Biological Warfare in the 1948 War

"Cast Thy Bread:" Clandestine Biological Warfare during the 1948 War

(Originally published in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 59, 2023, Issue 5)

By Benny Morris and BZ Kedar

Following the first Arab-Israeli war, of 1948, rumors surfaced that the typhoid epidemic that struck the Arab town of Acre, just before its fall on 18 May, had been caused by bacteria poured into the town's water works by agents of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia. Later that month, the Egyptian government announced that it had caught two "Zionist" operatives as they were trying to infect wells near Egyptian-occupied Gaza. The two episodes have been mentioned in several books[1] and discussed by Sara Leibowitz-Dar, Avner Cohen and Salman Abu Sitta in articles published some twenty years ago, based mainly on interviews.[2] But real-time Israeli documentation of the country’s clandestine biological warfare in 1948 remained closed to researchers and over the years government agencies have tried to suppress information on the subject. For example, crucial words in Ben-Gurion’s diary for 1948, published in 1982 by the Israel’s Defense Ministry Press, were deleted.[3]

The code name of the biological warfare campaign - “Cast Thy Bread” (in Hebrew: Shallah Lahmekha, from “cast thy bread upon the waters” (shallah lahmekha ‘al pnay hamayim, Ecclesiastes, 11:1)) is partially mentioned , as shallah, in a memoir published in 2000 by Aryeh Aharoni, a Palmah officer in 1948, who unequivocally asserted that the operation aimed at infecting water used by the invading Egyptian army.[4] The full code name is mentioned in the 2003 article by Abu Sitta, who received the information from Israeli military historian Uri Milstein.[5] Once aware of the code name, we were able to trawl through hundreds of files in IDFA, produced by military units operating in areas that we thought might have been targeted in the operation, and to identify relevant documents. Israel government censors, apparently unaware of the significance of the code name and confused by the cryptic language generally used, let them through. Furthermore, we found a crucial letter by Ben-Gurion from 14 May 1948, preserved in a private archive, and used unpublished – and highly revealing – interviews with two key figures, Ephraim Katzir (Katchalsky) and Shemarya Guttman. In addition, a privately printed memoir by Rafi Kotzer, commander of an elite Israel Defense Forces (the Israeli army, henceforward IDF) unit in 1948, also supplied useful information. Taken together, these documents revealed that the Acre and Gaza episodes were merely the tip of the iceberg in a prolonged campaign, designed initially to prevent Palestinian Arab militiamen from returning to their villages from which they harassed Jewish settlements and road traffic, and, later, to hinder the Arab states’ armies that invaded Palestine on 15 May 1948.

In the following pages we offer a step-by-step reconstruction of Israel’s top secret biological warfare campaign during the 1948 War and describe how, if at all, it affected the war-making. Along the way, we shall show how dissenting voices, at various levels of government and army, hampered the unfolding operation. However, due to the fragmentary nature of the available sources, our remains a skeletal reconstruction. For instance, we were unable to access material on the science side of the Cast Thy Bread campaign: On how and what equipment and knowledge of biological warfare was acquired in Europe and the United States and how the requisite germs were acquired or produced and weaponized and where this was done. At several points, we have been constrained to offer assumptions, all duly presented as such.

In April 1948 the gloves came off. Following 29 November 1947, when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181, proposing the partition of Palestine into two states, and the Palestine Arabs had launched hostilities, the Jews had been on the defensive. They had accepted the partition resolution. Palestine's Arabs had not and, backed by the Arab states around, their militiamen, based in the country's 750-odd villages and towns, continuously attacked Jewish settlements and convoys, causing more than one thousand deaths. The Jews periodically retaliated. The British, who had conquered the country from the Turks and ruled it since 1917/18, were scheduled to depart on 15 May 1948, and the Arab states had announced that they would invade when the British left. For the country's 650,000-strong Jewish community – called collectively the Yishuv (Hebrew: the Settlement) - the future looked grim. March 1948 had seen a series of major military setbacks, with large Haganah convoys destroyed in ambushes along the roads, mostly around Jerusalem. The Jews feared that, should the Arabs win, a second Holocaust would result, a bare three years after the first had ended.[6]

On the night of 31 March David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Yishuv and its de facto defense minister, in political charge of the Haganah, summoned an emergency meeting of his military aides. He was especially worried about the fate of Jerusalem's 100,000 Jews. The city's western, Jewish half was besieged by Arab militiamen, who dominated the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road, the Jews' main supply line. Ben-Gurion insisted that the Haganah secure the road and push through a number of large supply convoys; the Haganah’s commanders reluctantly – who preferred that their crack troops engage the Arabs elsewhere - agreed. As it turned out, Operation Nahshon, which in effect began on 3 April with the capture of the Arab hilltop village of al-Qastal, just west of Jerusalem, marked the Yishuv's turn to the offensive and was the first in a six-week-long series of country-wide operations in which the Palestine Arab militias were crushed and the Yishuv braced for the impending pan-Arab invasion. The invasion, by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Syria, duly began at sun-up on 15 May. Nahshon was the first operation in which the Yishuv captured and held – as it turned out, permanently – swaths of Arab-inhabited territory designated in the UN partition resolution for Palestine Arab sovereignty.

A week into Nahshon, after the capture of a handful of sites, the Haganah brass decided on a series of measures to prevent the return of the Arabs – critically, militiamen - to their villages on either side of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road. The main measure adopted was levelling the villages, partially or completely; this usually included the destruction of the village wells. Indeed, well-destruction had become routine in the tit-for-tat characterizing the first months of the war. For example, a Haganah operational logbook, under "21.2.48," reported: "Last night the Arabs blew up the well of [Kibbutz] Kiryat ‘Anavim [just west of Jerusalem]. Part of the building was destroyed. In the retaliatory strike immediately carried out, a unit of the [Palmah] 6^th Battalion attacked [the nearby Arab village of] Beit Naqquba and blew up the village spring."[7] A similar case was recorded a month before: A Jewish convoy traveling through the Arab village of Breir in the south was ambushed. The convoy stopped, the troops disembarked and then "blew up the village well."[8]

But bulldozing or blowing up houses and wells was deemed insufficient. With its back to the wall, the Haganah upped the ante and unleashed a clandestine campaign of polluting certain captured village wells with bacteria – in violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, that contained a blanket prohibition of “the use of bacteriological methods of warfare.”[9] During Operation Nahshon, it was unclear whether the Haganah would be allowed – by the British, who still ruled the country, the United Nations, or the Arabs – to permanently hold captured village sites; besides, the Haganah lacked troops to garrison them. The aim of Cast Thy Bread henceforward referred to as CTB), like the demolitions, was to hamper an Arab return. Over the weeks, the well-infecting campaign was expanded to regions beyond the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road and included Jewish settlements captured or about to be captured by Arab troops, and then to inhabited Arab towns, to facilitate their prospective conquest by the Haganah or to hinder the progress of the invading Arab armies. Lastly, in the war's final months, Israel's military leaders contemplated – and perhaps even ordered – the use of biological agents to harm or "harass" the belligerent Arab states themselves, on their home ground. By then, of course, Israel had all but won the war and "our-backs-to-the-wall" circumstances no longer pertained.

Neither the decision-making processes nor the mechanics of CTB are completely clear, given the continued classification of most of the relevant documentation in Israel's archives. But enough has been opened – not a file or files specific to the operation but isolated cables in dozens of files largely devoted to other matters - to enable the reconstruction that follows.[10]

The well-polluting campaign was personally initiated in April by the Haganah head of operations and acting chief of general staff, General Yigael Yadin,[11] undoubtedly with Ben-Gurion's authorization (see below). At least initially, it was Yadin who, in effect, personally liaised between the "producers" of the bacteria, HEMED (heyl mada‘– the science corps), the Haganah/IDF's weapons development arm that supplied the organization with a variety of armaments,[12] and the officer and unit charged with managing the delivery of the bacteria to the wells. Later, through the summer, with Yadin – now IDF chief of operations and acting IDF chief of general staff[13] – still personally involved, the campaign was managed by Israel's intelligence services. Throughout, Cast Thy Bread was highly compartmentalized and top secret – almost no one not directly involved was in the loop. Even in the logbook of Haganah General Staff\Operations for April-May 1948, registering most of the important incoming cables - of the many hundreds received during those weeks – there is only one explicit, but of course unexplained, use of the phrase shalleh lahmekha.[14] Indeed, all the accessible cables dealing with CTB between Yadin, HEMED, the campaign's hands-on director and the operational units involved are written cryptically, often leaving the historian to guess meanings or befuddled.

As with much of Israel's behavior in the Zionist-Arab conflict (including Israel's nuclear program, launched in the late 1950s), the bacteriological campaign of 1948 had its roots in World War Two and the Holocaust. In summer 1945, immediately after the end of World War II in Europe, Abba Kovner, a Crimean-born Jewish partisan leader and poet, after reaching Palestine tried to organize a mass poisoning of Germans in revenge for the murder of the six million. He considered two alternatives: Plan A, to poison waterworks in a number of German cities; and Plan B, to poison thousands of SS officers detained in Allied prisoner-of-war camps. Kovner sought out and obtained a quantity of poison from the brothers Aharon (1914-72) and Ephraim (1916-2009) Katchalsky (later, Katzir), young scientists who worked in the laboratory of the organic chemistry department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.[15] They believed Kovner intended to carry out Plan B.[16] Kovner was arrested by British security men on his way to Europe right after he dumped the poison in the sea, and the revenge operation was aborted.

But the notion of employing poisons against "the enemy" resurfaced as the first Arab-Israeli war loomed. At the end of 1947 or the start of 1948, Ephraim Katchalsky—then doing research at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute—met David Rittenberg, an American biochemist at Columbia University and told him—so Katchalsky related to historian Dina Porat in a 1998 interview—"I need germs and poisons for the [impending/ongoing Israeli] War of Independence."[17] Rittenberg told Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist elder statesman and scientist, who was in New York at the time, of this request, calling Katchalsky a "savage" (pere adam).[18] An enraged Weizmann ordered that Katchalsky be dismissed from the Sieff Scientific Institute in Rehovot (soon to be renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science), laying down that "people in my Institute cannot be involved in such matters." (But a few weeks later Weizmann relented and Katchalsky's dismissal was rescinded).[19]

HEMED, officially created on 17 March 1948 with Aharon Katchalsky at its head,[20] consisted of three sections: HEMED A dealt with chemical problems, HEMED B with biological defense and warfare, HEMED C with geology and nuclear research.[21] It was Alexander Keynan (1921-2012), a young microbiologist and Haganah officer, who proposed the establishment of HEMED B and on 18 February was ordered by Yadin to set it up (even before HEMED itself had been established). The location of the unit’s initial headquarters base is unclear but it eventually moved to Jaffa (occupied by the Haganah on 13-14 May) and then to Abu Kabir , a deserted Arab village southeast of Tel Aviv.[22] After the 1948 war, HEMED B—its activities "kept top secret"—became a formally civilian research body, the Israel Institute for Biological Research located in Nes Ziona, with Keynan as its first director.[23] It would appear that the decision in principle to launch the 1948 biological campaign was taken on 1 April, during a protracted one-on-one meeting between Ben-Gurion and General Yohanan Ratner (1891-1965). The Odessa-born Ratner was a key, veteran member of the Haganah – later IDF – general staff. He had commanded a brigade in the Red Army after the October revolution and during the Second World War advised the British Eighth Army on problems relating to fortifications. In between, he served as professor of architecture in the Haifa Technion (Israel's MIT) while clandestinely helping to organize the Haganah general staff. On 26 March 1948, four months into the 1948 War, Ben-Gurion offered Ratner the position of de facto Haganah chief of general staff. Ratner hesitated and then declined, leaving Yadin in effective control of the organization – on 1 June 1948 renamed the IDF - for the duration of the war. Ratner instead asked to head the Haganah's Planning Department, which included control of HEMED.[24] On 1 April, at their meeting, Ben-Gurion and Ratner surveyed the functioning of the key Haganah branches and brigades and senior appointments – and also "[discussed] the development of science and speeding up its application in battle/warfare," as Ben-Gurion put it in his diary.[25]

What happened during the following days suggests that the seed of Cast Thy Bread was planted at that meeting. On 7 April, Yadin cabled David Shaltiel, the commander of the Haganah's Etzioni Brigade and OC Jerusalem District, instructing him to meet Moshe Dayan, codenamed "Magi," who will "reach you tomorrow in the first convoy from the Dead Sea for a special mission [le-tafqid meyuhad]."[26] Between the Ben-Gurion-Ratner meeting and this cable, Yadin, probably with Ben-Gurion's and Ratner's approval or authorization, had selected Dayan, the Haganah General Staff's Arab affairs officer as well as its "Staff Officer for Special Operations [qetzin mateh le-tafqidim meyuhadim],"[27] to run the CTB campaign. Dayan had a reputation as an efficient, and daring, clandestine operations officer. Ben-Gurion, who later appointed Dayan IDF chief of general staff (1953-58), had probably met Dayan sometime in 1944-45, when he played a part in the "Saison," the Haganah crackdown against the right-wing Jewish terrorist/para-military organization, the Irgun Zva'i Leumi (IZL or "Irgun"), and occasionally met him in 1947 in his capacity as an Arab affairs expert. (In 1942 Dayan had personally conveyed suitcases full of weapons from Palestine to Jewish defense activists in Baghdad following the Farhoud, the Iraqi pogrom against the city's Jewish community the year before).[28]

