http://star.arabia.com/980625/OP1.html
25 JUNE 1998
Summer of '54 a history of state-sponsored terrorism
By Samir Raafat
MS VICTORINE Marcelle Ninio (which she spelt Nigno) was a native
of Cairo and a one-time Olympic contender who had played
basketball at the Hakoah Club on Selehdar Street, Heliopolis. The
combination of geopolitics, youth and personal ideals pushed her
into the forefront of regional events in July 1954.
Although born and raised in Egypt, Ninio had thrown in her lot
with the newly created State of Israel. If in 1948 she suspected
her actions could be catalytic to the downfall of Egypt's thriving
Jewish community, by the time she faced sentence in 1955 she had
no lingering doubts.
Ninio and her associates had been indirectly responsible for the
hastening of 50,000 Jews out of Egypt. On a more personal tragic
note, Armando Carmona, a close companion of Nino's family,
allegedly took his own life (or was encouraged to) upon
discovering his Heliopolis flatmate had been indicted in a covert
Israeli-led operation.
The physically challenged Carmona (walking disability) worked for
the The Cairo Electric Railways & Heliopolis Oases Company, known
to most simply as The Heliopolis Company. It was his habit after
working hours to join his friends at the nearby Heliopolis
Sporting Club for a round of cards. Failing to appear one day, his
anxious partners advised the police. Upon entering his flat at 6
Rue Ibis, off Avenue des Pyramides, Armando was found hanging from
the ceiling. To this day, Marcelle Carmona-Fisher, who lives
outside Tel Aviv, failed to resolve the riddle of her father's
death. Her attempts to obtain answers from the Israeli government
have been persistently stonewalled.
As it transpired during the Cairo investigation, Armando's friend
Marcelle Ninio was part of an espionage network run by the Israeli
military. Their objective: To spread havoc in Cairo and Alexandria
by planting bombs in crowded public areas such as cinema theaters,
the main railway stations and central post office in both cities.
And to discredit Egypt in the West, the American USIS libraries
and British Councils in both cities were also added as an
afterthought.
In other words, Marcelle Ninio and her colleagues were licensed to
kill civilians using fire bombs.
It was Ninio's ultimate controllers, most of them senior Israeli
officers who laid out the gameplan. Also in the know were
privileged members of the political Israeli apparatus including
cabinet members-to-be like Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan and
Ben-Gurion (then in retirement). The code name for this mission of
death was Operation Shoshana (Susana) known in history books as
the Lavon Affair or Esek Bish (the Mishap).
A latter day name for this deadly operation was Ha-Parashah (the
case). Like the the multiple names associated with this operation
its objectives went beyond destabilizing Egypt's new republican
regime or causing dissension in Egypto-British/US relations.
Aside from forestalling the withdrawal of British troops from the
Canal Zone, its success or failure notwithstanding, another
equally important objective of this operation was to poison
relations between mainstream Egyptians and the 50,000 Jews who had
remained in Egypt after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Operations similar to Shoshana had been primed elsewhere in the
Middle East where large Jewish communities existed, the most
important being the 1949/50 Operation Ali Baba in the Hashemite
Kingdom of Iraq, when Israeli agents went after Jewish targets
wounding and killing innocent bystanders near Baghdad's Shemt of
Synagogue. Predictably, requests for exit visas started pouring in
and within a year, Iraq's largest and most important non-Muslim
minority numbering in the tens of thousands relocated in Israel.
Without resorting to such drastic measures in Egypt, had Israel's
policy-makers waited, Egyptian Jews would have left anyway at
their own free cognizance. Like Egypt's Italian, Greek, Armenian
and Syro-Levantine minorities, all of whom found the new
combination of nationalism and a state controlled economy
distasteful, the Jews would have had no reason to remain.
Ever since the days of Viceroy Mohammed Ali Pasha, (r.1805-48),
laissez faire and free enterprise had been the mainstay of the
nation's enlightened minorities. Lacking the elements which had
attracted foreigners to Egypt, why would these minorities remain?
And with the arrival of socialism in 1961, it was the turn for
Muslim and Coptic members of Egypt's business class to apply for
immigrant visas, an unprecedented phenomena in a country that had
accepted economic migrants throughout the ages.
Operation Shoshana-a.k.a. Susana, Lavon, the Mishap, the
Affair-failed because Paul Frank (alias Avraham Siedenwerg or Avri
El Ad), one of the 13 Israeli agents involved, had had second
thoughts. An undecided Zionist, he snitched to an Egyptian
undercover agent in Germany. Concommittant to sparing innocent
Egyptian lives, Frank's action eventually brought down the
government of Moshe Sharett in Israel, starting with the February
1955 resignation of Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon.
Like many other disturbing facts in Israel's first 50 years,
Operation Shoshana was buried and forgotten by the official
propagandists. When its perpetrators were rounded up in Cairo no
one from Israel stepped forward to take responsibility of their
operation. If ever mentioned, Ninio and her accomplices were
referred to as saboteurs (never as terrorists) by the western
press.
Diverse court verdicts were delivered on January 27, 1955, ranging
from two death sentences to several years in prison, some of them
in absentia. Predicatbly, the Cairo rulings sent Israel into an
unofficial state of mourning. There were emotional promises to
dedicate a street in Ramat Gan and Beersheeba each in honor of the
fallen "victims", an action which would have its equivalent today
in renaming one of Gaza's streets in commemoration of a Tel Aviv
suicide bus bomber.
Marcelle Ninio and three of her colleagues were released during
the 1967 June War prisoner exchanges. No one knew she had returned
to Israel, for in her country of adoption like in her country of
birth, Ninio was a source of political embarrassment. The
situation changed only after Prime Minister Golda Meir personally
announced in 1974 she would attend Ninio's wedding. That year,
what had been deliberately ignored for so long came out on
Israel's national TV. Operation Shoshana was no longer a carefully
guarded state secret.
Throughout the polemic, the word "terrorism" was never brought up.
With the help of propagandists abroad and with the assistance of
an immensely powerful Jewish lobby in the United Sates, the terms
"agents" or "saboteurs" were used instead.
Equally remarkable in this whole affair is how one of the first
prototype of organized state sponsored terrorism in the region,
was shrouded under tons of secrecy acts and waves of
disinformation
campaigns. How the usually merciless and overzealous media never
insisted. The Israeli state apparatus did not realize then that
one day the chicken would come home to roost, this time against
civilians in Tel-Aviv buses.
