Jooish

We regret to inform you of the sudden Petirah of Mrs. Chana Murik A”H (nee Rosenberg), of Elm Street in Lakewood. She was 26.

She leaves behind her husband, Yaakov, and one child.

The Levaya is scheduled to take place today, Sunday, at 3:00 PM at the Lakewood Chapel, 613 Ramsey Avenue. Kevurah will take place in Lakewood.

Baruch Dayan Ha’emes.

The IDF Archive at the Defense Ministry on Sunday opened a new website marking 70 years since the Sinai Campaign, gathering more than 4,500 photographs, documents, and maps, a large share of them never published before. Among the files are remarks by then-Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion on the Gaza Strip, including his judgment that Israel had to seize it, but that staying there under international isolation while fighting terror was beyond the country’s strength and would destroy it.

The remarks were delivered at a gathering of senior IDF officers on April 4, 1957, after the army had withdrawn from Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel had taken large parts of Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt at the end of October 1956, then pulled back within months under heavy pressure from the United States and the wider world. Speaking to the officers, Ben-Gurion returned to words he had used at a cabinet meeting on October 28, 1956, on the eve of the campaign. “The Gaza Strip is an ’embarrassing’ target,” he said. “We must take it. This is what faces us. If I believed in a miracle, I would want it to be swallowed by the sea.”

He told the officers that Israel had known even before capturing it that the Gaza Strip was a malignant danger. An Egyptian strike force was concentrated there that, in a surprise attack, could push toward the approaches of Tel Aviv if it was not stopped, because the strip cuts into the heart of the country. He also pointed to some 300,000 Arab residents packed into a small, narrow territory, among them 180,000 or 190,000 refugees who had lived in Eretz Yisrael and whose former fields and homes in the south, including the areas of Ramle and Rehovot, were then home to Jews. In the few months that Israel controlled Gaza, he said, it appeared possible to keep order, yet officials knew an underground was operating there even without an official Egyptian army or police presence.

Ben-Gurion said the strip would be trouble under any arrangement, whether Israeli rule, Israeli rule together with the United Nations, or United Nations rule without Israel. Egyptian control, he said, was the worst of those options. “But it was clear that our remaining in Gaza, after the world ostracizes us, and there will be terror there and we must suppress it, is not according to Israel’s ability and vital needs,” he said. “This terror would have destroyed us.” From the outset, he said, he had strongly opposed those who demanded that Gaza be annexed, telling the officers that Israel did not need another 300,000 Arab residents and the dangers that would come with governing them while the country stood isolated.

He also cautioned the officers not to treat the Sinai Campaign as a model for the next war. The 1956 fighting, he said, had been planned in a way meant to hold down the number of casualties, but that could not be counted on again. “This will not be so in the next war,” he said. “Tel Aviv will be bombed, Haifa will be bombed, and people will be killed. Not fighters. Women, children.” He separately warned that if Israel were cut off from the world, there was a real danger it would be unable to obtain weapons when Arab states believed they had the power to destroy it, and that he did not know how Israel would then fight or what price it would pay.

The archive also includes papers of Shimon Peres, then director-general of the Defense Ministry, describing Ben-Gurion making two seemingly contradictory decisions in succession, first to go to war and then to withdraw. Peres wrote that Ben-Gurion explained that wars would not resolve the problem of relations between Israel and the Arab states, “since a victory of ours in battle does not necessarily mean the last battle, but an Arab victory could be the final victory.”

The files also document Operation Tushia, recorded in the archive as Operation Honio, in which 65 Jews were rescued from Port Said and brought to Israel. Military Intelligence documents from 1956 describe an Israeli team that operated in Port Said, in territory then held by British forces in Egypt. The team’s goals were to examine possibilities for intelligence work there and to save Jews. The unit included two members of the Shin Bet, a representative of the Mossad le’Aliyah, four members of Shayetet 13, and a radio operator from Unit 220. The team was attached to a French intelligence unit, and the documents describe the preparations for the mission and the cooperation with French officials during the campaign.

In a report to the head of Military Intelligence, Lt. Col. Aryeh Eliav wrote: “My role in the team was to rescue Jews and bring them to Israel.” Eliav reported that on November 17, 1956, 65 Jews in Port Said were boarded onto two Navy fishing boats.

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