It took Yadin-HEMED-Dayan two weeks to get CTB off the ground, against the backdrop of the hostilities that raged around the country, including Operation Nahshon. Dayan duly arrived in Jerusalem and met Shaltiel on 8 April – and then traveled down to Tel Aviv/the Coastal Plain, probably to meet with Yadin and collect the typhoid-dysentery bacteria (perhaps stored in test-tubes) prepared by HEMED. During the following weeks, Dayan personally delivered the bacteria to specific Haganah officers around the country. This was how, by the way, Dayan's three-year-old son, Assi, contracted typhoid. In his autobiographical film, Assi Dayan related: "After a few weeks [of absence], he [Moshe Dayan] arrived home [in the Jezreel Valley village of Nahalal] for a short visit and brought with him test-tubes [mavhenot] containing typhus bacteria designed to poison the drinking water of the Arab Legion [i.e., Transjordan’s army]. At home, one of the test-tubes broke and it was me and not the Jordanians who was infected. My father went back to the front, and I was [sick] in bed for many days."[29]

But Dayan was unable to return to Jerusalem as planned on 9 April due to the suspension of the scheduled convoy – since the start of the siege of Jerusalem in late March, Jews had traveled to and from the town in Haganah-organised and -guarded convoys. The suspension was caused by the massive funeral that day of the Palestinian militia commander, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who had been killed in the battle at al-Qastal on 8 April. ‘Abd al-Qadir was buried in Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), known to most non-Muslims the Temple Mount. Dayan asked Yadin to arrange "seats on the airplane" to take him to Jerusalem (and to notify his parents in Nahalal that he would be "stuck in Jerusalem").[30]

Dayan reached Jerusalem probably on 10 April. Yadin that day cabled Shaltiel to "fill Magi's request concerning Cast Thy Bread [male et baqashat magi be-'inyan shallah lahmekha]."[31] It appears that the Haganah General Staff/Yadin had decided sometime between 8 and 10 April to name the operation Cast Thy Bread, and this was to remain its codename until the end of the year. At their meetings on 8 or 10 April Dayan may have asked Shaltiel for the use of one or two efficient officers to carry out the well-infections, or he may have brought one or two with him, perhaps from the neighboring Harel Brigade, to which the Arab Platoon (see below) was attached at the time. Shaltiel, who does not seem to have been very cooperative, was preoccupied at the time with Nahshon and with the Deir Yassin imbroglio (though he may also have had misgivings about CTB.

Yosef ("Yosefle") Tabenkin, codenamed "Amon," appears to have been more amenable. Tabenkin commanded the Harel Brigade’s 4^th Battalion and was responsible for the area – and the main road – just west of Jerusalem. He apparently gave Dayan one or two officers - possibly including Moshe Ben-Zvi (Horowitz), an intelligence officer and member of the Arab Platoon - willing to deliver the bacteria to target. It is possible that Dayan asked Tabenkin and Shaltiel for specific officers whom he had come to know and trust during his long service in the Haganah. It is also possible that Dayan accompanied the officer or officers he had chosen on the following days' missions, Dayan often courted danger. Early on 13 April Dayan cabled Yadin that the 4^th Battalion "was beginning" CTB operations "[while] Etzioni had not [played ball?]."[32]

It is unclear what Dayan/Tabenkin managed to do during the following days, which were marked by battles and skirmishes along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and the constant shift of Harel troops from place to place. On 16 April Dayan – now calling himself, in code, "Moshe Neptune" - cabled Yadin: "Cast Thy Bread will be activated by Nahshon [meaning Operation Nahshon forces, which included the Harel Brigade] on Monday or Tuesday [19 or 20 April]." He also told Yadin that he would be traveling to Tel Aviv mid-week and to notify his parents.[33] (A week later, HEMED asked Dayan to send them a report about the progress made in the campaign and where Cast Thy Bread had been implemented).[34]

On 22 April Dayan cabled that he was "ready to travel with all the material [kol ha-homer]" and "will bring with me Ya‘acov [?] and an [the?] engineer [mehandes]." Dayan said he would be arriving apparently after the Sabbath and instructed: "Prepare a place for the material and the work."[35] The following day, 23 April, Dayan, now back in Jerusalem, informed Keynan that "we have begun to activate Cast Thy Bread as planned."[36] Later that day he cabled Keynan that CTB had been used in Biddu and Beit Surik,[37] two Arab villages northwest of Jerusalem, captured, temporarily denuded of their inhabitants and partially leveled on the night of 19/20 April, and then abandoned by the Palmah.

The last days of April witnessed a doctrinal addition to the aims of CTB: The hindering of the prospective invasion of Palestine by the armies of the neighboring states. The Arab states had made it clear, through radio broadcasts and other channels, that they intended to invade Palestine when the British left. Ut was believed that the Syrian army (and possibly also the Lebanese and Iraqi armies) would advance on eastern Galilee (as, in fact, the Syrians and Iraqis did on 15 May). On 22 April the Haganah commander in northeastern Galilee, Uro Yoffe, (codenamed “Oded”), headquartered at Yavni’el, cabled Yadin that the “Cast Thy Bread [material? Word unclear] had arrived.” But “according to my investigation,” wrote Yoffe, “we have no place\location where we can use it. I understand that the matter [i.e., material] can spoil [ha’inyan yakhol lehitkalkel]” and so thought it desirable “to take it immediately to some other place [lekahto miyad lemaqom aher]”[38] Whether Yoffe really had nowhere to usefully plant the material or whether he was averse to using it for other reasons is unclear. In any case, we do not have Yadin’s response.

But the chain of events relating to CTB and the prospective invasion of Palestine in another area, fifty miles to the south, is clearer. On 27 April Etzioni passed on to Yadin a piece of intelligence culled from "consular circles": "The Transjordan parliament decided last night on intervention in Palestine's affairs and endorsed a mobilization of its army. Such [intervention] is a matter of hours." [39] This cable was followed, within hours, by a more specific warning: "Highly reliable intelligence tells of serious preparations by the Transjordan and Iraqi armies including air power to invade the country. The direction/objective [kivun] of [the proposed] advance is apparently Jerusalem. Stopping Arab traffic is necessary. The demolition of the Allenby and Jericho bridges is desirable. The only possible alternative is the destruction of the Jericho-Jerusalem Road."[40] As we know, the Transjordanian and Iraqi armies only invaded Palestine on 15 May, alongside the Egyptian and Syrian armies, because they were unwilling to move before the prospective British departure, scheduled for 15 May. (In fact, the British quit Palestine a day early, on 14 May.) But Etzioni intelligence at the end of April apparently believed that there was a likelihood of invasion momentarily.

Yadin weighed Etzioni's warning and ordered: "Activate Cast Thy Bread in Jericho. It is very important."[41] Shaltiel (Etzioni) then apparently consulted Dayan, who informed Yadin: "Cast Thy Bread will be activated as soon as possible [beheqdem] in Jericho and in Jerusalem's environs."[42] But Jerusalem's environs (bisvivot yerushalayim) presented a problem: Harel Brigade, responsible for the area just west of the city, on 6 May informed Etzioni that they were "leaving your area" and that Etzioni would henceforth be responsible for "activating … Shallah [i.e., CTB] in your area" and "henceforward we haven't the ability to deal with the matter [in your area]."[43]

But another problem obtruded: Dayan was not around – perhaps he was in the north or the Negev - or there appeared to be no materials available to carry out the operation in Jericho. "There is no Cast Thy Bread," Yadin informed Etzioni on 7 May. "He [Dayan] won't be able to fly tomorrow to the [Dead] Sea for lack of a plane. Better that he come down [westward] to Tel Aviv in a convoy and from [Tel Aviv] we will move him there [i.e., eastward, to the Dead Sea, by air] more easily."[44] Given Dayan's apparent unavailability, Etzioni cabled Yadin: "In line with your order, I will tomorrow send a SHAI [Haganah Intelligence Service] man with the material to carry out the Cast Thy Bread operation at the Dead Sea [i.e., Jericho area]."[45]

But transportation remained a problem. The following day Yadin informed Etzioni "concerning Cast Thy Bread at the Dead Sea." "There is no plane today to Jerusalem because of the weather. If the weather will allow, we will send a plane tomorrow to take him [i.e., the SHAI operative]."[46] But problems continued to plague the operation. Indeed, nothing seems to have been done before the Arab Legion actually crossed the Jordan River into Palestine just east of the town at dawn on 15 May – and it is unclear what exactly was done thereafter. On and immediately after 15 May the Haganah was engaged up to its neck, on all fronts, containing the various invading Arab armies; CTB was far from a priority (except, perhaps, in Ben-Gurion's mind (see below)). On 19 May "Moshe Mizrahi" – possibly Dayan's successor as manager of Cast Thy Bread, at least in the Jerusalem area, but still using Dayan's codename – complained that the "material" (i.e. bacteria) for Jericho was stuck at the airfield "here" (Jerusalem?) "for lack of aircraft. Try to carry it out without the files" he wrote.[47] He was referring to the SHAI files on Jericho and Wadi Qelt, west of Jericho. Jericho received much of its water from the Wadi Qelt springs. Dayan had sent Yadin copies of the files – for use by the operative intending to poison the Jericho-Wadi Qelt waterworks – a few days before, but these appear to have been mislaid. On 18 May Mizrahi informed Yadin/Neptune that a second copy of the files had been sent to him four days before[48] - and Neptune now acknowledged that they had arrived.[49] But, in the end, it is unclear whether the CTB operatives managed to poison the Jericho area wells/springs. In any event, the Jericho area – a logistical hub of the Arab Legion expeditionary force in Palestine – was still in Neptune's sights in July. According to General Staff/Operations cable traffic, a CTB officer was sent to the area early that month, and the "Sodom Area" – south of Jericho – OC was ordered to "give him all [the] assistance he demands," presumably relating to an unfolding well-poisoning operation, apparently in the area.[50]

But back in May, two other operations proceeded more smoothly. On 13 May Dayan informed Yadin that CTB had been implemented in Beit Mahsir, an Arab village south of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road captured two days before.[51] The initial operational order had called for "the destruction of its ability to constitute an economic and military base for enemy forces surrounding the road."[52] And on 15 May, the day of the pan-Arab invasion, Dayan informed Yadin that CTB would be carried out against "Shelomo ha-Melekh" (King Solomon) that night.[53] The following day, Dayan informed Yadin that CTB had been carried out "successfully in the Shelomo ha-Melekh area."[54] It is uncertain what the codename "King Solomon" referred to. In all probability, the reference was to the Siloam (Shiloah) Spring or to the neighboring Gihon Spring, southeast and east of the Old City walls, where, according to the Bible, Solomon – Shelomo – had been crowned king. In any case, "Mizrahi" informed Yadin on 26 May that "the Shelomo ha-Melekh Operation had been carried out for the second time."[55]

But the shift in policy, from using CTB to block a return of Palestinian militiamen to their villages to using it to undermine Palestinian staying power in still inhabited sites and to sow hindrances along the prospective routes of advance of invading Arab armies, had already begun a few weeks before. Haganah intelligence assessed that the invading Arab armies would include a lunge from the north, by the Lebanese Army (perhaps accompanied by part of the Syrian Army), down the coast road from Ras al-Naqurah through Acre toward Haifa. Ya‘acov Pundaq, a Haganah company commander in the 21^st Battalion, Carmeli Brigade, responsible for the Western Galilee town of Nahariya and surrounding kibbutzim – an area designated in the UN partition resolution of November 1947 to form part of the Arab state – had previously repeatedly damaged the Kabri aqueduct that fed the Arab town of Acre. But the Arabs had repeatedly repaired it.[56] He now poured flasks full of typhoid (or typhoid and dysentery) bacteria into the aqueduct, near the Arab village of al-Kabri. According to his later testimony, the flasks, with instructions, had been handed him by Moshe Dayan.[57] This turned out to be the most serious and potent use of CTB during the 1948 War.

The morale of the inhabitants of Acre was already shaky due to the Haganah’s conquest of the Arab parts of nearby Haifa, the region's "capital," on 21-22 April and the flight of the bulk of its population, mostly to Acre or through Acre to Lebanon, and of the Haganah’s severance of the coast road linking Acre to Haifa in the south and Lebanon in the north. The prospective departure of the British, who had previously protected Acre from Haganah attack, contributed to the town's plummeting morale. And so did the outbreak of what most contemporary reports called a "typhus" epidemic. According to a report by the director of Acre's Ittihad Hospital from July, the epidemic broke out already in the "middle of April,"[58] though most reports about the outbreak speak of the first week of May.

