| Summary/Abstract |
On February 19, 1981, Shmuel Lahis, the general manager of the Jewish Agency for Israel (the organization coordinating immigration absorption in Israel) resigned at the culmination of a public scandal. Three years earlier, Lahis’s very appointment as the general manager had sparked public protests due to the fact that in 1948, then-First Lieutenant Lahis stood trial for killing thirty-three unarmed civilians in the village of Hula (three kilometers north of Israel) during the final campaign of the first Arab-Israeli war.1 Lahis had initially been convicted by a military court for killing fifteen people, and received a seven-year sentence. On appeal, the supreme military court commuted his punishment to one year, stating that in the context of the war “there is no wonder a great hatred of Arabs emerged.”2 Lahis was spared prison time, and spent a year in an open military base instead. In 1955 he received a presidential pardon.3 Lahis began working as a regional legal advisor for the Jewish Agency in 1961, moving up the ranks to the position of general manager in 1978. Arie Dulzin, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, rebuffed protests against Lahis’s appointment by saying that as Lahis had been pardoned, and his “was not an act which carries a stigma,” the appointment was conisdered unproblematic.4 Lahis’s military record did not keep him out of the job. Instead, Lahis would lose his job for an act Israeli officialdom could simply not pardon: authoring a report detailing the grievances of Israelis who chose to emigrate from Israel to the United States.
|