It is impossible to stop without talking about the Lavon Affair.
Ben-Gurion retired in 1953
to Sdeh Boker at the height of his rule,
with a great fanfare, to a hut at Sdeh Boker.
No one quite understood why he did it.
To this day it is not very clear,
but he left behind a minefield:
he had appointed Pinhas Lavon to be Minister of Defence,
who was the opposite of what a Minister of Defence should be.
He belonged to the left wing of Mapai,
an anti-militarist until then
who became a crazy militarist overnight.
He appointed as Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan who hated Lavon,
and as Deputy Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres
who hated them both.
All three of them hated each other,
but all three of them hated the Prime Minister Moshe Sharett more.
At that time there was
a spy cell in Egypt
set up by an Israeli intelligence agent,
of young Egyptian Jews
which was a scandal in itself.
You were actually putting all of the Jews in Egypt at risk
by setting up an Israeli spy cell composed of locals.
But it was quiet, the spy cell.
Then, in 1954
there was a rapprochement between
Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Americans.
Abdel Nasser, as I said, at the beginning,
it was very unclear what exactly he was.
I think that he himself was not sure.
He was feeling his way. He had been a military officer
and suddenly he was the ruler of a country?
He was groping. Also with regard to the matter of Israel,
including the West-East and everything.
The Americans liked him
and started a sort of flirtation with him,
and this really worried Ben-Gurion
and his people and Sharett.
Contrary to legend, Ben-Gurion and Sharett
had no real deep disagreements.
Sharett knew Arabic
and was more rooted in the Arabic reality than Ben-Gurion.
Then someone,
I'm not sure who exactly,
had a stroke of genius:
we have people in Egypt,
in the Israeli resistance force,
let's just say they were to place bombs
in various American and English institutions in Cairo
and we claimed that it was the Egyptian anti-American resistance force.
Then the Americans would get annoyed
and the relationship between America and Nasser would weaken.
A rather idiotic idea.