1904 - 1976
Israeli labor leader and politician.
Born in Galicia, Poland, Pinhas Lavon was active in a Zionist socialist youth movement and was one of the founders of the Gordonia-Pioneer Youth Movement. After immigrating to Mandatory Palestine in 1929, he was active in the Kibbutz movement and became one of the ideologists of MAPAI, whose secretary-general he was in 1938 and 1939. Elected to the Histadrut Executive Committee, he became its secretary-general from 1948 to 1951. Elected to the Knesset in 1949, a year later he joined the cabinet as minister without portfolio, minister of agriculture, and from 1954 to 1955, minister of defense. In that position Lavon sought to reform the Defense Ministry, thereby angering many of its top officials and senior echelons of the Israel Defense Force (IDF). In 1954 his name was linked to a failed operation in Egypt, in which a cell of young Egyptian Jews, activated by the IDF, placed explosives in American facilities in Cairo, with the intent of souring relations between Egypt and the West in order to delay the British withdrawal from Egypt, thus removing a buffer between Egypt and Israel. Lavon argued that he did not give the order to carry out these operations. The director of Military Intelligence claimed he had.
Lavon was forced to resign his post as defense minister when the leadership of MAPAI felt his erratic behavior and hawkish policies were not acceptable. They persuaded David Ben-Gurion to return from his self-imposed retirement. Lavon was reap-pointed secretary-general of the Histadrut (1956 - 1961). In 1959, with new evidence in his hands, Lavon demanded the re-opening of the investigation of the 1954 affair in order to clear his name. In the process he accused senior IDF officers and Defense Ministry officials of perjury. Ben-Gurion demanded Lavon's ouster from the Histadrut. In 1964 he left the MAPAI party. The Lavon Affair led to a split in the ruling MAPAI Party and to BenGurion's resignation in 1963. To his dying day Lavon continued to demand that his name be cleared. New research suggests that he knew of the operation but did not necessarily sanction it.
Bibliography
Bar-Zohar, Michael. Ben-Gurion: A Biography, translated by Peretz Kidron. New York: Adama Books, 1978.
Teveth, Shabtai. Ben-Gurion's Spy: The Story of the Political Scandal That Shaped Modern Israel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
— REEVA S. SIMON
UPDATED BY MERON MEDZINI
