Thursday, January 15th 1961. Footage of Pinhas Lavon, the Israeli politician being filmed working at his desk in 1961. Lavon had been the Israeli Defence Minister just over six years earlier at the time of "Operation Susannah", a botched "false flag" operation mounted by Israeli military intelligence in Egypt. Using Jewish-Arab operatives, it targeted American and British establishments in Cairo and Alexandra. The object was to blame an Egyptian source and so pit the West against the government of Egypt. Film: Reuters News Archive. Note: "...a recounting of‘Operation Susannah’, an infamous episode in the annals of Israeli intelligence is essential. In 1954, Aman activated a sleeper cell composed of operatives who had been recruited from the Arab Jewish population of Egypt. They were tasked with planting a series of bombs in American and British establishments in the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. On July 2nd, the unit detonated bombs at a post office in Alexandria. Twelve days later, it bombed the libraries of the US Information Agency in Alexandria and Cairo. The explosions caused little damage and there was no loss of life. On July 23rd, a bomb exploded prematurely while one of the agents was entering the British-owned Rio Theatre in Alexandra. He survived the blast and was arrested. Most of the conspirators were rounded up by Egyptian intelligence and put on trial before an Egyptian military tribunal. After deliberations, two were executed by hanging (another two had committed suicide while in custody) while the others were handed lengthy terms of imprisonment. The official position of the Israeli government at the time was that the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser had framed a group of innocent Jews and convicted them in a show trial after their confessions had been extracted by torture. The truth was of course different. The incident, which came to be known as the ‘Lavon Affair’, so-called because defence minister Pinhas Lavon had been held responsible for the conception and execution of the operation, had been carried out without the knowledge of Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Sharett was despised by figures such as Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan because of policies which they perceived as ‘dovish’. He had established back channels of communication between himself and Nasser. But the idea behind the operation went further than intentionally frustrating Sharett. ‘Susannah’ was conceived as a ‘false flag’ operation to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, communists and malcontented Egyptian nationalists in order to discourage Western rapprochement with the Egyptian leader. It also had the objective of encouraging the British not to withdraw from the Suez Canal and may have also been designed to create the circumstances where the United States and Britain would be encouraged to take military action against Egypt. It would be 51 years after the event before Israel officially admitted it had conducted this covert operation, and in a ceremony presided by Moshe Katzav, its then president, the surviving members of the cell were awarded certificates of appreciation for services rendered to the state." - From "Israel and Islamist Militias: A Strange and Recurring Alliance", by Adeyinka Makinde, April 2017. http://adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.com/2017/04/israel-and-islamist-militias-strange.html

• published: 14 Sep 2019
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