Accordingly, Sharon and Moshe Dayan, chief of the general staff, shifted tactics, abandoning pinpoint precision for something more primal. Rather than kill prime Palestinian terrorists, they would avenge the killings of Israelis by attacking and terrorizing the Arab villages from which the terrorists had set forth to harm Jews, as well as the army camps and police stations.
“We cannot prevent the murder of workers in the orchards and of families in their beds,” Dayan said in a lecture in 1955, “but we have the ability to set a high price for our blood.”
Sharon, craving action, drew up plans for a series of punitive raids against Arab military and civilian targets, then lobbied for his superiors to approve them. Yet it is an open question how many of those raids were punitive as opposed to provocative. Sharon was fond of quoting Dayan’s famous dictum “We do not initiate battles in times of peace.” Uzi Eilam, who served as Sharon’s intelligence officer, suggests that this was not an ironclad rule. “There were many cases in which we, at Arik’s bidding, provoked the enemy over the border and incited war. In a real analysis of ‘who started it’ over the entire history of the IDF’s retaliations, we will not come out squeaky clean.”
Even in real time, as they were unfolding, there was an apparent downside to Sharon’s tactics. In the fall of 1953, fedayeen murdered a young woman and her two children in Yehud, just southeast of Tel Aviv, brutal deaths that shocked the Israeli public. The government vowed to retaliate. The assumption was that Arab militants were using West Bank villages close to the border as bases to attack Israel. Sharon selected one of those villages—Qibya, which may or may not have been involved in the Yehud murders—as a target.
On October 15, before dawn, Sharon led a force of 130 men from Unit 101 and other outfits, carrying more than 1,500 pounds of explosives, into Qibya. Within hours, the village was destroyed. “In the Qibya operation,” one of Sharon’s lieutenants later testified, “we blew up forty-three houses. The IDF was equipped with small flashlights left over from the British Army, something you could barely see with. We went in with a megaphone, shining flashlights and shouting: ‘If there’s anyone here, come out, because we are about to blow it up.’ Some got up and came out. Then we’d apply the explosives and blow up the house. When we returned, we reported eleven [Arabs] killed. It wasn’t that we lied; we just didn’t know.”
The death toll was sixfold higher. At least sixty-nine were killed, most of them women and children. The world, including much of Israel and Jewish communities around the globe, was horrified. The UN Security Council condemned the raid, as did the U.S. State Department, which announced that it already had suspended aid to Israel for violating the armistice agreements of 1949.
Israel’s official explanation for the massacre was that rogue Jewish civilians were responsible. “All IDF units were at their bases” on the night of the raid, Ben-Gurion said publicly. Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, repeated Ben-Gurion’s lie at a session of the Security Council.
Privately, Ben-Gurion gave Sharon his full support, because Unit 101—despite the worldwide outrage—boosted morale within an Israeli Army exhausted by unrelenting defensive operations. The unit represented dedication, daring, physical prowess, and mental stamina, ideals to which each IDF unit aspired. As Sharon later said, Unit 101 “proved, within a short period of time, that there was no mission it could not carry out,” and that those missions helped secure Israel’s borders. That claim is open to debate—there are serious questions about how successful those commando raids were in reducing attacks by infiltrators, and some didn’t even achieve their immediate objectives—but Israeli soldiers believed it was true.
And that was enough. In early 1954, only five months after Unit 101 had been established, Dayan merged it with the Paratroopers Brigade, with Sharon as one of the battalion commanders. Dayan believed that Unit 101 had become a model—of training and discipline, of dedication and skill—that Sharon could replicate with the paratroops and then in the entire army.
Sharon’s activity within the paratroops was more restrained, because he was no longer commander of an independent unit, but also because changes had taken place in the high command. Ben-Gurion had resigned and been replaced as prime minister by the dovish Moshe Sharett, who generally refrained from approving retaliation attacks.
But what Sharett did not approve, Sharon’s men took upon themselves. The sister of the most renowned warrior in 101, Meir Har-Zion, was brutally murdered by Bedouins while on an illegal hike across the Jordanian border. Har-Zion and two comrades, with Sharon’s moral encouragement and logistical assistance, went to the scene and killed four Bedouin shepherds in revenge. Sharett demanded that they be court-martialed, but Dayan and Sharon, with Ben-Gurion’s backing, thwarted it.
Sharett wrote in his diary on January 11, 1955: “I wonder about the nature and the fate of this nation, capable of such fine spiritual sensitivity, of such profound love of humanity, of such honest yearning for the beautiful and the sublime, while at the same time it produces from amongst the ranks of its youth boys who are capable of murdering people with a clear mind and in cold blood by thrusting knives into the flesh of young, defenseless Bedouin. Which of the two souls that run around in the pages of the Bible will overcome its rival within this nation?”
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MUSTAFA HAFEZ, MEANWHILE, WAS still alive. The Egyptian intelligence captain and his colleague in Jordan, Salah Mustafa, continued running squads of Palestinian infiltrators, and those infiltrators were still wreaking havoc in Israel.
