The Farmer Spy
He drove a tractor, managed his kibbutz, and generally lived the happy purposeful life of a man conquering what he believed was his historic land.
Chapter One of The Soviet Jew continued: Part II.
I’ll be dropping all installments into this table of contents going forward. Paid subscribers get full access to all chapters and footnotes and audio versions. Read the previous bit: Kidnapping on the Moscow Express.
Kfar Blum
"The Soviet Union tried for thirty years to make the Jews forget their nationality. They realized how little they had succeeded only after the state of Israel had been founded."
—Anonymous Israeli official1
It was 1952, four years the State of Israel came into being. A man by the name of Nechemia Levanon got called off Kfar Blum, the kibbutz he had helped build near the border with Lebanon, for a meeting in Holon, a city near Tel-Aviv.
Nechemia — 37 years old, with thick black hair, a blocky forehead, and big bulbous nose — was a typical idealistic old school Zionist. He was born in Estonia in 1915, his family moved to Russia during the Russian Revolution, and in his youth he was active in socialist Zionist movements, bouncing around Russia, Estonia, and Latvia — studying, learning how to farm, and working for the cause. He finally made it to Palestine in 1938, where he and other aspiring colonists from America, Britain, and the Baltics set up a kibbutz on the Jordan River — built right next to an old Palestinian village that would be depopulated and destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948 and then swallowed up by his kibbutz.2 He drove a tractor, managed the farm, and generally lived the happy purposeful life of a man conquering what he believed was his historic land.3
He was a dedicated Zionist, so the meeting in Holon was a big deal. It was set up by some of the most respected members of the Zionist clandestine services. Among them was the ultra-secretive Shaul Avigur, who had been head of the Old Mossad — an agency created to organize illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine when it was still under British control. The other was Isser Harel, head of the New Mossad — a clandestine security agency set up after Israel declared itself a state.
The two spy bosses set up the meeting with Nechemia and other Zionist old timers to get their thoughts on the Soviet Jewish Question. Specifically they wanted to know what people thought could be done to help bring Soviet Jews to Israel.
Why were these Mossadists interested in Soviet Jews? It wasn't just about a national-altruistic drive to reunite all Jews, although that was a part of it. The main reason was strategic — it was about securing their newly created state.
Israel’s founders had long coveted the vast pool of Jews living in the U.S.S.R. It was estimated that there were somewhere around 2 million of them — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel in the early 1950s, which hovered just above 1 million. The thought of all those Jewish bodies, all that potential, just sitting there untapped sent them into a frenzy of desire. All those Jews could easily double Israel’s non-Palestinian population, buttressing the state against a hostile majority that now surrounded its new, now ethnically cleansed lands.4
That was the main reason for their interest in Soviet Jews. That was obvious to everyone. But there was another lesser-known dimension that had to do with Israel’s intra-ethnic politics: Israel’s European ruling elite wanted Soviet Jews because of their culture — their European culture.
Israel was established mainly by Jews from Europe. These Jews wanted to create an Israel that was European, rather than Middle Eastern. But they quickly ran into a problem. Desperate to pad its population with any Jews they could, Israel’s clandestine services did everything in their power to trigger a mass migration of Jews out of Middle Eastern countries. From 1949 to 1952, there was a big influx of Jews into Israel from places like Morocco, Yemen, and Iraq. The percentage of Israel’s Jewish population that was born in Asia or the Middle East more than doubled over that time, and by 1951 it stood at almost 40 percent of the entire population. Israel’s European Zionist ruling elite was concerned. They had wanted these people to come to Israel and had worked very hard to make this immigration wave from the Middle East possible. But now that all these Eastern Jews had arrived, the European Jews were concerned that they would overwhelm their project and would infect Israel with their backwards Arab values, turning Israel into an eastern society rather than a European one.5
“The Zionist movement and Israel’s founders very much wanted to maximize the number of European Jewish immigrants who shared a common cultural bond with Israel’s European Jewish establishment,” wrote Fred Lazin in The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics. “They had disdain for many of the culturally different, less educated and skilled and poorer Jews from Arab countries. For Ben-Gurion and his generation, the Jewish State was to have been the homeland of masses of Jews from Eastern Europe.6
Desiring Soviet Jews was easy. Getting them to come was the hard part.