Acre's Arabs appear to have been unaware of the origin of the epidemic. On 3 May, Acre's mayor reported that "the town of Acre is now in a state of extreme distress," partly because the Jews had cut off the town's electricity supply, shutting down the pumps drawing water from the town's wells, and had damaged the aqueduct from Kabri. "The lack of water had prevented us from carrying out a cleaning operation and other [sanitation] measures required in this situation, and as a result of all this typhus illness had appeared among us in a dreadful way."[59] But Brigadier Arthur Joseph Beveridge, director of the British Army health services in Palestine, stated on 6 May at a conference in Acre that the “medical representatives … consider the infection us water bourne [sic].”[60]

Many of those who fell ill were from among the refugees, mostly from Haifa, encamped in various parts of Acre. On 8 May, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross sent to the town, Maximilien de Meuron, reported that there had been some 90 cases among the locals and 65 among the British forces stationed in the region.[61] Later, after the IDF conquest of the town on 17-18 May, the director of the Ittihad Hospital reported that the hospital had taken in 58 cases of "typhoid" and "12" of dysentery between 25 May and 18 July and that five of the typhoid cases had "succumbed."[62]

But, before the IDF conquest of the town, the Usama bin Zayd Scouts Company of Acre reported on 9 May to the commander of the town's Arab Liberation Army (ALA) garrison that "the rumors about the spread of an epidemic in the town are greatly exaggerated, and there is now a widespread vaccination campaign, and the water has been purified after the necessary materials [chlorine?] had [become available]."[63] The Scouts' appreciation of the situation was more or less echoed in the Haganah Intelligence Service's assessment from the same day: "The number of people infected with typhus in Acre is diminishing daily." The report stated that an International Red Cross mission had arrived in the town and was treating the sick, as was a delegation of "12 doctors and 12 nurses" who had arrived from Syria. The report stated that altogether some "70" had been reported sick but assumed that the true number was much greater "as many cases had gone unreported."[64]

Nonetheless, in retrospect, Israeli officers and officials attributed the ease with which Acre fell to the Haganah in part to the demoralization caused by the epidemic. The SHAI, in its report from the end of June 1948 on the causes of the Arab flight from Palestine, mentioned "the typhus epidemic" as "an exacerbating factor in the evacuation" in certain areas. "More than the disease itself, it was the panic induced by the rumors of the spread of the disease in the area that was a factor in the evacuation," stated the report. In its site-by-site breakdown of the Arab flight, the report mentioned "harassment [by the Haganah] and the typhus epidemic" as the causes of the partial flight of part of the population from Acre on 6 May.[65] In his memoir, Battles of the North (ma'arakhot tzafon), published in 1949, Moshe Carmel, the Carmeli Brigade's commanding officer, disingenuously – if not misleadingly – wrote of the conditions in the town before it fell to Haganah assault: "Water was in short supply. In the town unemployment, fear, dirt and hunger prevailed. Because of the poor sanitary conditions serious illnesses and epidemics broke out."[66] The official history of the Carmeli Brigade, published two and a half decades later, was marginally more informative: "At the start of May a typhus [epidemic] broke out [in the town]," causing demoralization.[67]

One can assume that Moshe Carmel had been informed of the CTB operation before or as it unfolded. On 7 May the Carmeli Brigade intelligence officer wrote: "The typhus epidemic is spreading and increasing the [townspeople's] panic."[68] The brigade's medical officer on 6 May ordered the brigade HQ personnel to be vaccinated against typhus[69] and, the same day, ordered the inoculation of all the brigade's troops by 15 May.[70] Immediately after the town's fall, the new military governor was instructed to send uninoculated troops for inoculation.[71] Further bouts of troop inoculation took place weeks after Acre's capture.[72] In June, Haifa's Department of Health informed Carmeli Brigade's doctor that Acre's water supply was "polluted (ha-mayim mezohamim)” and "unsuitable for drinking without boiling or prior chlorination."[73]

At some point, the rumor that Acre’s water supply was deliberately contaminated spread among the Arabs. ‘Arif al ‘Arif, the Palestinian administrator and historian, wrote in the mid-1950s that the Jews had polluted the water coming from Kabri with typhoid germs; and an unnamed ‘trustworthy” friend, he wrote, had told him that forty people who drank the infected water had died within two days.[74]

Back to mid-May. The Arab Legion's advance through Jericho into the West Bank, and then to East Jerusalem, during 15-18 May, threatened a number of isolated Jewish settlements just north of the city (Neve Ya‘acov, ‘Atarot). The Yishuv leadership, while always reluctant to abandon settlements, considered the evacuation of the sites. (They were, in fact, abandoned within days.) A question arose: If they were evacuated, should their waterworks first be infected, to deny their use to the invaders?[75] Regarding the settlement of Har-Tuv, west of Jerusalem, Etzioni told Haganah General Staff that it was outside their area of control; in terms of CTB, it was up to the Giv‘ati Brigade, Etzioni wrote, to take responsibility for the site.[76] Mizrahi then asked, in principle: "Is there authorization to use B [the Hebrew letter bet]" – B for biological weapons? – "in the areas that will be evacuated by us [i.e., Israel]?"[77] Days passed, and no answer was forthcoming. On 19 May Mizrahi again asked for a ruling in principle: "Awaiting your answer regarding the use of material B in the places that are being abandoned."[78]

A major shift in modus operandi and personnel occurred after the return of Ephraim Katchalsky from New York, via Europe, to Palestine.[79] On 13 May Ben-Gurion jotted down in his diary: "Ephraim has come," and then went on to list his expenditure on chemicals and sniperscopes (underway by sea), four radar systems (still in the United States), and "biological materials" that Katchalsky bought for $2,000 and most probably brought with him. Ben-Gurion decided that Ephraim should stay in the country and replace his brother Aharon as over-all commander of HEMED.[80]

Evidently Ephraim's efforts to obtain "germs and poisons" met with success, and we may assume that the "biological materials" he acquired boosted the capabilities of HEMED B. (It is highly significant that the editors of the printed version of Ben Gurion's war diary – Gershon Rivlin and Elhanan Oren – chose or were compelled by government censors to delete the words "Biological materials $2000").[81]

Ephraim arrived in Palestine at a perilous juncture. Ben-Gurion's next diary entry mentions the Arab conquest of Kfar Etzion that day and the subsequent decision to allow the three other settlements of the Etzion Bloc, deep in the Arab-populated hill-country between Bethlehem and Hebron, to surrender. The fall of the bloc was a major, unprecedented setback – these were the first Jewish settlements conquered during the war - that sent shock waves through the Yishuv and heightened fears that it might not be able to repel the prospective invasion by the regular Arab states' armies. (The bloc fell, in effect, to assault by Arab Legion companies in what was the Haganah's first battle against regular Arab troops. These companies, used by the British army in Palestine during the 1940s as auxiliaries, had been left behind in the country when most of the Legionnaires had been withdrawn to Transjordan in the days before the British evacuation on 14 May). It stands to reason that it was Katchalsky's arrival, coupled with the fall of the Etzion Bloc, that prompted Ben-Gurion to set in motion, the following day, the restructuring of the biological warfare campaign geared to obstructing the invaders' expected advance on Haifa and Tel Aviv.

That day, 14 May, may have been the busiest in Ben-Gurion’s life; it was certainly the most momentous. That morning he had had to deal with the fallout from the loss of the Etzion Bloc. Then he had to formulate the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel (i.e., the country’s declaration of independence), which he read out in a formal ceremony attended by the Yishuv’s leaders in Tel Aviv; then he had to see to the establishment of the new state’s government departments; and then, as defense minister, he had to oversee the Haganah’s last minute preparations for the expected invasion the following day of the country by the armies of the surrounding states.

Yet he found time to write and send a personal letter to General Ratner concerning CTB (without explicitly mentioning CTB). It stated: "All the science units [i.e., all branches of HEMED], [including?] the company of science workers [perhaps a reference to the soldiers guarding HEMED's bases and labs], [and] the mista‘arvim [literally those who pose as Arabs, meaning the Arab Platoon of the Palmah] - are [now] under your command, and you are responsible directly to me. Ezra [Helmer, later Omer, head of the Haganah General Staff Intelligence Department] will be your operations officer. You are authorized to appoint a special officer responsible to you directly to any unit working in these areas and to any type of operation [within HEMED's purview]."[82]

The letter – and the contemplated expansion of CTB that the letter seemed to portend - reveals the depth of Ben-Gurion's involvement in the operation. But it also highlights his acute, indeed existential, fears as the Yishuv faced the pan-Arab invasion. No one could predict how effectively (or ineffectively) the Arab armies would perform, and the Haganah brass knew that the Yishuv was outgunned and (theoretically) outnumbered and faced the prospect of a simultaneous onslaught along all its borders. Ben-Gurion may have been confident that the Yishuv would ultimately triumph - or at least felt compelled to put a brave face on things. But he could not ignore what Yadin had told him and his assembled ministerial colleagues just two days before, on 12 May: That the Yishuv's chances were "fifty-fifty" or "very evenly balanced,"[83] meaning that the Zionist enterprise might well go under.

Ben-Gurion throughout his life had exhibited a profound reverence for "science," much like other politicians who knew little about the subject. Indeed, as Ratner wrote in his autobiography, "one could almost say that he had a mystical belief in the power of science and its vocation to solve seemingly unsolvable problems."[84] As the war entered its crucial phase, Ben-Gurion appears to have believed that "science" would give the Jews the necessary edge. Earlier, in a meeting with scientists during the war's first weeks, Ben-Gurion had told the gathering – which included Ernst David Bergmann, Aharon Katchalsky, Yohanan Ratner and Shelomo Gur – that back in October 1943, when Ivan Maiiski, the Soviet ambassador in London, had visited Palestine, the Russian had told him, predicted, that the Jews would establish their state and win the prospective war with the Arabs by virtue of "the wonderful youth that had grown up in Palestine" and the Yishuv's Jewish scientists, "who could work wonders."[85] It is possible that, facing possible catastrophe and a second Holocaust, Ben-Gurion in April-May 1948 saw in CTB a magic bullet.

There was nothing new in Ben-Gurion’s reiteration of Ratner's overall responsibility for HEMED – and there was no need for it. What was new was the letter’s explicit assignment of the Arab Platoon to serve at Ratner's discretion in HEMED's operations – meaning, in CTB. (Ratner had no other conceivable use for the mista‘arvim.) The Arab Platoon,[86] established in 1943, was a small, secret unit composed mainly of dark-skinned native Arabic-speaking Sephardi Jews who could pass for Arabs. The unit was codenamed Hashahar, which meant the dawn. Following the war's outbreak in November 1947, its members had been sent, usually in pairs, into Arab urban neighborhoods and rural areas to gather intelligence and, occasionally, to carry out acts of sabotage and assassination.

Henceforward, under the direction of Ratner/Omer, CTB would be carried out, in the field, by operatives whose daily bread was penetrating Arab-populated areas. Until this point, the Arab Platoon operatives, the mista‘aravim, had been under the command of the Palmah, in coordination with the SHAI. Now they would be at the beck and call of Ratner to serve CTB – while, if free, continuing to carry out missions for the SHAI and Palmah. It is worth noting that Ben-Gurion’s letter is cryptic and nowhere explicitly mentions Cast Thy Bread or well-poisoning; as was Ben-Gurion's wont, he always refrained from associating himself in writing with anything that might be construed by later generations as morally dubious or repugnant. But the letter was probably requested by Ratner, but it likely dovetailed with Ben-Gurion’s vision for the future of CTB. Throughout April-May the accessible IDF cable traffic relating to CTB leaves the reader with the feeling that Yadin was being egged on and under constant pressure from above; it is likely that it was Ben-Gurion who was breathing down his neck.

