Egyptian Jews to the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the uncertainty of its facts perhaps augmenting its power in the popular political culture of both countries; and, at Chapter 2’s close, it “illustrates one of many instances in which Israel was actively complicit in that exclusion” of Jews from the Egyptian political community. Moshe Marzuq, the Cairo network’s commander, was a Karaite, and his execution had a chilling effect on his community (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 534-574, 635-698).
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In Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, the government’s announcement on October 5, 1954 that it had apprehended the network is “the most fateful development for the Jewish community”: it “provided an excuse to treat the entire Jewish community as potential subversives,” and the February 28, 1955 Israeli attack on Gaza, which many Egyptians understood as retaliation for the execution of two of the conspirators, began a countdown toward the 1956 war (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1317-1319).
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The chapter’s “return to normalcy” perception for Egypt’s Jews, sustained from late 1949, persisted “until the announcement of the apprehension of the Operation Susannah conspirators in October 1954” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1274-1277).
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Chapter 4 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora is devoted to the operation’s discourse: the arrest, conviction and execution of the network in 1954–55 “were critical moments in the elaboration of a discourse that cast the Egyptian regime, and ultimately all Arabs, as neo-Nazis,” a discourse first formed in 1948 when Israel’s government and the American Jewish Committee described Egypt’s wartime measures against its Jews in the vocabulary of the early Hitler regime. The chapter compares the Israeli and Anglo-American Jewish discourse, the official Egyptian story, the international campaign for the defendants and the later marginalizing of the “heroes of the affair,” arguing that imposing the European Jewish experience on Egypt “censored the voices of Egyptian Jews and blocked their ability to narrate their own history” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1694-1701).
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On the trial reporting: the Jerusalem Post’s first substantive account reported 150 Jews arrested, Armand Karmona beaten to death and a “National Egyptian Militia” trained by former German officers on the storm trooper model; “Every significant assertion in this report was totally fictitious or highly questionable” — no other reference to such a militia has been found, and there is no credible evidence that former Nazis exercised a policy-making role in Egypt. The arrests and investigations did not directly disrupt the lives of the vast majority of the approximately 50,000 Jews then living in Egypt (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1735-1745).
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On the Egyptian case: the government’s central claims were well supported by the evidence presented in court, but its pamphlet The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt also asserted falsely that “during the Palestine War the Jews of Egypt were not interned” and argued that Zionism and communism share “one political objective-world domination” — a contention that reproduced elements of Nazi propaganda and discredited the Egyptian case for many foreign observers. The General Security Services’ own investigation reports do not mention communism and are dry and factual; the pamphlet’s anti-Semitic content apparently came from the midlevel Ministry of Information officials who produced it (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1842-1860).
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On the aftermath in Israel: concern for the convicted prisoners who remained alive soon disappeared from the public agenda; Israel did not request their release in the general prisoner exchange after the 1956 war, although Egyptian officials expected such a request and were prepared to grant it. Me’ir Meyuhas and Me’ir Za’fran served out their seven-year terms; Robert Dassa, Victor Levy, Philip Natanson and Marcelle Ninio were released only in the prisoner exchange following the 1967 war (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1881-1888).
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Only in March 1975 did the Israeli government finally admit the conspirators had acted on its behalf, twenty years after the trial; Dassa, Levy and Ninio appeared on television that month declaring they had acted on orders from Israel and asking why they were abandoned after the 1956 war and who was responsible for the decision not to request their release (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, Lavon Affair, Robert Dassa, Moshe Marzuq, Aviezer Golan, Pinchas Lavon, Marcelle Ninio, Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon