The Kibbutz Boy Who Became a Spy
SALPETER, ELIAHU
SOME HARD QUESTIONS FOR ISRAELI SOCIETY The Kibbutz Boy Who Became a Spy BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv It will probably take many weeks to determine the full extent of the damage to Israel's...
...His fellow countrymen found it difficult to understand how a young man of his caliber, a member of the elite, a fighter in the Six-Day War, could go over to the enemy-and to virulently anti-Semitic Syria at that...
...As a young boy, he wanted to be a painter...
...But how realistic is the hope that providing more opportunities for the Arab minority (i.e., those who are full-fledged Israeli citizens-not the residents of the occupied territories who remain citizens of their native countries) will result in their becoming more closely integrated into Israel's national life...
...Is it possible that better chances create stronger nationalistic sentiments, turning some of the Arab citizens against the Jewish State...
...There is nothing of what I knew that I did not tell the Syrians," Adiv was reported lo have told police investigators...
...Then it began participating in demonstrations, including an attempt to deface a memorial to the fallen in the June 1967 war...
...His subsequent application to join the Foreign Ministry was turned down, and evidently this was the last straw: He felt it confirmed his long-held suspicions of discrimination because of his "oriental" (i.e., non-European) origin...
...He was a model teacher greatly admired by his students, to whom he gave no hint of his political views...
...Apparently it all started in the mid-'60s, when both Adiv and Vered joined the obscure Israel Socialist Organization, founded by a band of Leftists for whom the Communist party was too moderate...
...Looking to the future, Israel must ask whether the story of Ehud Adiv has disclosed some fundamental failure in the way the nation is educating its youth to meet the ideological and emotional challenges of the '70s...
...The second man, however, had no such chip on his shoulder: Daniel Vered was the precocious son of a well-to-do middle-class family in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv...
...Eventually he did win a scholarship that helped him through Tel Aviv university, where he earned a degree in history and Middle Eastern studies...
...Yet even Matzpen was not radical enough for Adiv and Vered...
...Have some of the extreme Left-wing movements become a corridor to national betrayal...
...The former paratrooper, born and raised in the prosperous kibbutz of Gan Shmuel, seemed the picture-book image of the young Israeli sabra: tall, athletic, open-faced, the son of deeply committed Zionist parents who were among the founders of the kibbutz...
...A star on the Mount Carmel-Hapoel basketball team, he was working his way through Haifa University as a sports instructor in a local youth club...
...A brilliant high school student, he was sent to a university in the United States, where he graduated with honors in mathematics and became involved with the radical Left through SDS...
...Do the Leftists influence their Jewish colleagues, or is the Haifa success merely attributable to a stronger effort there because of the presence of a large number of Arab students...
...More significantly, it now appears that Cohn-Bendit's influence led to the original Matzpen split and the founding of the extremist Revolutionary Communist Alliance...
...One of its activities was the publication of Red Front, a mimeographed bulletin bearing a replica of a "made-in-Peking" illustration of heroic freedom fighters of all races on the cover, and calling for the complete destruction of Israel as one of the preconditions for world revolution...
...Only fools or dogmatists can pretend to have answers to all these questions...
...Out of this grew Matzpen, a vocal quasi-Mao-ist group with a tiny following in Israel, Britain and Germany, dedicated to the establishment of a "secular" Arab-Jewish state in Palestine to replace the present "reactionary" nation-state...
...This was firmly rejected by responsible party spokesmen and dismissed by the public at large, which drew a very mature distinction between these individual cases and Leftist organizations in general...
...But what really stunned most Israelis was the identity of the third suspect, Ehud Adiv, said to be the deputy commander of the ring...
...Eliahu Salpeter reports regularly in these pages on Israeli affairs...
...Satisfied with his work, Syrian intelligence recalled Adiv to Damascus last September to take what may be regarded as the ultimate step in the process of becoming a traitor: He was given a two-week special course in sabotage and assassination, supposedly in preparation for a set of simultaneous attacks on Israeli police and Christian pilgrims to be carried out on Christmas Day 1972...
...Still, intellectuals here now have to face a difficult issue: Is there a danger some of the traditional Marxist-Socialist ideals held by Ma-pam, and by those to the Left of it, will ultimately lead to the negation of the fundamental tenets of a Jewish nation-state...
...But there is little doubt that the alleged participation of at least four young Jews in the recently discovered Syrian-operated espionage and sabotage ring has touched some of the most sensitive nerves in Israeli society...