The Ben-Gurion-Ratner letter did not cast Dayan in any role in the envisaged re-organized CTB setup. With the pan-Arab invasion looming or already in motion, Dayan, in fact, was itching for a proper combat posting and began to press Yadin. On 17 May he got his wish – an appointment as OC of a "commando" battalion, which he had to set up from scratch.[87] But before he could take it up, a crisis developed in the Jordan Valley, just south of the Sea of Galilee. Having crossed the international frontier on 15 May, the Syrian invaders were advancing toward the country’s first kibbutz, Degania Aleph – where, incidentally, Dayan had been born 33 years earlier (he was the second child born on the kibbutz). Yadin delayed the activation of the battalion command appointment and, with Ben-Gurion's approval, on 18 May sent Dayan to oversee the battle in the Jordan Valley,[88] and off he went. Dayan was to remain in the Jordan Valley until the end of 22 May, when he returned to Tel Aviv.[89]

CTB was now under Ratner's overall command, with Ezra Omer (Helmer) or another officer designated by Ratner, actually running the show on the ground. Previously, Dayan, while physically much of the time in Jerusalem and focused on Jerusalem and its environs, had overseen, even micro-managed – as we know from the Acre episode CTB around the country. The Tel Aviv-based Omer apparently appointed another officer – we don't know his name though it may have been Moshe Ben-Zvi, of the Arab Platoon - to run the operation in the Jerusalem area. This officer would continue, in late May, June and July, to codesign his cables "Mizrahi" (but no longer "Moshe Mizrahi"), and occasionally he would sign the cables "Yisrael Mizrahi," and, in August, "Mizrahi Boni.” In a series of cables over June-August between "Mizrahi" and "Neptune" (HEMED B), the parties discussed the transfer of personnel and containers between Rehovot/Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.[90] “Mizrahi” was nonplussed that the operation was not going forward. Annoyed, he reprimanded Neptune: "Immediately stop your neglect of Jerusalem and take care to send bread here [da'agu lishlo'ah lehem kan]."[91]

The first concrete evidence we have of the mista‘arvim's involvement in CTB came from the cable that Egypt’s foreign minister to the United Nations secretary general on 27 May 1948. The minister wrote that the day before Egypt had arrested two “Zionist agents who admitted that they had been instructed by the commander of the Jewish settlement of Dorot to contaminate the springs from which the Egyptian troops in Gaza drew their water, and that they had actually dropped typhoid and dysentery germs into the wells lying to the east of that town..” The minister pointed out that this violated the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Two days later, a communique issued by the Egyptian Defense Ministry specified that the two operatives were in possession of “several bottles containing a liquid which was discovered to contain the germs of dysentery and typhoid,” as well as a “canteen containing a liquid with a high concentration of typhoid and dysentery germs.” The Egyptian army took the precaution to supply its soldiers with water brought from al’Arish and Rafah, but subsequent tests revealed that Gaza’s water was drinkable, with the exception of the two wells at which the “Zionist spies were found loitering; these were immediately closed.[92]

On 27 May Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary, without comment or elaboration: "Yigael [Yadin said]: We have intercepted a cable from [the Egyptian military in] Gaza saying that they have captured two Jews with malaria bacteria, and gave orders [to their troops] not to drink the [local] water."[93] The two – David Mizrahi (calling himself Mustafa Salah Khader) and Ezra Horin (Afgin) (calling himself ‘Izat Ibrahim Nimr) –had been driven to the area by Arab Platoon officer Moshe Ben-Zvi and crossed from Kibbutz Gevar-‘Am into Gaza in the early morning hours of 21 May. They had been apprehended by locals or Egyptian soldiers that day or the next (and not on 26 May, as stated by the Egyptian foreign minister). On 22 May Horin signed a confession in Arabic, rendered in Hebrew letters. The two were interrogated and tortured, and in August were tried in an Egyptian military court and executed in Gaza by a firing squad on 22 or 27 August 1948.[94] Whether Israel made clandestine attempts to save them remains unknown.[95] What is clear is that the Egyptians took the matter seriously. At the end of May their army physicians began to analyze the water in the wells in their zone of occupation.[96]

The Gaza well-infection mission unfolded as the Egyptian expeditionary force was advancing – the Israelis felt, relentlessly – toward Tel Aviv. On 19 May, Egyptian battalions launched their assault on Yad Mordechai (named after the commander, Mordechai Anielewicz, of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto), and, after bloody battles, the kibbutz fell on 23 May. After Yad Mordechai, there appeared little that could impede the Egyptian drive northward.[97]

Yeruham Cohen, the intelligence officer of IDF Southern Front in late 1948, in his war memoir, wrote that Horin and Mizrahi were sent to the Gaza "to gather intelligence on the invading Egyptian army."[98] In his history of the Arab Platoon, Gamliel Cohen elaborated on the two mista‘arvim's mission and said the same thing: The two were sent into Gaza to gather intelligence on the Egyptian army. But he added: “Among our military leaders there were those who tried to 'hitch a ride' on the intelligence mission and raised the idea … of poisoning the well from which the Egyptian soldiers in the Gaza Strip drank." According to Cohen, once the order from the General Staff/Operations Branch went down the chain of command through 'the Intelligence Department' – headed by Omer –and reached Shemarya Guttman, the just-installed commander of the Arab Platoon, Guttman "asked to speak to General Yohanan Ratner … and protested … saying the idea was immoral and asked that the order be rescinded." Guttman, according to Cohen, was adamant and threatened to resign. So "the idea of poisoning wells, which had been added to the intelligence assignment, was dropped and the mission assigned to the two was solely one of intelligence", Cohen concluded.[99]

But Gamliel Cohen was wrong (or was lying). In 1988 Guttman gave an interview to Yeruham Cohen and explained what had really happened. According to Guttman – and Gamliel Cohen saw the Yeruham Cohen-Guttman interview (it is referred to in Gamliel Cohen's footnotes in The First Mista’arvim) – the mission was, indeed, to infect wells. In their interview, Guttman told Yeruham Cohen that he had been summoned to Ratner and Ratner had told him: "We have decided to send two people to the Egyptian border to do this job [concerning] wells. I [Guttman] said to him – 'listen Ratner, firstly I personally object to this vehemently … I ask that they cancel this …' I ask him – 'assuming that I announce that I will resign, will this lead to cancelling this thing?' And he says to me – 'firstly, you won't announce this. And secondly it won't influence [the decision to go ahead]. There is a decision, and it has to be carried out'. I told him: 'I want you to know that this is against my professional conception of what has to be done, and also against my conscience' […] I tried in all ways to prevent [its implementation]. I also told Ratner – 'look, we may also conquer tomorrow this area and drink from this water, and all our army will also be sick with typhus or dysentery' … But they insisted. I admit that had this matter surfaced after I had been in the unit longer and had I been braver with regard to what I could have demanded and not demanded and not carried out, as we [later] refused to carry out some things, then they wouldn't have sent these guys [to Gaza]." Guttman claimed that the idea of infecting the wells in Gaza had come from "the Arab department [i.e., section] of the [Foreign Ministry’s] Political Department [the predecessor of the Mossad]." Yet he believed that it was Ratner who had made the decision. Guttman added: "I said to Ratner … 'Are you willing to give me [this] in writing, that we need to give you the men?' And he said to me – 'I will never give such a thing [in writing]'." Guttman also asked Ratner, on a technical level, what sort of material were they talking about – "liquid or powder[?] … and he then decided it would be powder." Yeruham Cohen asked Guttman: "But it was in a canteen(?)." Guttman: "Yes, a canteen. And they [the two operatives] were supposed to take out [the powder?] and put water into it [the canteen]." Elsewhere in the interview Guttman remarked: "The two were caught red-handed (tafsu otam ‘al ham)."[100]

On 27 May, at the meeting of the UN Security Council in Lake Success, New York, Faris el-Khuri, the veteran statesman who represented Syria—then a non-permanent member of the Council—asked to read into the proceedings what he said was the text of a cable he had received from Egyptian Prime Minister Nukrashi Pasha stating: "Two Zionists were arrested in the vicinity of the Egyptian Army encampment at Gaza. On being interrogated they stated that they have received orders from Mosche, officer commanding Dorot settlement [i.e., Kibbutz Dorot], to throw typhoid and dysentery microbes into drinking water used by Egyptian troops. They made a written statement to this effect. They stated that they threw the microbes into the well north of Gaza. The water flask used for the purpose was found on one of the men arrested, while the other confessed he threw a bottle full of these microbes into the water."

Major Aubrey (Abba) Eban, the Israeli representative, designated in the UN protocol the representative of the "Jewish Agency for Palestine" as Israel had not yet been internationally recognized and was not a member state, responded: "The Egyptian Government and the Syrian Government have now chosen to associate themselves with the most depraved tradition of medieval anti-Semitic incitement. The Security Council, we are convinced, will not wish to become a tribunal for recitations from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion offered from the words of Dr. Goebbels [sic]. We hope that the Security Council will be interested not in this contemptible incitement, but in the reality of [Arab] bombs and shells falling on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at this moment."[101] It is highly unlikely that Eban knew that the IDF was conducting a well-infecting campaign.

The Egyptian accusation and Eban's retort made the pages of leading daily newspapers.[102] It stands to reason that Chaim Weizmann, then on his way to France and Switzerland, read about the attempted well-poisoning, linked it to Ephraim Katchalsky's attempt to acquire "germs and poisons," and was alarmed. If so, here may be a clue to Weizmann's deep dissatisfaction with what was going on at "his" Sieff Institute in Rehovot during the 1948 War and the deep rift that developed between him and Ernst David Bergmann, his erstwhile protégé who directed the institute.

No satisfactory explanation has yet been offered for Weizmann's intense displeasure with his colleagues in Israel at this time. In a letter to his trusted aide Meyer Weisgal Weizmann decried the conversion of the institute, under Bergmann, from peacetime research to a "war footing," from "scientific work" to "something which is not science but [the] making of explosives."[103] Yet Weizmann was no pacifist. During World War I he famously invented a new way of producing acetone and then organized its mass production, greatly helping Britain's munitions industry. So the production of explosives and other war-related materials at the Sieff Institute is unlikely to have alarmed Weizmann – but weaponizing bacteria was something else. Yet he would have avoided referring to this explicitly in an open letter. Weizmann's unhappiness with what had happened was probably reflected in his call to Bergmann, at the ceremony inaugurating the Weizmann Institute of Science on 2 November 1949, to "keep Science pure and untarnished."[104]

By contrast, Ben-Gurion's attitude remained consistently militant. He continued to take a great interest in CTB and remained intensely involved in its mechanics. Indeed, during the war's UN-imposed First Truce, which began on 11 June, Keynan informed Ephraim Katchalsky, the new overall head of HEMED, that "Teddy" – Teddy Kollek, Ben-Gurion's protégé, then stationed in the United States and in charge of weapons-purchasing for the Haganah/IDF – "suggests sending two experts [in biological warfare] from America. BG wants to know what you think. Respond immediately." Katchalsky responded: "Tell BG that I support bringing the experts. Give details about when the experts intend to arrive and their plans."[105] We don't know whether "the experts" actually reached Israel and, if so, how exactly they assisted HEMED B. But from the correspondence it is clear that Ben-Gurion was in direct contact with the 27-year-old budding scientist Keynan (at this point he had an MA in microbiology), who headed HEMED B and was one of the chief protagonists in CTB, probably HEMED B's chief activity.

Also, during the First Truce, on 11 June, Yadin instructed a number of senior IDF commanders: "There is an immediate need to appoint in your HQ a special officer for Cast Thy Bread matters. The matter is of utmost importance and must be kept in great secrecy by you. Moshe Sh[alovsky] will come to you with a special letter from me in order to determine who that man [officer] will be and other relevant arrangements. You must handle the matter of selecting the appropriate officers personally."[106] This directive was probably part of the restructuring of CTB operations in the wake of the Gaza fiasco.

In the south, the Negev – which at the time was conceived as stretching as far north as the kibbutzim Dorot and Ruhama in the west and Faluja and ‘Iraq al-Manshiya (today's Kiryat-Gat) in the east – CTB, as far as can be ascertained from accessible documentation, began in late May 1948. There is an enigmatic reference to "Triangle and Negev material that I sent you" in a cable from 19 May.[107] And on 27 May, 12 days after the Egyptian Army's invasion of the south, the Palmah Negev Brigade explicitly referred to a CTB operation by one of its units.[108]

Hostilities in the Negev – at the time considered a remote area of the country, populated by wandering bedouin tribes and a scatter of isolated Jewish settlements, mostly established in 1946 – began already in December 1947 and continuously focused on water resources. The Yishuv had run a pipeline, with two branches, from the arable center of the country down to the isolated settlements. The pipes were continuously sabotaged by hostile Bedouin, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood volunteer units that infiltrated the country to help their Palestinian brothers, and, eventually, Egyptian Army units. As Nahum Sarig, OC Negev Brigade, put it in an overview written in July 1948 of what had happened in the previous half-year, "immediately with the start of the disturbances there was a general unruliness [hitpar‘ut] of the villagers and bedouin areas in the Negev. This unruliness was expressed in attacks against the patrols that protected the water pipeline, attacks on traffic along all the roads, sabotage and dismantling of water lines and attempted attacks on settlements … [This] put paid to any possibility of protecting the integrity of the water pipelines … With the failure of the attacks on the settlements, enemy activity was limited to hitting road traffic and the water lines. The increasing pace of sabotage attacks and the need to protect the water lines preoccupied all our forces, [leaving us] unable to mount even minimal operations to clear the area [of the hostiles]."[109] As the attacks surged, the Negev Brigade was reinforced, and occasionally retaliated against bedouin tribes believed to be responsible; occasionally, their wells were demolished. This localized tit-for-tat character of the fighting continued after the Egyptian invasion of 15 May, whose main thrust was up the coast road through Gaza to Yad Mordechai and Isdud (near present-day Ashdod), with auxiliary sorties eastward into the area east of the Gaza Strip. A parallel, secondary thrust took Egyptian forces eastward to Beersheba, and then northeastward to Dhahiriya and Hebron. This eastward maneuver brought the Egyptian forces into the Negev bedouin heartland. Throughout 15 May-July, the northern Negev fighting was characterized by attacks on water resources, seen by both sides as a key to success. One Negev Brigade report states that "the water problem preoccupies the enemy. At issue are water pipes and fuel for purifying [?] the water situation. It appears that there is [for the Egyptian Army?] enough useable water [for washing?] but not for drinking." The Negev Brigade reported that on 28 May a mechanized column of Egyptian troops had occupied the Sa‘ad-Nir-‘Am crossroads, east of the Gaza Strip, and "sabotaged in four places the water pipeline that leads to [Kibbutz] Sa‘ad."[110] Three days later units of the 2^nd Battalion, Negev Brigade, blew up a water pumping station in an orange grove near the Arab village of Beit Hanun, near Gaza.[111] On 16 June the Negev Brigade reported that the Yishuv's western water pipeline had been sabotaged in three places, near the kibbutzim Be'eri and Be'erot Yitzhak. The local Arabs "were warned." But a new hole in the pipeline was soon discovered "and in the afternoon the Arabs were expelled eastwards … and [our troops] burned [their] haystacks."[112] On 3 July, the Negev Brigade reported that the water pipeline between Be'eri and Be'erot Yitzhak "was yesterday blown up in 20 places."[113] On 14 July the Negev Brigade reported that its units "cleansed" the village of “Sumsum … The wells were sabotaged and anti-vehicle and anti-personnel mines were laid.“[114]

