the army officers by ordering retaliation raids that were not strictly necessary. One Israeli yarn making the rounds in those days was that Prime Minister Sharett opened his newspaper every morning with trembling hands, for fear of what Lavon and Dayan might have concocted during the night.
In order to understand these events, one must comprehend the mood of the country. Five years after victory in the War of Liberation, peace was more distant than ever. Arab nationalism, trying to unify the Arab world and the Arab armies surrounding Israel, posed an obvious threat to the very existence of Israel. The acts of killing and sabotage perpetrated by Arab infiltrators, many of them refugees from the territory now held by Israel, created an activist mood. "Activism," as the hard line of Israel's hawks was then called, was popular, not because people were bloodthirsty, but because it seemed the only way to safeguard the security of the state.
* * *
By May, 1954, the tension in Israel had come to a head -the State seemed abandoned by its allies, confronted with a unified Arab world and a re-armed Egyptian Army; the Suez Canal finally closed, armed infiltration creating havoc along the frontiers. Trickling down to the general public from the small circle of insiders came word that intrigues were rampant at the highest policy-making level. In this climate, the latest news looked even worse than it was. On the first of May, Henry Byroade made yet another speech. Addressing the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist Jewish-American minority group much hated by the Israelis, Byroade said that Israel must put an end to mass immigration, because of the fear it generated in the Arab world, and that it must repatriate a number of the Arab refugees. Byroade thought that Israel must cease being a beachhead of world Jewry and integrate itself