Introduction
There have been, for decades, global connections between armies and intelligence services and the world of drugs. Official sources and media reports indicate that the United States CIA, Britain’s MI6, the Soviet KGB, Iran’s security forces, and many other state agencies have either trafficked in illicit drugs themselves or have turned a blind eye to the drug trade if they felt that this might serve their interests.Footnote 1 At the same time, however, these states have engaged in an uncompromising, sometimes ruthless war on drugs inside their national territories, fiercely cracking down on domestic black markets and drug users. To cite one example, while annually incarcerating hundreds of thousands for nonviolent drug violations at home, the U.S., as Alfred McCoy has demonstrated, was inexorably complicit in the international drug trade during the Cold War era. “Washington,” McCoy argues, “seemed ready, whenever the need arose, to sacrifice its drug war to fight the Cold War.”Footnote 2 Still, scholarship on drug policies and drug cultures in Middle Eastern countries has tended to study these two trajectories separately.Footnote 3 In what follows, I attempt to address this lacuna by focusing on the workings of these simultaneous processes in the state of Israel.
Indeed, drawing on untapped archival sources and contemporary police and press reports, this article explores an apparent contradiction in Israel’s drug policy during the second half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the Israeli authorities clamped down on local hashish dealers and hashish consumers, mainly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (collectively known in Israel as Mizrahim, “Easterners,” or Mizrahi Jews, “Eastern Jews”). In doing so, these authorities were empowered by a public discourse that drew on pseudo-race science and obsolete Orientalist or colonial knowledge. On the other hand, the Israeli military may have been directly involved in an enduring clandestine operation to flood Egypt, which was Israel’s main enemy at the time, with cannabis (in the form of hashish), to corrupt, debilitate, and enfeeble the country’s military forces and society.Footnote 4 The discussion will, thus, highlight how the state of Israel functioned as both a force in the suppression of illicit drugs and an active agent in the regional drug trade.
Hashish and Israel’s “worn-out and filthy riffraff”
In 1919, the British military in Palestine issued an edict outlawing drugs in the country, including cannabis products. It warned the public that henceforth it would be “an offence to cultivate, export, introduce, buy, sell, offer for sale or be in possession of hashish.”Footnote 5 This ban on hashish was reaffirmed by the League of Nations’ 1925 Opium Convention, which extended international control to cannabis products,Footnote 6 and was subsequently enforced through a series of drug ordinances issued by the Government of Palestine throughout the Mandate period.
The primary hashish consumers in Palestine at the time were urban working-class Arabs. The country’s Jewish community (immigrants and veterans) mostly kept at arm’s length from hashish. As direct recipients of colonial knowledge, e.g., pseudo-race science and Orientalist fantasies about the drug, Jews perceived hashish, like many other contemporary societies elsewhere in the world,Footnote 7 as an Oriental vice, a form of backwardness and barbarism linked to living among Arabs in the Middle East. As the daily Davar—the mouthpiece of mainstream Zionism's labour movement, and the most popular Hebrew-language newspaper in interwar Palestine—reported in 1938, hashish induces violent insanity; it “begets angry behavior which can easily reach brutal and fearless aggression.” The hashish user, it continued, “is easily given to boiling rage or homicide, with remarkable cold-heartedness.” That is because hashish “stuns [his] mind,” “weakens or destroys his recognition of reality,” and neutralizes his “natural and social inhibitions.”Footnote 8
In the early 1950s, the state of Israel joined UN-sponsored anti-drug treaties and conventions. It even kept intact the 1936 Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, the last in a series of anti-drug ordinances which the British had enforced in Mandatory Palestine.Footnote 9 Ideas about hashish, as discussed above, also survived the transition to the state of Israel. Still, they responded to new demographic and political realities: the deportation and flight of the Arab population of Palestine in the Nakba and the country's massive repopulation by Mizrahim. No less than 1.5 million immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa arrived in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, threatening to tip the majority of Jews of European descent (Ashkenazim).Footnote 10 A few of these Jews had used hashish in their countries of origin and brought the habit to Israel. Other first- and second-generation immigrants were not hashish smokers but had picked up on the practice in Israel owing to their socio-economic and ethnic-cum-racial marginalization. This circumstance turned hashish into a Jewish “problem” where formerly it was considered an Arab one.