CTB quite naturally played into this situation. On 17 May the Negev Brigade reported: "A Cast Thy Bread operation was carried out south of Halsa [Halutza]."[115] On 9 June the brigade reported that its 8^th Battalion had carried out "a Cast thy Bread operation in the Beersheba area."[116] Two days later, Sarig reported that Cast Thy Bread "operations" had successfully been carried out in the Beersheba area.[117] In July Negev Brigade HQ ordered the 8^th Battalion to carry out a series of harassing operations against the Egyptian Army along the Rafah-Beersheba axis. Among the objectives to be targeted were "water resources," and the brigade HQ explicitly stipulated the implementation of "Cast Thy Bread operations [pe‘ulot Shallah Lahmekha]."[118]

It is apparently to these specific operations that Aryeh Aharoni obliquely referred in his autobiography, From the Diary of a Candidate for Treason. Aharoni, a left-winger who matured into a poet and translator, in 1948 was a Palmahnik and the 8^th Battalion's education\cultural affairs officer (formally titled qetzin hasbara). In his memoir he related that "one morning a cute lass, a messenger from HEMED … showed up at the 8^th Battalion HQ … in [Kibbutz] Tse'elim. She accompanied a shipment of crates [argazim] that contained brown bottles … Hearing her explanation, I was shocked. She said that we were charged with [carrying out] an operation called 'Shallah' (from 'Shallah Lahmekha ‘al pney hamayim'). The bottles contained a culture of typhus bacteria, and the battalion's soldiers were to pour their content into the water sources [i.e., wells] serving the Egyptian Army." Aharoni relates that he went to his battalion OC, Haim Bar-Lev[119], "and I told him categorically, that if he carried out this dastardly deed, I would request a transfer out of the battalion. Haim smiled at me and asked: 'What do you suggest we do with [these bottles]'? 'Destroy them,' I said. 'Destroy them,' he responded." Aharoni writes that he then threw the bottles into a nearby barrel and torched them. But he added: "There were in the brigade other companies and battalions, in some of which they tried to carry out [Cast CTB operations]. The result was pitiable. No Egyptian soldier was harmed. On the other hand, a few bedouin fell ill with typhus, as did a few of our soldiers who mistakenly believed that they had found bottles of gazoz [a carbonated soft drink] and drank from them." Aharoni, who regarded the episode as a "war crime," noted that "bacteriological weapons" had been used in the 1948 War but "in a most shlemazeli way."[120]

It is possible that the "cute lass" sent by HEMED and encountered by Aharoni in 8^th Battalion HQ was Ayala Rubinstein. She is identified in HEMED documents as a 25-year-old “biologist” with the rank of “sergeant,”[121] and was probably a student of the Katchalsky brothers at the Hebrew University. She appears to have been a regular "Neptune" courier to the Negev that summer. In July, General Staff\Operations ordered Air Force\Operations to fly Rubinstein to Dorot, where Negev Brigade HQ was based, with a "10-kilogram load."[122] In summer 1948 the IAF was minuscule, even ferrying generals and brigade commanders between HQs and the front lines was unusual and prioritized. That Yadin’s bureau made a point of ordering the air force to ferry a lowly sergeant to the Negev speaks to the importance accorded CTB by the acting chief of the general staff.

CTTB was also activated that summer or autumn in the Galilee. Rafi Kutscher (later, Kotzer), who in June 1948 formed the Commando Unit of the 12^th Battalion of the Golani Brigade and commanded it, wrote in his memoirs that "one day there arrived a HEMED man with an [I.D.F.] General Headquarters envelope with instructions to help him and keep [the mission] top secret." Kutscher complied and, after the mission failed, he was shocked to learn that its objective had been "to poison the well of [the village of] ‘Ailabun in order to neutralize the military force [i.e., the ALA force] there." When the commander of the Golani Brigade, Nahum Golan, learned about the affair, he reprimanded Kutscher and, when confronted with the written order, told Kutscher curtly that he would deal with the matter.[123] The incident took place sometime before the 12^th Battalion conquered the village on 30 October 1948.

To date, just one strictly contemporary Palestinian source has come to light referring to, and condemning, Israel’s resort to biological weapons in 1948 (for the Arab Higher Committee report of July 1948 see below). But – despite ‘Arif al ‘Arif’s allegation, published in 1956, about the biological attack in Acre in May 1948 – references to Israel’s biological warfare in 1948 almost never figure in later Palestinian writings. Avner Cohen, known for his work on Israel’s nuclear project, highlighted this in his article from 2001. His scan of mainstream Palestinian internet sites, he wrote, “turned up no references to Israeli use of bacteriological warfare, biological warfare, or well-poisonings during the war,” and he assumed that either the warfare was ineffectual or that the Palestinians were not aware of it with so much violence taking place all around.[124] Salman Abu Sitta, the Palestinian researcher, writing in 2003, based his account of Israeli biological warfare in 1948 on Western, Israeli and Egyptian sources – not on Palestinian ones.[125]

The one contemporary exception, duly mentioned by Cohen and Abu Sitta, is the undated memorandum publicized in July 1948 in New York by the Arab Higher Committee Delegation for Palestine. The memorandum charged that Palestine’s Jews had committed numerous war crimes in the war in the preceding months, including resorting to biological warfare. “For several years the Zionists have planned and prepared for the use of biological warfare. To that end they set up laboratories in Palestine. The Jews plan to use this inhuman weapon against the Arabs in the Middle East in their war of extermination. When cholera broke out in Egypt in November 1947 and in Syrian villages on the Palestine-Syria border about February 1948, there was some, but not conclusive, evidence that Zionists were responsible for this outbreak of this plague.”[126] The memorandum then quotes the NBC correspondent Leon Pearson, who, it stated, on 12 January 1948 reported from Paris that “the Jewish underground is preparing to launch bacteriological warfare against the Arabs,” and an unnamed “Christian American citizen” who heard in February 1948, in Rio de Janeiro, an IZL officer, Zvi Kolitz, declare that after the British pull out, “we shall bring cholera microbes to Cairo, to Baghdad, to Damascus, and Amman.” Finally, the memorandum the above-mentioned Egyptian allegations about the attempt to poison wells near Gaza in May 1948. Curiously, the memorandum made no mention of the Acre typhoid epidemic or of well-infections in Arab villages.

As for the accusations regarding the cholera outbreaks in Egypt and Syria, W. Seth Carus, an expert on weapons of mass destruction and emeritus professor at the National Defense University, has marshaled evidence that, at the time, Egyptian officials told the World Health Organization that the disease originated in India, while others accused the Soviet Union and the British of causing the outbreak. As for Syria, a Lebanese journal reported that the Damascus police were said to have arrested several Zionists who caused the cholera outbreak in order to impede the mobilization of the “People’s Army,” but the New York Times stated that “official quarters” did not corroborate the story.[127]

Zvi Kolitz (1912-2002) was indeed a member of the IZL and for a time represented the right-wing Zionist Revisionist Movement in South America;[128] it is conceivable that he fantasized about spreading cholera in Arab capitals but Israeli biological warfare in 1948 was the work of the Haganah\IDF, not of the IZL, and we have seen no evidence that the IZL used or try to use biological agents in the war.

But in one sense, the Arab Higher Committee memorandum from July was anticipatory. On 26 September 1948 the Israeli government – or possibly Ben-Gurion alone – decided to selectively extend CTB to the belligerent Arab states around Israel. Yadin signed the cables initiating the process but, without doubt, the authorization – if not the initiative itself – originated with Ben-Gurion; it is inconceivable that Yadin would have embarked on such an enterprise off his own bat.

Two events that day probably persuaded Ben-Gurion to order the activation of CTB against surrounding Arab states or, more specifically, against Egypt. The second was the cabinet's rejection of Ben-Gurion's proposal that afternoon that the IDF launch an offensive against the Arab Legion aimed at conquering parts or all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The proposal was made against the backdrop of the de facto stalemate in the war, which Israel regarded as onerous and unsustainable. The truce imposed by the United Nations in July left the Egyptian Army holding Israeli territory (i.e., areas awarded in the UN partition resolution to Israel) in the south and a chain of positions between the Mediterranean (Majdal) and the Hebron Hills which effectively cut off and besieged the two dozen settlements in the Negev from the rest of the Jewish state. It also left the Arab Legion holding an expanded "West Bank," with its guns potentially threatening the centers of Jewish population in West Jerusalem and the coastal plain. More immediately, on 24 September, despite the truce, Arab irregulars, operating out of the West Bank, overran an IDF position near present-day Modi‘in, killing 23 Israeli soldiers – a serious provocation. Ben-Gurion was insistent that the stalemate had to be broken. But the cabinet - very unusually - rejected Ben-Gurion's proposal to attack eastward. What remained was to strike southward, at the Egyptian army, to break through to the besieged settlements and drive the Egyptians out of Palestine altogether or, at least, out of the northern Negev. To accompany and facilitate the contemplated offensive, Ben-Gurion, it appears, believed that simultaneously "harassing" the Egyptian homeland with a bacterial campaign would help.

But the notion of such harassment was probably also triggered by a second "event" on 26 September, Ben-Gurion's meeting, just before the fateful cabinet session, with Yosef Weitz, an important Zionist executive, and an "expert" on the unfolding Arab refugee problem. Weitz, according to his diary entry, had come to warn of the threat of a mass Arab refugee return to the territory of Israel or to territory that was about to fall into Israeli hands. What was to be done? asked Ben-Gurion. "Harassment [hatrada]," said Weitz, "harassment using all means," designed to prevent the return of the refugees from across the borders.[129] Ben-Gurion's diary entry about the meeting was slightly different. "What is to be done," asks Ben Gurion. Weitz: "If not [re-starting the] war, then they [the Arabs] must be harassed without end." Weitz, or Ben-Gurion, seemed to be speaking of something above and beyond the refugee threat. Ben-Gurion: “Who would handle the harassment?” Weitz: "[Reuven] Shiloah [in effect both the coordinator of the country's intelligence services and Ben-Gurion's chief intelligence advisor. In 1951 he was to become the founding director of the Mossad, the Political Department's successor organization] … Weitz asks that I instruct Shiloah."[130] It seems that the notion of "harassment," as a complement or alternative to war-making, had been planted in Ben-Gurion's mind.

Following the cabinet meeting that had left Ben-Gurion frustrated and angry, but with his gaze now firmly set on Egypt, Ben-Gurion met with Yadin and set the ball in motion: CTB was to be activated abroad, starting with Cairo. But who would carry out the attack – transport the bacteria to Egypt and pour them into the wells or waterworks of Cairo? Political Department operatives posing as tourists or department agents already in place? Or Arab Platoon mista‘arvim? And who would run the show?

Activating CTB abroad thus brought to the surface the problem that was to plague Israel's intelligence services for decades: Who was responsible for missions abroad, the Political Department (in 1951 reorganized and renamed the Mossad – Hamossad lemodi'in u’letafqidim meyuhadim – the institute for Intelligence and Special Duties) or the IDF Intelligence Service (renamed, at the end of 1948, the Intelligence Department and in 1954, the Intelligence Division – Aman [agaf hamodi'in])? And if the mista‘arvim operated abroad, who would run them?[131]

The organizational issues had not yet been resolved but time was pressing. That day, 26 September, Yadin instructed Moshe Shalovsky (Shilo), of HEMED B, to contact Shiloah, "concerning the activation of CTB abroad [beqesher lehaf'alat Shallah Lahmekha behu"l]."[132] In a separate cable, also that day, Yadin asked Levi Eshkol, Ben-Gurion's chief aide in the Defense Ministry (later, Ben-Gurion's successor as Israel's prime minister (1963-69), to arrange Binyamin Gibli's travel to and stay in Europe, specifying "Paris," "for two months."[133] Gibli headed the IDF Intelligence Service’s field intelligence branch and, in effect, was the service's deputy director. Gibli was now tasked with unrolling CTB abroad, as emerges from the testimony of Asher Ben-Natan, the Political Department's head of operations, then based in Paris. Interviewed in 2008, Ben-Natan related that "that autumn" Gibli had shown up in Paris and given him "a capsule [container?] to be used for poisoning wells in Cairo." But an uneasy Ben-Natan proceeded to block or question the operation. He contacted his boss, Shiloah, and – apparently on Shiloah's orders - "scrapped [the plan] forthwith … I was left with the poison capsule, and in the end, I destroyed it in the sewer."[134]

But as emerges from the available documentation, it was not only Cairo that was in Israel’s sights. In January 1949, two months before Lebanon and Israel signed the armistice agreement ending the war between them, the Political Department (codenamed "Da‘at") asked the Arab Platoon team in Beirut – first planted there in January 1948, with the arrival in town of Gamliel Cohen, who was later joined by other mista‘arvim – to investigate and report back on the waterworks – "water sources, central reservoirs. If possible, maps of water pipelines" - of the main towns in Lebanon and Syria.[135] The implication would seem to be that Israel was considering these waterworks as potential targets for eventual attack, biological or otherwise. But as far as we know, no Arab cities were thus attacked in the dying days of 1948 or subsequently.