On March 17, 1954, a gang of twelve Arab terrorists ambushed a civilian bus on its way from Eilat to Tel Aviv at Scorpion Pass, a winding stretch of road in the heart of the Negev Desert. Firing point-blank, they killed eleven passengers. A nine-year-old boy, Haim Furstenberg, hiding under a seat, got up after they had left the bus and asked, “Have they gone?” The terrorists heard him, returned to the bus, and shot him in the head. He survived but was paralyzed until his death, thirty-two years later. The Arabs mutilated and spat on the bodies of the dead. It turned out later that they were Palestinians and Bedouins who had come from Jordan and were supported by Salah Mustafa.
Sharett was under heavy pressure to retaliate, but he would not approve a revenge operation. “An act in reaction to the bloodbath would only blur the horrifying effect, and would place us on the same level as the mass murderers on the other side,” he wrote in his diary.
Instead, AMAN’s Unit 504 sent in a detail of three Bedouin assassins whom they employed as agents. They crossed into Jordan heavily armed and carrying two explosive devices prepared by Natan Rotberg. They discovered where one of the terrorists lived, in a village in southern Jordan, and, after deciding not to blow up his house, they waited until he was alone and shot him dead. “Our agents found the ID card of the bus driver among the things he’d looted and brought it back to us,” Yigal Simon, a 504 senior veteran, recounts.
This pinpoint operation was considered a success by 504, but it didn’t make much of a difference in the wider picture. Targeted killings, with their limited success, had failed to stop, or even noticeably stall, the cross-border attacks. Punitive raids had drawn global ire but hadn’t slowed the carnage.
In the middle of the 1950s, Hafez was winning. The terrorists he trained carried out ever more deadly attacks in Israeli territory—collecting intelligence, sabotaging infrastructure, stealing property, and killing Israelis. Israel, lacking proper infrastructure, including high-resolution intelligence, experience, know-how, and large enough trained and equipped forces, could respond only with increasingly nonspecific retaliation operations and heavy bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Hafez’s name appeared frequently in the reports that Unit 504 received from its sources in the south. Yet he was a vague figure, cloaked in shadows. “We never got a picture of him,” said Yaakov Nimrodi, who commanded the unit’s southern base. “But we knew that he was a young man o
f about thirty, fairly good-looking and very charismatic. Our prisoners and agents spoke of him with admiration and awe.”
Hafez and Nimrodi, himself a young, charismatic officer, stood on either side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Hafez was considered one of the best minds in Egyptian intelligence,” Nimrodi said. “Few were our agents who managed to slip through his fingers. Many were captured and liquidated, or became double agents after the treatment they received from him, and turned against us. In this war of minds, only the best won and survived.”
Against the background of the security impotency and under heavy public pressure, Sharett was compelled first to accept Ben-Gurion as his defense minister, and then to give him back the premiership, in November 1955. Sharett went back to being just the foreign minister and later was forced to resign under pressure from Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion’s return encouraged AMAN to again plan more vigorous attacks against the fedayeen. One idea was to do away with Hafez. “He was the head of the snake,” Nimrodi said, “that we had to cut off.”
“But this was difficult, for three reasons,” said Avraham Dar, who now, as a major in AMAN, was charged with gathering intelligence about Hafez. “First, collecting enough intelligence about him and about the places he frequented; secondly, getting to him and killing him; and third, the diplomatic problem. He was a senior officer in the army of a sovereign state. Hitting him might have been seen as crossing a red line in relations with Egypt, and lead to deterioration.”
Attempts by the UN to mediate between Israel and Egypt failed, and Hafez’s raids continued, through 1955 and into the spring of 1956.
On April 29, 1956, a squad of Palestinian guerrillas trained by Hafez opened fire on farmers working in the fields of Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on Israel’s southern border. Roi Rotberg, a young first lieutenant in the IDF reserves, in charge of security for the kibbutz, rode out on horseback to repel them. The Palestinians killed him, gouged out his eyes, and dragged his body through the field and across the trench that marked the border, an effort to suggest that Rotberg had invaded foreign soil.
Moshe Dayan took Rotberg’s death particularly hard. He had met the lieutenant only the day before, as he toured southern settlements. The next day, April 30, Dayan stood over Rotberg’s open grave and read a eulogy that, in the intervening years, has come to be seen as the seminal formulation of Israeli militarism:
Roi was murdered yesterday, in the early morning. The silence of the spring morning blinded him and he did not see those lying in wait at the edge of the furrow.
Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance…
We are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews, annihilated because they had no country, gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people.
…We must not flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us and await the moment when they are strong enough to get our blood. We will not avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak. This is our generation’s destiny.
In simple terms, Dayan meant that the Jews in the State of Israel may have arrived as settlers returning to their ancient homeland, but, from the perspective of the Arabs, they came as invaders. Therefore the Arabs—justifiably, from their point of view—hated the Jews. And the continued existence of the Jews depended, more than anything, on their ability to defend themselves against the Arabs who wished to kill them. All the rest—development, the economy, society, and culture—were subordinate and must bend to the needs of security and survival. This, in Dayan’s view, was Israel’s destiny, born of thousands of years of Jewish history.