Many of these immigrants were settled in “transit camps” (ma‘abarot) that sprang up across the country, some on the ruins of previous Arab towns and villages, while others were transformed into “development towns” by the 1960s. As their name implies, these camps were initially perceived as temporary dwelling places. Yet many Jews remained there for extended periods, some for as long as seven years. They remained unemployed or were diverted to blue-collar industries or physical labour and forced to contend with poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, neglect, ill-treatment, and discrimination by the state.Footnote 11 “Varying efforts, which unfortunately included all imaginable atrocities, were made by the state apparatuses to ‘save’ these ‘underdeveloped’ children from their fates.”Footnote 12 Beset by these adversities, these places soon evolved into havens for drug use and trade, which gave rise to a burgeoning hashish culture.
How extensive was hashish consumption in this period? Because no reliable statistics are available, obtaining precise data on the number of hashish smokers in the discussed period is problematic. However, it can be carefully assumed from available official sources that the numbers did not exceed a few thousand among the underclass Mizrahim.Footnote 13 A journalist who visited “hashish dens” in Jaffa in the early 1950s thus noted with satisfaction that “very few Ashkenazim smoke hashish, and I did not meet any of them when I toured hashish dens in Jaffa”;Footnote 14 and following a 1963 police raid on a Haifa café that served hashish to its customers, an embedded reporter mused that patrons were “divided into different types and different ethnic groups [‘edot]: about a quarter of them were Arabs. About forty percent came from Morocco… [and the rest were] immigrants from Iraq and Turkey.”Footnote 15
Agreeing with the ethnic consumer type emerging from media reports, there were plenty of mainstream moral entrepreneurs for whom the hashish-consuming Mizrahim presented a danger to the very Western foundations of the Jewish state, bringing it to the brink of turning into a full-fledged Arab or Levantine space. The primary terms that expressed the state’s fears were “contagion” (hidavqut) and “plague” (magefah), as though hashish smoking were a disease that might spread to the enlightened, European—not to say white—sectors of Jewish society in Israel. These metaphors are reminiscent of older continental anxieties of reverse colonialism, which spoke of an insidious invasion of Orientals and Oriental drugs usurping European societies’ mental and physical strength and vitality.Footnote 16 Take, for example, the medical and moral pathologization of Chinese immigrants to the US in the latter part of the nineteenth century: their opium-smoking habits were said to be undermining the “white race” in general and white womanhood in particular.Footnote 17 In the case of 1950s Israel, consider the following ominous warning issued by a senior police officer: “What we have here is a national peril, a terrible peril…. Israel will become a second Egypt in ten years if something is not done to eliminate this terrible plague.”Footnote 18
Hashish-smoking venues—where hashish could be shared by Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews on the one hand and between Jews and Arabs on the other—were specifically singled out as a threat to the national project. That these venues were usually located in Israel’s ethnically mixed towns, basically, bi-national borderlands in which Arabs and Jews live together, heightened the threat of “mixedness” arising from them.Footnote 19 In brief, these same venues appeared to compromise the homogeneity of the Zionist project. Mainstream public discourse quickly cast these venues into the realms of radical alterity. Hashish-serving venues in Jaffa are a case in point. Patrons of these venues were described as “worn out and filthy riffraff”; “the most revolting figures … ever seen”; “a mixture of malignant diseases, degeneration, and the underworld”; and “a prey for bugs and lice.”Footnote 20 While indulging in hashish, they were said to be “in a state of hallucination—their eyes rolling, their pupils wide, their gaze incoherent, their speech tired and unending—and there were those who didn't seem conscious of their surroundings.”Footnote 21 The interiors of these establishments were also said to be filthy, foul-smelling, depressing, and in a state of utter disrepair: “Everything in this place is dirty and sticky—the furniture, the glasses, the cups, the thick air hanging in space”; “most of the cafés are filthy. They are located in ancient, ramshackle one-story buildings,” in “plaster-less buildings, their entrance yawning before you, bringing to mind toothless old women”; “the room is dingy and gloomy. Its windows are shut. The ceiling is high and curved”; “a filthy light bulb flickers, producing very little light and many heavy, depleted, and sickly shadows”; “the paint that was glued to the wooden ceiling peeled off long ago, and a few stains remained here and there”; “the stench is discernible in every corner”; “the smell of the manure of beasts is truly nauseating.”Footnote 22