Conclusion

To the best of our knowledge, given the evidence available, the Yishuv’s political and military leaders made no preparations before the outbreak of the 1948 War in November-December 1947 to use biological weapons should hostilities with Palestine’s Arabs, or the Arab states around, erupt. The start of CTB can clearly be traced to late March-April 1948 and was prompted by the – for the Yishuv – adverse turn of events in the battlefield and in Washington DC during the preceding weeks and by the prospect of imminent invasion of the country by the armies of the surrounding Arab states.

The decision to use bacteriological weapons was taken at the highest level of the government and the military and was, indeed, steered by these officers, with Ben-Gurion’s authorization, through the campaign. And while not knowing the campaign’s full extent, the Arab side – or, at least, the Egyptian government – understood, from late May 1948, that this was no local affair launched by junior officers. As Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha told the UN Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, at their meeting on 29 May , shortly after the Egyptian capture of the two Arab Platoon operatives outside Gaza contaminating “the water supply of the Egyptian army” with “vials of cholera and dysentery germs”: “The Egyptian Government held the Jewish authorities responsible for this since this sort of thing had to be planned inasmuch as it was not possible to buy germs for such purposes in retail shops. Scientists and high officials had to be involved … [in] such well-planned acts.”[136]

What had the scientists of HEMED B, Ben-Gurion, Yadin, and the soldiers who dispensed the bacteria, hoped to achieve through CTB? Unlike the poison/s given Kovner to kill Nazis in 1945, the typhoid and dysentery germs dispensed in 1948 were basically non-lethal. The scientists and Haganah/IDF officers probably hoped that they would induce disease, an epidemic even, which would bar militiamen returning to villages and attacking Jewish settlements and traffic, reduce the Arabs' ability to prevent Jewish conquest of towns and villages, and create medical havoc among invading Arab troops. As the scientists knew, the availability of antibiotics would keep deaths to a minimum (as apparently occurred), but Arab combat effectiveness would be reduced.

But the occasional dispensation of the bacteria – in the Negev, in the Jerusalem-Jericho area - apparently had no or very little effect on the advance or performance of the invading Arab armies (though it may have persuaded refugees to refrain from returning to well-polluted villages). The apparent ineffectiveness of CTB may well have curbed enthusiasm for the campaign among Israeli defense executives. What was the point? The use of the bacteria was apparently fairly limited in Israel/Palestine during April-December 1948, and apart from Acre, seems to have caused no epidemic and few casualties. At least that's what emerges from the available documentation.

Perhaps the meager use and reach of CTB was partly due to the opposition the campaign gave rise to, both high and low, in Israel's defense establishment. Clearly it triggered a moral repugnance. The leading Zionist Chaim Weizmann was seriously distressed; Shelomo Gur, the administrative director of HEMED, later claimed that he had opposed biological warfare in 1948 and had been happy that HEMED B had been taken out of his hands;[137] Reuven Shiloah apparently opposed the use of the bacteria in Cairo; Aharoni opposed their use by the Palmah in the Negev; Guttman (ineffectually) opposed the well-infection in Gaza; and Kutscher/Kotzer was dissentient in the ranks of the Golani Brigade in the north (and his brigade commander, Nahum Golan, seems to have reprimanded Kotzer for assisting the poisoning attempt at ‘Ailabun). Ben-Gurion, Yadin and HEMED B may have been deterred from greater use of the bacteria by fear of wider opposition in the defense establishment and perhaps by leaks leading to publicity.

Given the circumstances of existential peril to the Yishuv in April-May 1948, the turn to extreme methods, even internationally illegitimate methods, is understandable. But the continued interest in, if not actual use of, CTB in late September, and certainly after December 1948 is dismaying. Certainly, by December, it was clear to all that the Arabs had lost the war and that justifying the use of biological warfare was morally questionable if not reprehensible and – in practical terms - illogical. But perhaps, as often happens in wars, inertia took hold and officers were tempted to try out new toys when these became available, and international conventions be damned.

Appendix:

The Yishuv had entered the 1948 War effectively with one intelligence agency, the Haganah Intelligence Service (the SHAI, or HIS), which had three departments – the Arab Department, responsible for gathering intelligence in Arab Palestine; the Political Department, responsible for gathering intelligence about the British Mandate authorities; and the Internal Department, covering the Yishuv's "dissident" organizations, the IZL and LHI, and the Communists. When the Haganah changed its name and became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 1 June 1948, a four-week process of institutional re-organization began. By July, the Arab Department had become the IDF Intelligence Service (which also coopted the IDF General Staff\Intelligence Department (headed by Omer)) and was now headed by Isser Be'eri, with Binyamin Gibli serving as his deputy;[138] the HIS's Political Department (with the absorption of some personnel from the Mossad Le‘Aliya Bet – the institute for illegal immigration) became the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry (which later became the Mossad), headed by Boris Guriel but under the oversight of Reuven Shiloah; and the Internal Department became the General Security Service (sherut habitahon hklali), headed by Isser Harel.

Initially outside of this re-organization was the Arab Platoon, the unique intelligence tool of the Palmah HQ or "Staff" (mate hapalmah), which functioned alongside but outside the Haganah's General Staff. The Palmah Staff was administratively more or less autonomous but operationally, the Palmah battalions and, eventually, brigades were run by the Haganah – later IDF – General Staff. The Arab Platoon was administratively part of the Palmah and operationally was run by the Palmah in conjunction with the HIS. On 14 May Ben-Gurion had given Ratner (Haganah, then IDF, General Staff/Planning) and Ezra Omer (IDF Intelligence Department) operational authority over the Arab Platoon, though it remained subordinate to the Palmah Staff (which was only disbanded and fully integrated in the IDF in November 1948).

But after the Gaza Strip fiasco, Ratner-Omer were apparently removed from operational control of CTB[139] and in the course of August-early September, the Arab Platoon changed from a unit of the Palmah into a unit of the IDF Intelligence Service. On 18 August Yadin informed Allon, OC Palmah, that the Arab Platoon "must be placed completely under the authority of the IDF Intelligence Service."[140] A week later, following meetings between Yadin, Be'eri and Allon, it was agreed that the " mista‘arvim unit would be under the authority of the Intelligence Service (shin mem 1) in all that concerned their use in their special function (intelligence, operations)."[141] By 1 September, the Intelligence Service's absorption of the Arab Platoon was completed, with Be'eri informing all concerned that "the 'Shahar' [the Arab Platoon] has been transferred to our service, and will be one of our departments, henceforward designated Shin Mem 18."[142]

But the intelligence re-shuffle had left a serious problem: Who would control the mista‘arvim 's activities abroad, which included cross-border intelligence-gathering missions? The problem would become especially acute when Ben-Gurion-Yadin decided to activate CTB "abroad." After all, the Political Department, overseen by Shiloah, was theoretically responsible for operations outside Israel. Obviously in response to a complaint by Shiloah, Yadin on 8 September wrote Shiloah that "there was no opposition to the participation/partnership [shituf] of the Political Department in determining the policy regarding the activation of the mista‘arvim within the framework of Shin. Mem. Tzadi [IDF Intelligence Service]. The head of the [Intelligence] Service received orders from me about this, and I ask that you get in touch with Shin Mem Tzadi in this regard."[143] On 21 September, Shiloah confronted Yadin with the problem: "Acts of sabotage and other military operations beyond the lines [i.e., borders] are not the purview [einam mi‘inyanam - of the Intelligence Service]. If IDF Operations reaches another conclusion, please inform me … I repeat my request to speed up the continuation of the examination [beyrur] in the matter of the mista‘arvim." Shiloah added that he did not accept Be'eri's view that "coordination" [te'um] could be achieved without a special body being set up for this purpose. "I did not maintain that I[sser] Be'eri or the functionaries of the Intelligence Service refuse to come into contact [lavo bemaga'] or consult [about this]. I just maintained that ad hoc meetings are insufficient and without a permanent institution we won't succeed in establishing the necessary coordination."[144]

Looking back on this dispute in March 1949, the acting head of Shin Mem 18, Shimon Somekh (Sam'an), in effect sided with Shiloah. He argued that in the course of 1948 the function of the mista‘arev had changed from short-term, one-off infiltrations of Arab communities in Palestine to long-term "plantings" [hashtala] of mista‘arvim in Arab states, which required that he work for an "institution" that "knows and determines the needs of the state vis-à-vis the Arab state where the mista‘arev is [planted], and knows the operational possibilities of the mista‘arev – and in line with these needs runs this person. The needs are: Political, military, political-strategic and economic." In effect, "neither the IDF [General] Staff nor the heads of the Intelligence Service were the body that ran [hif‘ilu] the mista‘arvim [over the past months] … The fact is that that the two squads [huliyot] that exist now 'de facto' (i.e., the Shin. Mem. 18 squads operating in Beirut and Damascus) are not run [muf‘alot] at all by the army!" The mista‘arvim unit "should be based in that institution [mossad] that will know and determine our country's needs in the Arab states, and will know the possibilities of running the mista‘arvim, and in light of this will run them." Somekh was almost explicitly arguing – despite his employment in the IDF Intelligence Department (the new name of the IDF Intelligence Service) – that the mista‘arvim were in fact, in early 1949, being run by the Political Department, and should be part of and in future handled by the Political Department.[145]

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[1] Benny Morris, Birth Revisited, 230; and Uri Bachrach, (Heb.) Power of Knowledge, 76-79. The paragraphs on biological warfare in Bachrach’s book, as published in Hebrew, were censored by the Israeli government. But some of the censored material was reintroduced in the book’s English-language edition, which appeared in 2016.

[2] Sarah Leibowitz-Dar, “Germs,” Hadashot, 13 August 1993; Avner Cohen, “Israel and Chemical\Biological Weapons,” 29-32; Salman Abu Sitta, “Traces of Poison,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 27 February-5 March 2003.

[3] For the post-1948 suppression of evidence, see Hagar Shezaf, “Nakba,” Haaretz (English edition), 5 July 2019’ and Ofer Aderet, (Heb.) “Silencing of the Archive,” Haaretz, 8 October 2021.

[4] Aryeh Aharoni, Diary, 109. In one IDF cable the operation was indeed referred to merely as shallah: Harel HQ to Eldad, Etzioni, 6 May 1948, Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archive (henceforward IDFA) 5254\1949 - 144. Our thanks to Gilead Alon for having brought Aharoni’s book to our attention.

[5] See note 1. In turn, we would like to thank Milstein for providing us with clues that pointed us in the right direction in IDFA’s files.

[6] For an overview of the 1948 war, see Benny Morris, 1948. For coverage of specific aspects of the war, see Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan, and Amitzur Ilan, Origin.

[7] Palmah HQ, "Logbook of Our Units' Operations," Kibbutz Me’uhad (Yad Tabenkin) Archive, 15-46, 165//1. The Palmah, short for plugot mahatz (strike companies), was the elite arm of the Haganah.

[8] Ephraim to the Council [Palmah HQ], "Reports," 17.1.48, Kibbutz Me’uhad (Yad Tabenkin) Archive, 12-4, 22/13. In August 1948, the Palmah's 4^th Battalion carried out a series of patrols to check out the wells in central Palestine/Israel, in the abandoned villages of Beit Jimal, Bir al-'Umariya, Idhnibba, Mughallis, Jilya, Qazaza and Sajd (see Dani to Moshe, "Annex No. 4, Operations Report," 16.8.48, IDFA 6127/1949 – 118). The purpose of the probes was not clarified in the document.

[9] Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, 6 vols. (Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm and New York, 1971-1975), vol. 3, Chemical and Biological Warfare and the Law of War, especially 71 and 155-158.

[10] Israel's Archives Law (1955) is liberal and its governmental implementation over the years has been largely enlightened. But during the past two decades, there has been a tendency by officialdom, especially in IDFA, to increase restrictions in the declassification process and, indeed, documents opened to researchers in the 1990s (when Yitzhak Rabin was Defense Minister and Prime Minister), as regarding, for example, the Deir Yassin atrocities (see below), have since been reclassified and barred to researchers. The main file or files on CTB – probably housed in the Nes Ziona Biological Institute – were never opened to researchers and remain, like all the institute’s archival holdings, classified. But IDFA files relating to various Haganah\IDF units in 1948 are largely open, and it is among these, in dispersed fashion, that we found most of the documents referred to in this article regarding CTB. For discussion of Israel’s Archives Law and its implementation, and the recent re-classification of documents that were once open, see material put out by the ‘Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research and Shezaf, “Nakba” Haaretz, 4-5 July 2019.