Standing over the grave as Dayan spoke was Roi’s cousin, Natan Rotberg, the bomb maker. After the funeral, Natan promised his uncle, Shmaryahu, that he would avenge Roi, his son.
As it happened, Dayan was determined to avenge Roi, too, and all the other Israelis killed and terrorized by Hafez’s squads. This time, Dayan persuaded Ben-Gurion not only to launch a retaliation raid against a Palestinian village, but to allow him to instruct the intelligence community to kill the Egyptians running killers into Israel—the colonels Hafez and Salah. This was a significant escalation.
Avraham Dar wrote the operational order, which was code-named Eunuch (Saris). As far as can be ascertained, this was the first operational order for a targeted killing that was both written and carried out in the history of the State of Israel.
“In light of Egypt’s organization of fedayeen activities in the Gaza Strip and Jordan,” Dar wrote, “it has been decided to act against its organizers, Mustafa Hafez in the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian military attaché in Jordan. The goal: the physical elimination of the said two men with booby-trap bombs.” In Hafez’s case, Dar recalls, “it was clear to us that the bomb had to be given to him by someone he trusted.”
They found their man in Muhammad al-Talalqa, a young Bedouin who lived in the Gaza Strip and was working for both Hafez and Unit 504. Al-Talalqa and Hafez were not aware that 504 knew he was a double agent, and the AMAN unit decided to exploit this and give him something in a package that would seem to him so important that he would immediately take it to Hafez.
What could that something be? A book that included all the ciphers in Morse code used by the Israelis, which Talalqa would be instructed by 504 to take to another Israeli agent in Gaza.
Once again, the services of Natan Rotberg were called for. He would indeed avenge his cousin.
“Zadok [Ofir, an officer at Unit 504’s southern base] called me and told me about the plan,” Rotberg said more than five decades later. “I understood who was involved and was very pleased. I told them that if they could deliver a thick book to Hafez, I would take care of the rest.
“I cut out the book’s insides and poured in three hundred grams of my stuff. Was it enough? Of course. A detonator is twenty grams—if it explodes in your hand, you’ll end up without any fingers. So three hundred grams that explodes in a person’s face will kill him for sure.
“The apparatus was based on a metal arm, a marble, and a strong spring. When the book was closed, inside a wrapper reinforced by ribbons, the arm is under pressure and doesn’t move. The minute you undo the ribbons and loosen the wrapper, the arm springs free and propels the marble forward, puncturing the detonator, which sets off the bomb and—kaboom!”
The plan and the booby trap worked perfectly. On July 11, 1956, al-Talalqa crossed the border, went straight to the Egyptian military intelligence HQ in Gaza, and excitedly handed the package to Hafez. “When he pulled the book out of the package,” an eyewitness later told a secret Egyptian inquiry, “a piece of paper fell out. Colonel Mustafa Hafez bent down to pick it up from the floor, and at that moment the explosion occurred.” Hafez was mortally wounded. Some of those present testified that, as he lay sprawled on the floor, he shouted, “You beat me, you dogs.”
The next night, Natan Rotberg paid a visit to his uncle, Roi’s father. He made a special point of putting on his dress uniform. “I told him, ‘Shmaryahu, I took care of your account with Mustafa Hafez,’ ” Rotberg said. “Did it make him feel better? I’m not sure, but me it did. I was happy. Shmaryahu was silent. A tear formed in his eye and he thanked me for updating him.”
The Egyptians were too embarrassed to acknowledge their security lapse publicly. The day after Hafez died, a notice appeared in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram: “Col. Mustafa Ha
fez, stationed in the Gaza Strip, was killed when his vehicle hit a mine….He was one of the heroes of the war in Palestine and fought for its liberation. History has recorded his heroic deeds. His name sowed fear and panic in Israel.”
The same day Hafez was killed, Salah Mustafa, the Egyptian military attaché in Amman, received in the mail a copy of Achtung Panzer! by Heinz Guderian, the German army’s tank warfare hero and one of the fathers of the concept of blitzkrieg. Avraham Dar, an aficionado of military history and strategy, chose the book because he was sure Salah would think it a suitable gift. Two Mistaravim had entered East Jerusalem, which was under Jordanian rule, and mailed the book from there so the postmark wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Salah, who had not yet heard of the attack on his counterpart in Gaza, opened the book, and it blew up, wounding him mortally. He later died in the hospital.
Chief of staff Dayan grasped the significance of these two hits, and he held in his backyard a lavish party to celebrate the killings of Hafez and Salah. Avraham Dar put together the guest list.
THE TARGETED KILLINGS OF Hafez and Salah jolted Egyptian military intelligence, and there was a certain reduction in the number of terrorist incursions into Israel. From the Israeli point of view, this was a success.
But then the skies over the region grew clouded for a different reason.
On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, acting on an anticolonialist agenda, nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital shipping link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. The British and French governments, whose citizens were the major shareholders in the highly profitable company that operated the waterway, were furious. Israel, for its part, wished to regain passage through the canal, but at the same time, it also saw an opportunity to deliver a clear message to Egypt: namely, that Nasser would finally pay a heavy price for sending militants in the Gaza Strip to attack Israel, and that his explicit ambitions to destroy the country would be met with crushing force.
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