Lastly, there was a recurring reminder, at once critical and ridiculing, that these venues were also Arab enclaves at the very heart of a Western space. The décor and the sounds were Arab in each and every respect: in one establishment, “a picture of a smiling King Faruq” of Egypt decorated the wall, and in another, there was “a television set which featured [Abd al-Gamal] Nasser venting malice.” In another Jaffa hashish den, “black coffee mixed with cardamom was served, as is customary with the Arabs”; in another hashish den, the guests “were playing—what else—backgammon.” In a café by the sea, “a screechy phonograph was playing songs of Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian singer, and her seductive voice flowed like fire in the veins of the listeners who were under the influence of the drug.”Footnote 23
Given this moral panic, it is not surprising that Israeli police began to take serious measures to curtail the hashish market and the burgeoning hashish culture. However, it initially responded slowly and decisively. Hence, during the first years after 1948, the Economic Department of the police, which reported to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID), took charge of combating “smuggling by land, sea, and air.”Footnote 24 In 1958, the task of foiling drug smuggling across Israel to Egypt was transferred to the newly established Criminal Department, which also reported to the CID.Footnote 25 Additionally, a Coasts and Borders Division was established in 1949 to combat the smuggling of various goods, including drugs, at all entry and exit points to the country. In 1953, this division was replaced by a coast guard force. Headquartered at the Port of Haifa and under the supervision of the Port Police, the force was charged with patrolling Israel’s coasts with the aim of, among other things, preventing drug smuggling by sea.Footnote 26
That the Economic Department was tasked with anti-drug enforcement in the early years is instructive. It demonstrates that the fight against drug smuggling across Israel, mainly from Lebanon (the producing state) to Egypt (the consuming state), via Israel, was at this stage prioritized over the fight against domestic drug consumption and the domestic drug market, which were still in their nascent stages. It is also instructive that drugs were but one category of several other smuggled goods—such as cars, watches, groceries, foreign currency, and even porcelain—the department was responsible for redressing.Footnote 27 Hashish, then, was not singled out from other smuggled goods. This must be understood within the context of Israel’s austerity regime (Tzena) that prevailed for most of the 1950s, resulting from the economic constraints imposed by massive immigration and the challenges of nation-building. These severe austerity measures led to a black market in goods, such as food and foreign currency, where illegal quantities were sold at a premium.Footnote 28
The massive influx of Jews from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) to Israel, which came on the heels of the Palestinians’ exodus and expulsion, gained momentum during the 1950s. With the anti-Mizrahi cannabis scare on the rise, this influx compelled the police to revamp their anti-drug enforcement. Internal police reports from the 1950s stated that hashish dealers—dubbed “new immigrants”—who made use of Egypt-bound “smuggling caravans as supply sources [for the local market]” were henceforth subject to “intelligence-gathering, ambushes… and surveillance… inside Israeli territory.”Footnote 29
We also learn that to deal more effectively with the problem of drug dealers and their clients, a canine unit was established in 1953. Trained to track down hashish by smell, the unit was possibly inspired by the British tradition of “forensic dog tracking” in the colonies since the late nineteenth century.Footnote 30 However, Israel was apparently the first country to use sniffing dogs to discover drugs.Footnote 31 During its first years, the police Animal Section owned one dog—predictably and unimaginably named Lassie. By 1960, an additional dog was trained for the task, and both dogs were deployed at sites around the country, primarily in mixed urban areas.Footnote 32 An enthusiastic journalist reported in 1953 that “the wiles of [hashish] dealers are almost limitless,” but “Lassie … is beginning to give them serious concern because the particular smell of hashish is unavoidable.”Footnote 33 A periodical that served as a police mouthpiece for reaching out to the public, 999, was of a similar mind, eagerly reporting Lassie’s exploits to its readers. Participating in a house search in Jaffa, Lassie led police officers to a chicken coop in the backyard, where she discovered 1.5 kilograms of hashish hidden under a heap. Likewise, in Haifa, “the same dog discovered various quantities of hashish hidden inside a desk drawer and a wardrobe belonging to a city resident.”Footnote 34
Whether or not the canine unit did cause hashish dealers to “tremble in their boots”Footnote 35 remains an open question. What is clear is that it was not enough to wage a successful war against hashish. Hence, the police devised another tactic: offering various incentives to people prepared to report on hashish dealers, including “large monetary rewards” reaching up to 15 percent of the captured drugs’ value.Footnote 36 To encourage informants, the police held periodic ceremonies to honour children who, by assisting in identifying drug dealers and uncovering hidden hashish supplies, “had shown initiative and good citizenship.” The police held these ceremonies in the presence of the children’s families and senior police officers.Footnote 37 “It is a pleasure for the police … to host children who have carried out good deeds and helped expose criminals and lawbreakers,” declared a police officer, summing up his satisfaction with these events.Footnote 38
