Lavon Affair (Operation Susannah)

In July 1954 members of a secret cell run by Israel's military intelligence, Unit 131, planted small incendiary devices in Alexandria and Cairo. Their targets included a post office, the libraries of the U.S. Information Agency, and cinemas owned by British companies. The plan, later code-named Operation Susannah, was to make the attacks look like the work of Egyptian nationalists or communists, so that Britain would doubt Egypt's stability and keep its troops at the Suez Canal base. The bombs did little damage. One device caught fire in an agent's pocket outside a cinema in Alexandria, and Egyptian police soon arrested most of the cell, made up of young Egyptian Jews.¹²

At a Cairo trial two members, Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar, were sentenced to death and hanged in January 1955; an Israeli officer, Max Bennett, killed himself in prison. In Israel the question of who gave the order caused a long crisis. The head of military intelligence, Binyamin Gibli, said Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon had ordered it, while Lavon denied it, and evidence later suggested documents had been altered. Lavon resigned in 1955. The Lavon Affair resurfaced in 1960 and 1961, splitting the ruling party and contributing to David Ben-Gurion's resignation in 1963. In 2005 Israel publicly honored the surviving agents.¹²