Joel Cairo Quotes

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready. Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

This was an Israeli false flag operation designed to create bad blood between the revolutionary regime headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Western powers. Israel’s military intelligence had recruited, trained and equipped the Jewish spy and sabotage ring. The arrest of one member led to the collapse of the whole ring, a well-publicised trial of its nine members, the execution of two of them and the capture of the Israeli officer in charge: Meir Max Binnet, the same Max Binnet who had directed the false flag operations in Baghdad a few years earlier. In 1954 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence branch of the IDF. He committed suicide in the Cairo prison by cutting his veins with a razor blade after being tortured and hearing that the Iraqi authorities had requested his extradition. The intention behind Operation Susannah was to sour relations between Egypt and the West; its effect was to sour relations between the Egyptian people and the Jews who dwelt in their midst. The terrorist attacks seemed to confirm the suspicions of Egyptian Muslims that their Jewish compatriots owed allegiance to a foreign country and posed a threat to national security. As Stanford professor Joel Beinin put it, ‘The involvement of Egyptian Jews in acts of espionage and sabotage against Egypt organized and directed by Israeli military intelligence raised fundamental questions about their identities and loyalties.’31 The whole affair backfired disastrously on Israel. Pinhas Lavon was the minister of defence at the time and strenuously denied ever giving the order to military intelligence to activate the ring. He denounced the type of action in the affair that bore his name as stupid and inhuman and added that it had all started in Iraq.32 Lavon was forced to resign; ‘Cruel Zionism’, however, continued to characterise Israel’s conduct long after the ‘Lavon Affair’ had died down. The ‘Unfortunate Business’ may have started with the bombs that went off in central Baghdad back in 1950 but it probably had much deeper roots.