Summary
The Jerusalem-born (1909) Haganah intelligence operative who in summer 1934 simultaneously became coordinator of the Hagana’s Arab intelligence and secretary of the Histadrut’s Arab Department, working with Eliyahu Agassi to organise Arab workers in Jaffa — a double life Lockman calls symptomatic of labour Zionism’s contradiction — and who after 1948, as Reuven Shilo’ah, organised and presided over Israel’s intelligence and security agencies until his death in 1959 (Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, lines 2445-2456).
Details
- Born Reuven Zaslanski in Jerusalem in 1909, son of a rabbi both orthodox and Zionist, Zaslani broke with his father’s orthodoxy in his teens, studied drama and joined the Hagana; adopted into the labour-Zionist elite, he was close to Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi, Rahel Yana’it, Dov Hoz, Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) and Eliyahu Golomb. From 1928 he studied Oriental studies, including Arabic, at the Hebrew University but never finished his degree, placing his Arabic at the service of the Hagana’s fledgling intelligence branch (lines 2445-2450).
- On Ben-Tzvi’s recommendation he was sent at not yet twenty-two to teach at a Jewish school in Baghdad — his cover for organising an underground Zionist youth movement and carrying out propaganda and intelligence work for the Jewish Agency under Shertok’s supervision, cultivating prominent Iraqis and on at least one occasion exposing an Iraqi Jewish communist to the Iraqi authorities; his sojourn lasted from summer 1931 to October 1932, one of the earliest efforts to initiate Zionist intelligence and propaganda work in the Arab world (lines 2450-2456).
- After his return he worked, with his Hagana and Jewish Agency superiors’ approval, as translator and secretary to the British officer in charge of the Royal Air Force’s intelligence branch in Palestine, serving as the link between British intelligence and the Hagana and the Yishuv’s leadership; in May 1934 he was again dispatched to Iraq, “obstensibly” [as printed] as a journalist, travelling through the Kurdish regions and apparently surveying Jewish communities in northern Iraq; the Iraqi authorities expelled him in July 1934 (lines 2453-2456).
- The contacts Zaslani and his colleagues established and the information they gathered through day-to-day labour organising proved of substantial benefit to the Zionist project, enhancing both the struggle for Hebrew labor and the Yishuv’s intelligence and military capacities (lines 2453-2456).
- With Agassi he confronted the Jaffa stevedores over Hebrew labor in November 1934 and reported the organisation there “strengthened and inoculated”, a judgment Lockman calls overconfident (lines 2473-2495).
Related pages
Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948, Eliyahu Agassi, Palestine Labor League, Histadrut, Haganah, Jewish Agency