It should be apparent to anyone familiar with anti-drug enforcement that these police activities are insufficient for waging an effective war against drug dealers and drug users.Footnote 39 The Israel Police suffered from profound structural problems, including labour force, equipment, and infrastructure shortages, during its formative years, and it was unable to organize in the manner required to achieve its goals for years to come.Footnote 40 This circumstance explains, in part, why the police were practically caught off guard when it was revealed, in 1954, that cannabis plantations had popped up in various transit camps across the country. As will be discussed below, this affair encapsulates the two themes explored in this section, namely the extent to which police enforcement was riddled with inefficiencies and the denunciation of Mizrahim as Arab-like, anti-transformative “hashishniks” in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
The offending cannabis cultivators in various transit camps were, indeed, all “new immigrants from the Orient,” mainly from Iran, Turkey, Iraq, and Morocco;Footnote 41 “in nearly every transit camp, there are immigrants from the Orient who grow this dangerous plant,” one observer rebuked.Footnote 42 Reportedly “earmarked for personal home consumption only,” the crops were grown in open gardens near dwelling places.Footnote 43 Ironically, these gardens may have been part of a nationwide project initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture to combat economic strain and austerity measures in the state’s early years. The idea behind this campaign was simple: to encourage families to grow their produce in private gardens to compensate for shortages in agricultural supplies.Footnote 44 The cultivation of cannabis in numerous transit camps may very well have become possible due to the lack of police presence in most of these localities (as well as elsewhere in the country).Footnote 45 Yet once discovered, the police embarked on an unprecedented “state-wide campaign” in immigrant camps—from the Galilee and Afula in the north, and from immigrant housing projects in Netanya and south Tel Aviv to the camps of the Castel (near Jerusalem), Kfar Masmia, and Migdal Ashkelon in the south—in a bid to destroy the cannabis plots and arrest cannabis growers.Footnote 46 In the course of the campaign, which ostensibly put “an immediate and decisive end” to cannabis cultivation in transit camps, a total of 1,089 cannabis plants were destroyed across the country.Footnote 47
The fact that transit camp occupants used their vegetable gardens to grow cannabis further maligned Mizrahim in the eyes of mainstream observers. The episode indicated their failure to thrive, as though their problems stemmed from their primitive cultural hinterland and hashish abuse rather than the state’s discriminatory policies; they had refused to assimilate, preferring to live in poverty rather than contribute to the Israeli economy. What particularly infuriated observers was that these immigrants, who had been considered unfit for realizing the Zionist ethos of Hebrew labour and self-sufficiency, to begin with, were found to be hard-working, motivated toilers of the land—when it came to criminal and harmful enterprises:
Amid the great song and dance celebrating the tremendous productivity in agriculture—the songs of tomatoes, beetroot, and whatnot—this week, you will have read that in large swathes of [transit camps] … they are growing hashish. It is severe because it threatens the lives of hundreds and thousands of people in that part of our population.Footnote 48
Alleging that the Mizrahi growers were to blame for a “terrifying murder” of a child named Rachel Levin, whose body was found near Hiriya, a transit camp close to Tel Aviv and home to Jews of Iraqi provenance, another observer concluded by warning that “in places where hashish grows … a savage youth will also grow.”Footnote 49 Instructively, when the actual murderer was apprehended, he turned out to be neither an Iraqi immigrant nor a transit camp resident.Footnote 50
Unlike Arabs, hashish smoking by Mizrahim was described not as an innate, irredeemable, racial pathology but rather as something they had picked up over many years of living in a “diasporic” Oriental environments: “Jews who lived among the Arabs … were infected by this indecent habit”; it was “from their Arab neighbors that the Jews learned to smoke hashish”; “[these] Jews assimilated [such] unseemly customs in their countries [of origin].”Footnote 51 However, such a view did not lead to an effort to integrate the new immigrants but rather vindicated their marginalization and criminalization. At the same time, hashish became the alibi used to reject governmental responsibility for the hardships and grievances of Mizrahim, placing them squarely on their own shoulders.