[11] Later the IDF's chief of general staff (1949-52), a famous archaeologist, and Israel's deputy prime minister (1977-81).

[12] On HEMED see Bachrach, The Power of Knowledge (2016).

[13] Irgun ha-Haganah (the defense organization), commonly called the Haganah (the defense), the Yishuv's national militia, officially changed its name and became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 1 June 1948. The Haganah's/IDF's chief of general staff Ya‘acov Dori was incapacitated by illness through most of the 1948 War, his functions filled by Yadin.

[14] Etzioni [Brigade OC] to General Staff, 14 May 1948, 16:55, General Staff/Operations Logbook, IDFA 464\1954 - 1: "We have no direct connection to Har-Tuv and so we cannot activate the Cast Thy Bread project [there]. This can be done only by the Giv‘ati [Brigade]."

[15] The Katchalsky brothers went on to have illustrious careers as scientists and civil servants. Aharon Katzir, a professor of physical chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one-time president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, was murdered by Japanese terrorists working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in an attack at Lydda International Airport in 1972; Ephraim Katzir, a professor of biophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, served as Israel's president in 1973-1978.

[16] Dina Porat, Beyond the Reaches of Our Souls, 236-37; eadem. Vengeance and Recompense, 163-66.

[17] Benjamin Z. Kedar, "And I Need Germs and Poisons for the War of Independence," Haaretz, 2 October 2020, p. 4.

[18] Part of Katzir's 1998 interview with Dina Porat published by Kedar in "And I Need Germs."

[19] Ephraim Katzir [Katchalsky], A Life's Tale, 104.

[20] For the order officially establishing HEMED, signed by Zvi Ayalon, the Haganah’s deputy chief of the general staff, see Bachrach, The Power of Knowledge – HEMED, 65-66.

[21] Ibid., 116.

[22] Cohen, "Israel and Chemical\Biological Weapons,” 30, based on the author’s interview with ShelomoGur; and IDF General Staff\Operations to Pikud Ikhsun (? – illegible word). 15 August 1948 (“We are especially interested in a speedy completion of the laboratories of the Science Department by you in Abu Kabir …”)

[23] Ibid., 131-39. Keynan was later professor of microbiology at the Hebrew University and the university's vice-president for research and development.

[24] Yohanan Ratner, My Life, 360-70.

[25] Entry for 1 April 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 1, 336.

[26] Yadin to Etzioni, 7 April 1948, IDFA, 19:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 29.

[27] General Staff/Operations/Administration to General Staff Mata"m, "The Staff Unit," 16 May 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21.

[28] Shabtai Teveth, Moshe Dayan, 253-54. Dayan went on to become Israel's defense minister (1967-1974) and foreign minister (1977-1979).

[29] Assi Dayan, director, "Ha-Hayim ki-Shmu‘a" (life as a rumor) (2012), minute 4:06.

[30] Magi to Yadin, undated, IDFA 5440/1949 – 14.

[31] Yadin to Etzioni, 10 April 1948, 17:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 29.

[32] Magi to Yadin, 13 April 1948, 01:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 9.

[33] Moshe Neptune to Yadin for Aleph Neptune [almost certainly Alex Keynan], 16 April 1948, 18:45, IDFA 5440/1949 – 22. "Neptune" – HEMED B - was defined in one General Staff/Operations cable as "a special department of HEMED linked to General Staff/Operations [mahlaqa meyuhedet shel HEMED ha-qeshura kagam (i.e.,sic should be le-agam]" (General Staff/Operations to Manpower Division, 6 July 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21).

[34] HEMED to Moshe Mizrahi, 22 April 1948, 12:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 31. It appears that from 22 April, Dayan also started to use the codename "Moshe Mizrahi." See below, note 34 should be 35 – but since earlier footnote deleted, 34 is probably right).

[35] Moshe Neptune to Yadin for Aleph Neptune, 22 April 1948, 15:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 1.

[36] Moshe Neptune to Yadin for Aleph Neptune, 23 April 1948, 10:20, IDFA 5440/1949 – 22. The Hebrew "Aleph" signifies Keynan, whose first name, Alex, begins with an Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

[37] Moshe Neptune to Yadin for Aleph Neptune, 23 April 1948, 13:15, IDFA 5440/1949 – 22.

[38] Oded to Elisha and Yadin, 13:30, 22 April 1948, IDFA 1301/1949 – 406.

[39] Etzioni to Yadin, 27 April 1948, 09:05, IDFA 5440/1949 – 22.

[40] Etzioni to Yadin, 27 April 1948, 09:50, IDFA 500/1948 – 52, General Staff/Operations logbook, entry for 27.4.48.

[41] Yadin to Etzioni, apparently sent 1 May 1948, 20:00 (received 2 May 1948, 03:30), IDFA 5440/1949 – 10. (The copy of the cable is unclear.)

[42] M. Neptune to Yadin for Neptune, 2 May 1948, 19:45, IDFA 5440/1949 – 21. It is noteworthy that this cable carries the name/signature "Moshe Mizrahi" at the bottom. We have no explanation for why Dayan began signing his cables "Moshe Mizrahi" (or "M. Mizrahi") after initially signing them "M. Neptune" or "Moshe Neptune" – but from the cables' content, and from the content of Yadin's subsequent cables to both "Moshe Mizrahi" and "Moshe Neptune," it appears that it is Dayan we are speaking of in both cases (until 17/18 May). It is worth noting that the cable following the 2 May cable "M. Neptune" to "Yadin for Neptune" (which is numbered "639"), "Moshe Mizrahi" to "Heli" (?), 2 May 1948, 18:40 (No. "640"), is also signed "Moshe Mizrahi" at the bottom (IDFA 5440/1949 – 21).

[43] Harel HQ to Eldad, Etzioni, 6 May 1948, IDFA 5254/1949 – 144.

[44] Yadin to Etzioni, 7 May 20:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 25.

[45] Etzioni to Yadin, 8 May 1948, 12:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 17.

[46] Yadin to Etzioni, 9 May 1948, 15:40, IDFA 5440/1949 – 25.

[47] Moshe Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 19 May 09:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 41.

[48] Moshe Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 18 May 1948, 15:05, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[49] Avi'ad [Neptune] to Moshe Mizrahi, 18 May 1948, 12:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 31: "The maps have arrived." The Harel Brigade HQ logbook records that on 10 May, Palmah HQ instructed the Harel Brigade doctor "urgently … [to] give an active vaccine against typhoid" to the troops (Harel HQ logbook, 10 May 1948, Kibbutz Me’uhad (Yad Tabenkin) Archive, 12-4, 53/1).

[50] General Staff/Operations to OC Sodom Area, 2 July 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21.

[51] Moshe Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 13 May 1948, 16:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[52] Harel Brigade HQ to 1^st and 2^nd Battalions, etc., "Operational Order No. 13," 5 May 1948, IDFA 5254/1949 – 144. In other files, the word "economic" was deleted by censors from (other) copies of this order.

[53] Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 15 May 1948, 13:45, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[54] Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 16 May 1948, 17:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[55] Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 26 May 1948, 09:45, IDFA 5440/1949 – 41.

[56] David Coren, Western Galilee, 43-44.

[57] Interview with Dr. Uri Milstein, 2020, who had interviewed Pundaq sometime in the 1980s. According to Milstein, Pundaq took him to the spot near Kabri where he had poured the bacteria into the aqueduct after he had received them from Dayan. Pundaq in his memoirs, The Warrior Fox 1919-2005 (shu‘al kravot, 1919-2005), ed. Eyal Stark (n.p., 2006), doesn't mention the incident. In a 1993 interview with Leibowitz-Dar, Pundak angrily responded: "Why are you looking now for problems relating to forty-five years ago. I never did any such thing in my life. I don't know anything about this. What will you gain by publishing this even if it …" and at this point, mid-sentence, he clammed up. See Leibowitz-Dar, "Germs”, Hadashot, 13 August 1993.

[58] The unsigned report, "Ittihad Hospital, Acre, 18^th July 1948," IDFA 922/1952 – 60, spoke of "a terrible typhoid epidemic," spread chiefly through the water supply and affecting "mainly children and infants." In fact, typhoid and typhus are different diseases, but the Jews/Israelis, Acre townspeople, and, often, foreigners (British and Red Cross personnel) referred to the Acre outbreak as "typhus." The "water-borne" epidemic generated by the Haganah was, of course, typhoid, but it is possible that the town suffered simultaneously also from cases of typhus, commonly transmitted by lice and fleas.

[59] Mayor of Acre, 3 May 1948, apparently forwarded by the Arab Liberation Army's garrison in the town, belonging to the 2^nd Yarmuq Battalion, to ALA HQ, Damascus, IDFA 100001/1957 – 273.

[60] Brigadier Beveridge, “Notes of a Conference held at the Lebanese Red Cross Hospital on May 6^th. Typhoid epidemic in Acre,” Archives du Comite International de la Croix-Rouge (ACICR) Geneva, BG 003-82.17, Mission de Maximilien de Meuron a Haifa, 1948, Rapport No. 5 (appendix).

[61] de Meuron, "Rapport No. 3," 8 May 1948, Archives du Comité International de la Croix-Rouge, Geneva.

[62] Unsigned report, "Ittihad Hospital Acre, 18^th July 1948," IDFA 922/1952 – 60.

[63] The Usama bin Zayd Scouts Company of Acre, 9 May 1948, to the commander of the Acre garrison, 9 May 1948, IDFA100001/1957 – 273. The ALA was a Syrian-organized force, sponsored by the Arab League, some 3,000-5,000 strong, of Arab volunteers, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Palestine, sent to Palestine piecemeal, starting in December 1947, to help the Palestine Arab militias.

[64] Hiram to ?, "Reliable Information Bulletin for 9.5.48," IDFA 5942/1949 – 23.

[65] Haganah Intelligence Service (SHAI) Arab Department, "The Migration Movement of the Arabs of Palestine during 1.12.47-1.6.48," 30 June 1948, HHA, Ya’ari papers, (7) 10.10.95.

[66] Carmel, Battles of the North, 151.

[67] Eshel, Hativat Carmeli be-Milhemet ha-Qomemiyut (The Carmeli Brigade, 175.

[68] "Segal," "Carmeli Brigade Information Bulletin No. 3, for 7.5.48," IDFA 5942/1949 – 9.

[69] Carmeli/Medical Service, to Daniel, Yehezkel, 6 May 1948, IDFA 6680/1949 – 3.

[70] Carmeli/Medical Service, to doctors of 21^st, 22^nd battalions, etc, 6 May 1948, IDFA 6680/1949 – 3.

[71] "Micha" to town commander, 19 (?) May 1948, IDFA 922/1952 – 60.

[72] See, for example, Dr. Brinitzer to Acre Military HQ, 7 June 1948, IDFA 922/1952 – 60.

[73] Senior Medical Officer, Department of Health, Haifa, to brigade physician, apparently from 9 June 1948, IDFA 922/1952 – 60.

[74] ‘Arif al ‘Arif, Al-Nakba, vol. 1, 421. ‘Arif al ‘Arif mislocates the aqueduct and his mention of “forty” deaths seems highly exaggerated and is not reflected in any contemporary document.

[75] Yadin to Etzioni, 14 May 1948, 09:45, IDFA 500/1948 – 29: "This morning your proposal regarding [the evacuation of] ‘Atarot was approved. Act on it. [It was also] decided to evacuate Har-Tuv … Place in the wells material of the Cast Thy Bread type. Consult Moshe Mizrahi." Neve Ya‘acov was abandoned – without Haganah General Staff authorization - on the night of 16 May, after its defenders had beaten off an attack by ALA troops (see entry for 17 May 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 2, 434).

[76] Etzioni to Yadin, 14 May 1948, 16:55, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[77] Mizrahi to Yadin, 15 May 1948, 17:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 40.

[78] Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 19 May 1948, 09:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 41.

[79] Katchalsky left New York in early May and, in transit, spent a few days in Paris before catching a flight to Tel Aviv (Katzir, A Life's Tale, 106-7).

[80] Entry for 13 May 1948, Ben-Gurion Diary, BGA. When in 1993 Leibowitz-Dar asked Ephraim Katzir about the rumors that he brought the first germs with him from the United States or Europe, he brushed the question aside with: "These are beautiful dreams [i.e., fantastical] but they lack reality" (Leibowitz-Dar, "Germs"). It is worth noting that HEMED B continued to import "materials" from abroad. In August HEMED scientist/operative Moshe Shalovsky (Shilo) was sent to Europe – "Switzerland, Italy and France" – to purchase unspecified materials (see General Staff/Operations to L. Shkolnik (Eshkol), "Shallah Lahmekha," 15 August 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21). General Staff/Operations requested a special budget of 450 Israel Pounds for Shalovsky's trip. Shilo was later professor of microbiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Is it possible that Aharon Katchalsky’s replacement as head of HEMED by his brother Ephraim was triggered by Aharon’s unease with or even opposition to CTB?

