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The Nazi mass murder of European Jews established the standard vocabulary, rhetorical frame, and social experience for assessing all subsequent threats, potential or actual, to any Jewish community, including the Jews of Egypt. In the second half of the twentieth century there have been no instances of antisemitic oppression that can reasonably be compared to the distinctively modern, European practice of scientifically elaborated racism, mass-marketed propaganda, industrialized genocide, and global conquest carried out by Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, commitment to strict vigilance against antisemitism, deep guilt throughout the Western world over the failure to adequately confront (in some cases, over actual complicity with) the Nazi genocide, lack of an adequate alternative lexicon, and a certain amount of cynical manipulation by Zionist publicists have installed Nazi-style antisemitism as a recurrent trope in discussions of the post-World War II Jewish condition.(1) Yet, even in their worst moments, Jews in modern Egypt were very far from experiencing such intense, unremitting, and ideologically committed persecution.
In July 1954 Israeli Military Intelligence ordered an espionage network of Egyptian Jews it had formed three years earlier to launch Operation Susannah -- a campaign to fire bomb the main Alexandria post office, the Cairo train station, and the United States Information Agency offices and several movie theaters in both cities. The saboteurs (today they would be called terrorists, especially if they were Arabs or Muslims acting against Israel or the United States) were quickly apprehended and brought to trial in December 1954. The verdicts and sentences delivered in January 1955 spanned the range of options. Sami (Shmuel) Azar and Musa (Mosheh) Marzuk were sentenced to death along with the Israeli handlers of the network tried in absentia, John Darling (Avraham Dar) and Paul Frank (Avraham Seidenwerg). Marcelle Ninio and Robert Dassa were condemned to life in prison; Victor Levy and Philip Natanson received fifteen-year prison sentences; Meir Meyuhas and Meir Zafran received seven years in prison; Caesar Cohen and Eli Naim were acquitted. Max Binnet, a major in Israeli military intelligence apprehended with the network but not directly involved in its operations, committed suicide in jail. Armand Karmona, the lodger of Marcelle Ninio, was interrogated by the Egyptian authorities and, although apparently not involved in Operation Susannah, either committed suicide or was beaten...