Operation “Addictive Candy”
On 2 February 1955, at the same time that the Israeli state was clamping down on Mizrahi hashish users, Zena Harman, a member of the Israeli mission to the United Nations in New York, sent a coded, secret cable to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. In it, she alerted her superiors that the Arab League was preparing a report to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), which alleged that Israel was deeply complicit in the ongoing Levant drug trade from Lebanon to Egypt via Israel—an illicit trade that debuted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Footnote 52 “The Arab League,” she wrote, plans to publish a memo on dangerous drugs in the Middle East. [It] alleges that we are disseminating intoxicating drugs… to reduce the Arabs’ strength…. We need to prepare for this.”Footnote 53
Harman’s information was correct. A few days later, Abdel Aziz Safwat, an Egyptian Brigadier who headed the Arab League’s Permanent Anti-Narcotics Bureau (maktab da’im li-shu’un mukhaddirat, or PANB), did submit a report to the CND in time for its tenth annual meeting in May 1955. The report was indeed highly critical of Israel. It accused the Jewish state of flooding the Arab states, particularly Egypt, with drugs to disrupt life by debilitating and immobilizing citizens.
The report accused Israel of two complementary schemes designed to “drug poison” the Arab publics and even European and American societies. The first method cited was ambitious and expensive, required unusual infrastructure and expertise, and was highly cunning; the second was more straightforward and economical. Safwat described the first method as follows:
It seems certain that there are small factories in Israel for manufacturing cocaine, heroin, and synthetic drugs and that it has been arranged to smuggle these drugs to certain countries in the Middle East and to certain European countries, using false labels bearing names of respectable firms. It has also arranged to smuggle “white” drugs [heroin and cocaine] to the United States of America by sea via Cyprus, Genoa, and Marseille and by air by means usually arriving from Israel.Footnote 54
Safwat’s account of Israel’s second and more modest method of disseminating drugs in the Arab states focused specifically on hashish. According to the writer, this method required Israel to recycle seized hashish supplies smuggled into the country from Lebanon or Jordan and then re-smuggle them to Egypt.Footnote 55 The same report also quickly capitalized on the furore that erupted in Israel in 1954 following the revelation that Jewish immigrants from MENA had cultivated cannabis plots in transit camps (as discussed in the previous section). Safwat alleged that this cultivation had institutional backing, with the objective of directing the yield to Egypt.Footnote 56
Similar accusations reappeared in PANB reports to the CND throughout the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s,Footnote 57 and the Arab press gave them added resonance. Hence, in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram reported that “hashish smugglers” —apparently Negev Bedouins—captured by the Egyptian military in the Sinai Desert disclosed that Israeli servicemen, whom they encountered during the Negev leg of their journey, had permitted them to proceed with their contraband towards Egypt. According to the same report, “the Jews used military vehicles to transfer [hashish] to the desert during the period of [Sinai’s] occupation [in 1956].”Footnote 58 In the same year, the daily Filastin reported that Israel had been disseminating “large quantities” of “poisoned cigarettes” in unspecified “Arab countries,” damaging the health of many a smoker.Footnote 59
Representatives and spokespersons of Israel’s Foreign Ministry did not sit by idly as passive recipients of these allegations; they actively fought back. In the first instance, they categorically denied claims that Israel was producing “white drugs” for distribution in the Arab world and elsewhere: “Pharmaceutical factories in Israel operate under Government license and supervision. No incident involving the illicit manufacture of white drugs has come to light.” At the same time, they denied that Israel was cultivating cannabis for similar purposes: “Cannabis was cultivated in Israel in negligible quantities [in 1954]. It was established beyond doubt that this hashish was earmarked for personal home consumption only…. No cannabis grown in Israel was ever smuggled abroad.”Footnote 60
To make the point that Israel was by no means a willing actor in the Middle East’s “white drugs” and “black drugs” trades, Foreign Ministry representatives were quick to observe that the Arab League's allegations were, in effect, a projection of their own complicity in the region’s drug trade. Because Arab rulers and Arab military and political elites were, they claimed, oblivious to the interests of their populations, they were prepared to sacrifice the health, vigour, and development of their citizens on the altar of the drug trade for a quick profit. To authenticate this charge, the Foreign Ministry regularly supplied its UN missions in New York and Geneva with intelligence reports and stories from the Arab press concerning the involvement of Arab rulers and other personalities in the Levant drug trade. Mission delegates were asked to pass this information to their UN peers and leak it to the international press.
