Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar

Following the first Arab-Israeli war, of 1948, rumours surfaced that the typhoid epidemic that struck the Arab town of Acre days 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 Defense Ministry Press, were deleted.[3]

The code name of the biological warfare operation – ‘Cast Thy Bread’ (in Hebrew: shallah lahmekha, from ‘cast thy bread upon the waters’ (shallah lahmekha ʿal pney ha-mayim, Ecclesiastes 11:1)) is partially mentioned, as shallah, in a memoir published in 2000 by Arieh Aharoni, a Palmah officer in 1948, who unequivocally asserted that the operation aimed at poisoning 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 the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Ministry Archive (henceforward, 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 Furthermore, we found a crucial letter by David Ben-Gurion from 14 May 1948, preserved in a private archive, and used unpublished – and highly revealing – interviews with two key figures, Ephraim Katzir (Katchalsky) and Shemarya Guttman.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 operations. However, due to the fragmentary nature of the available sources, ours remains a skeletal reconstruction.

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