Lavon Affair
Covert 1954 Israeli operation in Egypt involving bombings of American, British, and Egyptian targets designed to damage Western-Egyptian relations.
The Lavon Affair was a covert Israeli operation in Egypt in mid-1954, involving an Israeli spy ring that bombed and sabotaged American, British, and Egyptian targets. The goal of these bombings was to derail pending British and American negotiations and possible rapprochement with the Nasser government, aiming to keep Egypt isolated from Western powers.1
An internal Israeli investigation was unable to determine who had given the order for the sabotage activities. Moshe Sharett, who had not known of the operation, accepted Pinhas Lavon's resignation in January 1955. The affair resurfaced as a major scandal in the early 1960s, with new revelations suggesting that low-level officials in the defense ministry might have falsified documents and given misleading testimony to accuse Lavon of authorizing the operation. Lavon, then head of the Histadrut, publicly charged that David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, and Moshe Dayan had undermined civilian authority over the military, leaking his allegations to the press and breaking cardinal rules of Israeli politics.1
Sources
- Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 3, 9. ↩
Local network
Search or select an entry to see how it connects to Lavon Affair.
An interactive diagram of Lavon Affair's connections, drawn on a canvas and explored with a pointer. The same connections are listed as links in the Connected and Mentioned-in sections below.
How to read the graph
- People
- Organizations
- Programs
- Events
- Concepts
- Places
Larger = more mentions across the vault.
A link from one entry to another.
A name mentioned in an entry without a direct link. Toggle these with “Inferred”.
Gold rings mark entries mentioned across several clusters.
Orange rings mark your selection.