Egypt was the main country Israel pointed the finger at. On the eve of the twelfth CND session in 1957, the Foreign Ministry sent the Israeli mission in New York a “confidential” twenty-one-page military intelligence report, requesting that it disclose its contents.Footnote 61 The report contained information allegedly collected during the brief Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip during the 1956 Suez Crisis (otherwise known in the Arab world as Tripartite Aggression). The report detailed the supposed involvement of several Egyptian military and administrative personnel serving in Gaza in hashish trafficking. Actors reportedly included Major Mustafa Hafiz, the commander of Egyptian military intelligence in the Strip, who had done so, as the report claimed, “under the protection of the Egyptian military.”Footnote 62 The account linked these Egyptians to Lebanese and Syrian hashish and opium smugglers, claiming that the latter were offered “bribes” in return for information about the location of Israeli military ambushes across the border. It also included alleged testimonies of Egyptian customs officials, police officers, soldiers, and attorneys residing in Gaza. They claimed that armed Egyptian military units accompanied hashish traffickers across the Sinai desert, and senior military officers personally escorted hashish supplies into Cairo and Alexandria.Footnote 63
Given the paucity of available sources, it is difficult to determine which of the Arab League’s allegations were true and which were not. It is not helpful either that the few references to the affair in the Israeli press are predominantly vague, inconclusive, and invariably careful not to point out what it concerned. This is unsurprising: even though journalists and observers have progressively gleaned more information about this story over the years, the Israeli political, legal, and security authorities put their entire weight and force behind concealing the affair.Footnote 64 It is likely that Yossi Melman, Ha’aretz national security correspondent, invoked this very affair when he wrote that it is “one of the darkest and ugliest episodes of Israeli intelligence, and all information about it is still sealed.” Melman continues:
Because of the gag orders, I will code-name it “Addictive Candy” … It involved systematic illegal activity by the state over many years, and disclosure of its details could bring disgrace to many former intelligence officials and give Israel a bad name… [Throughout the years] I have repeatedly attempted to report [this] tale … I failed. The stubborn insistence by intelligence bodies to conceal and bury the story led me to conclude that it stemmed from shame, rather than genuine concern for national security. The security authorities and the courts blocked every attempt of mine using secrecy ordinances, gag orders, and sweeping censorship.Footnote 65
Despite the fact that this affair has been shrouded in secrecy, two compelling investigative press reports—the first in 1996 by The Times (London) and the second in 2010 by the French magazine Revue—have shed light on the prospects of the Israeli military’s active participation in the Levant hashish trade to Egypt.Footnote 66 Based on these sources and my own primary research, it is possible to partially reconstruct the affair as follows: the idea of smuggling Lebanese hashish to Egypt by the Israeli military can be traced back to 1959, eleven years after Israel’s independence and three years after the Israeli victory over Egypt in the 1956 Suez War. At the time, Israel was concerned with the hashish trade to Egypt, which crisscrossed the young nation’s territory. As Melman contends, “The situation became quite irksome…. The smuggling routes were well known to the army, and there was concern that trade in the illegal substances would benefit terrorists and others.”Footnote 67 The idea of taking control of the futile war against the trade and turning it to Israel’s advantage is credited to Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president (1983–93) and the head of military intelligence at the time. Instead of waging a hopeless war against hashish traffickers, Herzog and his associates decided that “they could run the drug shipments themselves, flooding Egypt with cut-price narcotics and weakening the Egyptian army.”Footnote 68
