Summary
Robert Dassa, an Alexandrine member of the Operation Susannah network sentenced to life imprisonment in January 1955, who spent fourteen years in Egyptian jails and whose memoir Be-hazarah le-kahir (Return to Cairo) Chapter 2 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry reads as a repudiation of the Zionist narrative imposed on the network by Aviezer Golan (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222, 635-698).
Details
- At the January 1955 sentencing, Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa “were condemned to life in prison,” between the death sentences for Sami Azar and Musa Marzuq and the fifteen-year sentences for Victor Levy and Philip Natanson (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 211-222).
- After fourteen years in Egyptian jails he reached Israel in the prisoner exchange following the 1967 war; the four’s presence was an official secret until 1971, and only in March 1975 did they tell their story publicly on national television (as Golan’s authorized memoir). In 1979, eleven years after his release, Dassa returned to Egypt as a journalist for the Arabic service of Israeli television to cover Prime Minister Menahem Begin’s visit to Alexandria; thirteen years later he wrote about his memories of Egypt in his own name: Be-hazarah le-kahir (Return to Cairo), an account of twenty-some return trips since 1979 interwoven with the operation, the trial and Tura prison, published by Israel’s Ministry of Defense (Chapter 2, notes 1, 93) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 470-484, 635-698).
- The memoir “oscillates between recapitulations of well-worn elements of the official narrative — the Cairo judicial proceedings were a show trial; Paul Frank was a double agent who betrayed the network; Dassa felt no connection to Egypt — and disclosures that undermine it”: he grew up in a mixed Alexandria neighborhood with no apparent anti-Semitism; his parents were twentieth-century immigrants to Egypt from Jerusalem and Yemen; Zionism was “quite an exceptional thing in the Egyptian Jewish community”; no other members of his family were Zionists; his sister married a Muslim Egyptian and lived with him in Alexandria’s fashionable Muntazah district (Chapter 2, notes 94–99) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- His central charge is that Israeli military and political authorities never assumed full responsibility for the operation: he accuses David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan of failing to request the prisoners’ release in the prisoner exchange after the 1956 war because they were a political embarrassment, “causing them to spend twelve more years in jail unnecessarily” (Chapter 2, note 100). Beinin notes that Dassa never asks what justified endangering the entire Egyptian Jewish community by ordering the bombing of civilian targets (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- The confessions that close the chapter: “I do not come to Egypt as a tourist. I never was and never will be a tourist there. I come to it as a free citizen, and only there can I express the full feeling of liberation” (Chapter 2, note 101); throughout his years in jail he yearned for Alexandria (note 102); “In order to feel complete freedom, I need to walk freely in the streets of Cairo. Only there do I feel that I really have been released” (Chapter 2, note 103) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 635-698).
- Chapter 4 returns to the abandonment charge: Dassa, Victor Levy, Philip Natanson and Marcelle Ninio have repeatedly charged that individuals in the highest echelons of the Israeli military, including Moshe Dayan, minister of defense in 1967, were uninterested in seeing them released — a charge first made in their 1975 television appearance (Chapter 4, notes 67–68). In March 1975 Dassa, Levy and Ninio appeared on television and declared that they had acted on orders from Israel, posing two new questions instead of “Who gave the order?”: why were they 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 1881-1888, 1926-1936).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Operation Susannah, Aviezer Golan, Lavon Affair