...Is Israel's Arab minority more susceptible to hostile infiltration than was formerly thought...
...The next step was to provide Turki with information about military matters, such as data on Adiv's own reserve unit...
...It seems he knew enough to give the most hardened security officer a bad case of insomnia...
...He is believed to have supplied the Syrians with details of military bases where he had served, of radar and Air Force installations he had observed and, perhaps most harmful, of sophisticated weaponry used against Arab terrorists...
...What made the latest case so upsetting was the motivation of its participants...
...And-hardest of all-what went wrong with the Zionist-Socialist education of Ehud Adiv...
...Why did be go from the kibbutz of Gan Shmuel to the intelligence headquarters in Damascus...
...Reportedly, he introduced Vered to the Israel Revolutionary Organization during a brief stay in this country in 1968...
...And is the hostility toward Israel limited to a few young extremists, or does it extend to a major part of the nation's Arab population...
...When he returned home to teach at a Tel Aviv high school, he joined the Israel Revolutionary Organization-whose existence was not known to the general public until the discovery of the espionage ring...
...Nor was the engagement of Jews in anti-Israeli intelligence activities unprecedented: In its 25 years of existence, this country has seen several of its Jewish citizens convicted for providing military information to foreign agents, including those of its hostile neighbors...
...Besides its serious implications for national security, the affair poses a number of fundamental and disturbing questions about Israel's domestic situation: - Has Haifa University been made a focus of Arab anti-Israeli activities...
...One of the four did have a criminal record (arrests for theft and burglary), but the other three Jews in the ring were young intellectuals who, in a way, belonged to Israel's privileged...
...SOME HARD QUESTIONS FOR ISRAELI SOCIETY The Kibbutz Boy Who Became a Spy BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv It will probably take many weeks to determine the full extent of the damage to Israel's security and the seriousness of the political repercussions...
...One of the reasons for establishing a university in Haifa was to give Israel's Arabs, most of whom live in the Galilee, easier access to higher education...
...A strange role was played in all this by the German-born Jewish student revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who a few years ago managed to create near-chaos in France...
...Everyone else in Israel will be devoting much time and effort to sorting out the causes, meanings and implications of the case of the kibbutz boy who became such a determined spy...
...In contrast, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem universities have right-of-center Ga-hal and middle-of-the-road Labor party student governments, respectively...
...Though senior police investigators described it to the press as "the largest, best organized and most dangerous [spy ring] we have come up against since 1948"-by mid-December nearly 100 suspects had been arrested-it was not the size of the network that shocked the country...
...Inevitably, reports of the ideological affiliations of those involved in the espionage ring evoked demands from the Israeli Right for some kind of action against the Left...
...What happens when New Left extremism, to which so many young Jews in the world seem susceptible, is encountered by the young Israeli who does not remember anything but a victorious Israel rolling back every Arab attempt to destroy it...
...Nonetheless, it is evident from news reports and a much publicized interview with the Inspector General of the Police that the suspected damage to Israel's security was in fact extensive...
...Since his parents could not afford to send him to art school, after his military service he went to work in the Dimona nuclear center...
...This ideological hotbed proved to be fertile soil for the recruiting efforts of the spy ring's alleged leader, one Daud Samaam Turki, an Arab bookstore owner in Haifa...
...The motives of the first suspect, Yehezkiel Cohen, the son of immigrants from Iraq, are perhaps the easiest to explain, if not necessarily the easiest to digest...
...Unlike their predecessors, those apprehended this time had not sold their country's secrets for the sake of money or other personal gain, but apparently for ideological reasons...
...At first the extremist group, composed of both Jews and Arabs, merely held debates about Israel's right to exist...
...To what extent is the difference in Haifa due to the fact that it has the highest percentage of Arab students...
...Finally the Alliance moved into the big-time, making a secret trip to Damascus where Adiv reputedly underwent training in the finer arts of espionage...
...It was recently recalled, too, that Adiv had once brought Cohn-Bendit to Gan Shmuel for a visit, and that in the course of a debate with local youths there his anti-Israel remarks had almost caused a riot...
...They quit the organization to form their own splinter group, grandiosely named the Revolutionary Communist Alliance...
...Police Minister Shlomo Hilel has sought to reassure the public that the ring was broken up before it could do great harm...
...There were signs that something was happening at Haifa University a year ago, when extreme Leftist candidates won control of the student government in an election marked by apathy and nonparticipation on the part of the majority of students...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 1