The Israeli military’s smuggling operation along the Lebanon-Israel-Egypt axis continued unabated for more than twenty-five years—from 1959 to the mid-1980s, long after Israel and Egypt established diplomatic relations. Initially code-named “Toto,” after the Israeli national soccer betting pool—and later “Lahav” (Blade) and “Tidhar” (a tree mentioned in the Book of Isaiah)—the operation was approved by successive Israeli governments, thus ensuring the flooding of the Egyptian military with prime hashish for decades. Curiously, no one dared question the idea, its morality, or its military value. Neither was the underlying logic of the operation questioned: no one asked how a handful of traffickers could paralyze an entire army through smuggled hashish. And worse: “That Egypt did not lack hashish is an understatement; hence, the operation was like selling tea to Ceylon, or coal to Newcastle, or ice to Eskimos.”Footnote 69
Finally, the long-lasting and highly covert operation was entrusted to an elite military intelligence team, Unit 504, formally referred to as the army’s Human Intelligence Division. Its task was, and still is, to identify, recruit, and run agents for information collection and the execution of special operations. Its other mission is to interrogate prisoners.Footnote 70 Unit 504 played a crucial role in Israel’s victory in the 1967 War by gathering valuable information about the Egyptian military.Footnote 71 However, its reputation has been badly marred throughout most of its years of activity by revelations about the unit’s resort to torture, rape, and, at least in one case, “sodomizing [a suspect] with a rod.”Footnote 72 Indeed, it has not helped the unit’s reputation that some of its officers were also caught befriending and running drug dealers and sometimes even smuggling drugs themselves.Footnote 73
To facilitate hashish smuggling to Egypt, the unit’s agents recruited Lebanese drug traffickers and offered local Lebanese growers monetary incentives in exchange for cannabis products. “Much money passed from hand to hand. Wine bottles [also] facilitated the traffic. An Israeli who participated in [the] Operation … [who was] dressed like an Arab and trained to speak Arabic in the Lebanese dialect recalls how he had travelled to the Bekaa Valley to deliver more than one million dollars in cash to a Lebanese grower.”Footnote 74
The routes chosen for the traffic were elaborate and diverse, mainly replicating the routes used by smuggling networks during the pre-state Mandates period.Footnote 75 Firstly, certain cargoes were transferred overland in trucks from Lebanon to Syria, and then from Syria to Jordan, before being redirected to Israel. Additional supplies were transferred directly from Jordan to Egypt by boat along the Gulf of Aqaba. Other supplies were transported by sea from the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre to Achziv, an old Arab village (known in Arabic as al-Zeeb) on the Mediterranean coast of northern Israel, which became a haven for hippies, loafers, and “bohemians” in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 76 Finally, Israeli navy combat boats escorted Lebanese drug boats to the northern town of Nahariya.Footnote 77
Once on Israeli soil, Unit 504 officers dressed in civilian clothes accompanied the hashish consignments to a warehouse in Ha-Kirya—a military base in the heart of Tel Aviv and the headquarters of Israel’s Ministry of Defense—for storage. Approximately once a month, Unit 504 officers escorted military trucks from this warehouse to precise meeting points in the Sinai on the Israeli-Egyptian border. At these points, they would transfer the cargoes to Egyptian traffickers or distribute the drugs among Egyptian soldiers stationed in the area between the Sinai Peninsula and Cairo.Footnote 78
Conclusion
In recent years, Israel has emerged as a leading force in cannabinoid research and a burgeoning power in the medical cannabis industry. Cementing Israel’s reputation as “the holy land of medical marijuana”Footnote 79 is the doyen or “father of cannabis research,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s professor of medicinal chemistry, Raphael Mechoulam, who died in 2023.Footnote 80 In 1964 Mechoulam discovered and distilled the THC molecule, one of the active ingredients in cannabis, and “figure[d] out how cannabis makes users high.”Footnote 81 He has since explored its medicinal properties and publicly called for the use of cannabinoids as therapeutic agents. To be sure, Mechoulam’s achievements and global standing have helped to make Israel an international leader in cannabis science and technology since the turn of the century. So much so that former high-ranking politicians (including two former prime ministers), retired military officers, police officers, business entrepreneurs, and even a Nobel Prize laureate have joined Israel’s thriving medical cannabis industry, eager to profit from the new bonanza.Footnote 82 All of this is taking place conjointly with the normalization of cannabis culture in Israel, a process that culminated in the 2022 de facto decriminalization of the drug, allowing possession of small amounts of cannabis for personal use.Footnote 83