[81] Entry for 13 May 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 1, 413. Katzir, in his autobiography (A Life's Tale, 106) quotes the 13 May 1948 diary entry from the censored version.

[82] D[avid]-B[en]-G[urion]. to Yohanan [Ratner], 14 May 1948, private archive. A mista‘arev, in Hebrew, is someone who "acts or speaks like an Arab;" the plural form is mista‘arvim. It is probable that the letter was in part designed to help Ratner neutralize possible opposition he might encounter in the Arab Platoon or elsewhere in the IDF to the well-infecting campaign. Ratner could say: “Look, here’s Ben-Gurion’s authorization for what I am ordering you to do.”

[83] Yadin, minutes of meeting of 12 May 1948, Minhelet Ha‘Am (the people’s administration), Protocols 18 April – 13 May 1948 (ISA, Jerusalem, 1978).

[84] Ratner, My Life, 338.

[85] Uri Milstein, "Mystical belief in science," Davar, 26 October 1979.

[86] A thoroughly censored "history" of the unit, The First Mista’arvim, was written by one of its veterans, Gamliel Cohen, and published by the Israel Defense Ministry Press and the Association for the Study of the Defense Force named after Yisrael Galili in 2002. A recent book on the subject, highlighting the unit's sociological problematics, is Matti Friedman, Spies of No Country).

[87] Yadin to Tzadok, 17 May 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21. See also entry for 17 May 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 2, 433: "Moshe Dayan was charged with organizing a commando [battalion] for the central [front]."

[88] Entry for 18 May 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 2, 437: "It was decided to appoint Moshe Dayan commander of the Jordan Valley front."

[89] Asaf Agin, Valley at War, 280. It is possible that on 23 May, Dayan resumed his CTB duties alongside his task of setting up the commando battalion (originally designated the 81^st Battalion, eventually re-numbered the 89^th Battalion).

[90] See Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 11 June 1948, IDFA 5440/1949 – 11; Max Levy to Shalovsky through Yadin, 9 June 1948, 13:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 11; Shelomo G[ur] to On (Aharon Katchalsky), 14 June 1948, 12:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 34; Neptune to Mizrahi, 22(?) June 1948 (date unclear), 11:30, IDFA 5440/1949 – 28; and Mizrahi Boni, to General Staff/Operations/Neptune, 5 August 1948, 08:13, IDFA 5440/1949 – 27. We don’t know why the” Mizrahi” codenames kept changing during the summer. Perhaps a number of different officers were involved.

[91] Mizrahi to General Staff/Operations/Neptune, 26 July 1948, IDFA 5440/1949 – 27. We don't know what Mizrahi meant when he wrote in the cable "all the water material of King David will arrive with Zelkind … [kol homer ha-mayim shel ha-melekh david yavo ‘im zelkind]."

[92] The two Egyptian statements are quoted in full in Arab Higher Committee, “Jewish Atrocities in the Holy Land,” 5-6. The memorandum is undated but since it was briefly summarized in T.J. Hamilton, “Arabs Assail Idea of Minority Shifts,” New York Times, 24 July 1948, it was likely produced a day or so before.

[93] Entry for 27 May 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary, 2, 462.

[94] The confession is reproduced both in Gamliel Cohen, The First Mista’aravim, 235 and Yeruham Cohen, By Light, 67. Yeruham Cohen says the two were executed on 22 August 1948; Gamliel Cohen says the executions took place on 27 August.

[95] According to a UP dispatch from Tel Aviv on 3 June, "the official Israeli radio, broadcasting in Arabic, reported that Egypt would sentence to death two Jewish prisoners on the charge that they tried to poison wells in southern Palestine. 'Let us remind you that we have several hundred Egyptian prisoners of war in our hands,' the broadcast said. 'The killing of these two Jews will not remain unavenged'." (New York Times, 4 June 1948, p. 3).

[96] See Negev Brigade, "Daily Summary – 31.5.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140: "Monitoring [Egyptian Army wireless transmissions]: This morning the medical officer received an order to be … in Majdal [Ashkelon] to carry out an analysis of the well-waters."

[97] In 1996, the well-known Israeli author S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky) published the story "Ha-mahsom ha-aharon (the last obstacle)” about an obstacle on the Ashkelon-Qastina road, hastily constructed in May 1948, "beyond which everything was open [to the Egyptian army] up to Tel Aviv" (S. Yizhar, Tsedadayim (Asides) (Tel Aviv, 1996), 107-18). It is worth noting that Yizhar dedicated the story to Alex Keynan. Apparently, they were friends.

[98] Yeruham Cohen, By Light, 66. According to Bachrach, "We do not have any accurate information regarding whether Mizrachi and Horin were sent on a spying mission to obtain information concerning the movement of Egyptian forces, or whether they were sent to contaminate water sources" (Bachrach, The Power of Knowledge – HEMED, 135).

[99] Cohen, Hamista'rvim, 232-233.

[100] "Interview with Shemarya Guttman – on the mista‘arvim from 13.6.1988, interviewer Yeruham Cohen," Kibbutz Na‘an Archive, Shemarya Guttman Papers, Box 1. Incidentally, in a separate interview with Guttman, conducted by Yisrael Galili (Kibbutz Na‘an Archive, Guttman Papers, "Galili Interview with Shemarya Guttman," 8.1.1982), Guttman described a three-hour-long meeting he had had with Ben-Gurion, apparently around the end of November-early December 1948, a few weeks before the final IDF offensive of the war, Operation Horev. In that operation, launched on 22 December, the Egyptian Army was driven out of Palestine (save for the Gaza Strip) and forced to sue for an armistice. At the Guttman-Ben-Gurion meeting, Guttman proposed that, should the tide of battle turn (if "the Egyptians are overwhelming us and we have no choice"), Israel – using Guttman's mista‘arvim unit – “should blow up the Aswan Bridge" (i.e., the Aswan Low Dam, first erected in 1902), causing the Egyptians massive chaos at home. Ben-Gurion: "You are willing to be responsible for whole villages being flooded?" Guttman: "Firstly, it won't be me, you will be responsible." According to Guttman, Ben-Gurion "smiled – he liked my answer." Guttman proposed sending a mista‘arvim squad in advance to Egypt, with explosives, to prepare the attack. But "[Re’uven] Shiloah [Ben-Gurion’s intelligence advisor] always opposed this, sending a squad to Egypt." From the interview, it is unclear if Ben-Gurion approved the plan, but Guttman quotes him "suddenly" saying: "You shall receive all the [necessary] funds [presumably to prepare the operation]."

[101] United Nations Security Council, Official Records, Third Year, 306^th Meeting: 27 May 1948," undocs.org/en/S/PV.306.

[102] See, for instance, "British Ask in U.N. for 4-Week Truce," New York Times, 28 May 1948, p. 4; "On Britain's Advice, The Arabs Rejected the Ceasefire," Haaretz, 28 May 1948, p. 1.

[103] Quoted in Benny Morris, "Weizmann and the Arabs,", 219. See also Jensen, Fenichel and Orchin, Scientist, 155-56, 166-69.

[104] Quoted ibid., 156.

[105] Alex to Ephraim, 19 June 1948, IDFA 5440\1949 – 35; and Ephraim Katchalsky, Jerusalem, to Alex HEMED, Tel Aviv, 20 June 1948, IDFA 5440\1949 – 11.

[106] Yadin to ?, 11 June 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21. From the content of the directive, it is clear that the intended addressees were various IDF brigade OCs, but it is unclear if it was actually sent out.

[107] Moshe Mizrahi to Yadin for Neptune, 19 May 1948, 09:00, IDFA 5440/1949 – 41.

[108] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 27.5.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[109] "Sergei" (Sarig) to General Staff/Operations, untitled report, 8 July 1948, IDFA 5879/1949 – 22.

[110] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 25.5.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[111] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 31.5.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[112] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 16.6.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[113] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 3.7.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[114] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Report – 14.7.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[115] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 27.5.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[116] Negev Brigade HQ, "Daily Summary – 9.6.48," IDFA 6308/1949 – 140.

[117] Sarig ('Sergei') to Palmah HQ, 11 June 1948, IDFA 957/1951 – 59.

[118] Negev Brigade HQ to 8^th Battalion, "Operational Order No. 1," 16 July 1948, IDFA 5879/1949 – 22.

[119] Later IDF chief of general staff (1968-72) and cabinet minister (1972-77, 1984-92).

[120] Aharoni, From the Diary, 108-10.

It is unclear when in May or June the episode Aharoni related occurred and how it was connected to the 8^th Battalion operations referred to in the Negev Brigade reports cited above.

Shlimazel is Yiddish – of which Aharoni was an expert – for "inept, bungling."

[121] HEMED to Supervision and Establishment (Manpower Division) IDF, 7 June 1948, and untitled, undated personnel list, both in IDFA 6127\1949 - 108).

[122] General Staff/Operations to Air Force/Operations-OC Tel Aviv Airfield, 28 July 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21.

[123] Rafi Kotzer, In a Different Time and Place, 152-53.

[124] Avner Cohen, “Israel and Chemical\Biological Weapons,” 32. It should be noted that Arab newspapers stopped appearing in Palestine after 23-24 April 1948.

[125] Abu Sitta, “Traces of Poison.”

[126] Arab Higher Committee Delegation for Palestine, undated, “Jewish Atrocities in the Holy Land: Memorandum to the United Nations Delegations,” 6.

[127] W. Seth Carus, Bioterrorism, 87-88.

[128] According to the Hebrew daily Hatzofeh of 28 January 1946, Kolitz had just returned to Palestine from South America. See also his obituary in the Washington Post, 8 October 2002.

[129] Entry for 26 September 1948, Yosef Weitz, Diary, 344.

[130] Entry for 26 September 1948, Ben-Gurion, War Diary 3, 721.

[131] For a detailed discussion see Appendix.

[132] General Staff/Operations ("in the name of General Yadin") to Moshe Shalovsky, 26 September 1948, IDFA 2384/1950 – 8.

[133] Yadin to Levi Eshkol, 26 September 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 15. In his message to Eshkol, Yadin said that Gibli (and another intelligence officer, Michael Bloch) were traveling to Paris "in connection with all the immigrants to Israel arriving via Mosul [Iraq] and to track a group of spies … some of whom had reached the country [Israel] who had a widespread network abroad." It is possible that these were real reasons for Gibli's trip to Paris. But it is more than likely that CTB was another of the reasons – or the main reason.

[134] Nir Mann, "The Testimony of Ambassador Asher Ben-Natan," Kibbutz Me’uhad Yad Tabenkin) Archive. The interview took place on 2 March 2008 in Ramat Ha-Sharon. Ben-Natan was a senior and respected government official, subsequently serving as director-general of the Defense Ministry (1959-65), ambassador to Germany and ambassador to France. What exactly the "capsule" contained we don't know.

[135] A short, handwritten note headed "to the Political Department (by Yael)", 25 January 1949, in a mista‘arvim file (IDFA 1096/1983 -19). It appears to be the draft by the mista‘arvim squad in Beirut of a response to a Political Department query. In his history of the Arab Platoon, Gamliel Cohen, who led the spy team in the Lebanese capital, refers to requests in February 1949 for intelligence on, among other things, "the water supply network in Beirut and [its] sources" (Cohen, Mista‘arvim, 279).

[136] Unsigned, "Meeting [of Count Bernadotte, Ralph Bunche and Paul Mohn] with Nakrashy [sic] Pasha, Prime Minister of Egypt, 10 a.m. 29 May, at Cairo,” UNA S-0616-0004-0018-00001 UC.tif, p.2.

[137] Leibowitz-Dar, "Germs."

[138] IDF Operations to brigades, divisions, services, etc., 20 July 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21.

[139] See Yadin's directive of 11 June, above. In July the head of General Staff/Operations wrote that "Ezra H[elmer i.e., Omer], who headed the Intelligence Department of [General Staff/] Operations… will be transferred to another position starting on … 22/7 …" (General Staff/Operations to Brigades, Divisions, Services etc., 20 July 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 21).

[140] Yadin to Allon, chief of general staff, Intelligence Service, etc., 18 August 1948, IDFA 6127/1949 – 118.

[141] Be'eri to Allon, Yadin, 26 August 1948, IDFA 2384/1950 – 8.

[142] Be'eri to OCs (IDF) Manpower and Operations and Palmah HQ, 16 September 1948, IDFA 2384/1950 – 8.

[143] Yadin to Shiloah, 8 September 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 15. Shin Mem Tzadi at the time ran the mista’arvim squad in Beirut.

[144] Shiloah to Yadin, 21 September 1948, IDFA 2315/1950 – 15.

[145] "Shin Samekh." (Shimon Somekh) to OC IDF Intelligence Department, "Survey of the Development of the 'Shahar' Unit and Conclusions," 13 March 1949, IDFA 1096/1983 – 19.