Mechoulam’s early-1960s discoveries regarding the structure of the cannabidiol (CBD) and THC molecules coincided with both the campaign against hashish users in Israel and the Israeli military’s involvement in hashish smuggling to Egypt, as examined above. Yet, it is highly instructive that I have not found a single press report about Mechoulam’s cannabis discoveries from the early 1960s to well after the early twenty-first century.Footnote 84 This may suggest that Mechoulam’s pathbreaking achievements remained largely unknown to most Israelis but were made public knowledge only retrospectively, that is, when his name and accomplishments were needed for bolstering Israel’s burgeoning legal cannabis industry. Meanwhile, Israel’s concerns were limited to the illegal drug industry in Lebanon, the cultivating and producing country. A “typical global hot zone of drug production” —comprising “a displaced, alienated, or ethnically segregated peasantry (for working drug plantations) and an especially weak state or ill-defined borders”Footnote 85—Lebanon has been able to supply Israel with high-quality cannabis, which in turn permitted the state to crack down on Mizrahim as a group driven by superstition and hashish abuse and at the same time to encourage drug use in Egypt.
Finally, upon first reading the Arab League’s reports on Israel’s alleged complicity in the hashish trade to Egypt, my instinct was to dismiss them altogether. I immediately recollected the days of the 1967 June War. At the time, I, a six-year-old child, and my family regularly tuned in to “Kol ha-ra’am,” an Egyptian radio station broadcasting in Hebrew. The station was founded in the early 1960s for propaganda purposes, designed to sow doubt and cripple the morale of the Israeli public.Footnote 86 The broadcasters’ pompous and flowery Hebrew, cringing language errors, and utterly unreliable war reports have made them a source of endless jokes and ridicule. So, I first read Safwat’s UN reports with a healthy dose of scepticism.
I started overcoming my prejudices and rethinking the credibility of the Arab League’s allegations when I recalled an earlier discovery in my previous research: at the very same time that the pre-state Zionist establishment had come out strongly against Arab use of hashish in Palestine, viewing it as a token of Arab backwardness and barbarism, anti-British military and paramilitary Zionist organizations had themselves engaged in hashish smuggling operations to Egypt, in exchange for arms and to replenish their shoestring budgets.Footnote 87 The alleged aim of the more recent smuggling operation was not to finance an anticolonial struggle but to encourage drug addiction and thus promote political apathy. Yet, the dialectics are the same. Despite a genuine (albeit misplaced and phantasmagoric) aversion to hashish, which culminated in an uncompromising (yet not consistently successful) drug prohibition, both the pre-state Jewish community and the state of Israel were not shy of exploiting the hashish trade for their own political and strategic benefit. As is well known, Israel has not been alone in this. To reach similar goals, numerous other states, past and present, have enforced drug prohibition at home while employing armies, militias, espionage organizations, and other shady individuals and groups to traffic narcotics across borders.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Elife Bicer-Deveci and Judith Vitale for organizing the Zurich Workshop on Drugs and the Industrial Situation and for giving me the opportunity to present my paper there, which formed the basis of this article. I am also grateful to the discussants as well as to the other workshop participants, whose insightful comments on my paper helped sharpen and strengthen the article’s analytical dimensions.
Funding statement
This research was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (Grant No. 395/20).
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