Eliyahu Sasson

Eliyahu Sasson was born in Damascus in 1902, into a milieu that would shape his lifelong fluency in Arabic language and culture.[1] At the age of eighteen he became the only Jewish member of the Arab Syrian National Committee, and in that capacity he publicly greeted Feisal — then king of Syria — on behalf of Damascus's Jewish community.[1]

At Feisal's personal initiative, Sasson edited an Arab-language Jewish newspaper for several months, with the explicit purpose of fostering understanding between Jews and Arabs in the spirit of the Weizmann–Feisal agreement.[1] When French forces ousted Feisal from Syria in 1920, Sasson settled in Palestine.[1] There he built a reputation as an expert on Arab affairs, working first for various newspapers and then for the Zionist Executive; from 1930 he headed its Arab Department.[1] On behalf of the Executive, he traveled widely across the Middle East and maintained sustained contacts with Arab leaders for many years.[1]

Sasson's wartime activities demonstrated the breadth of his role as a political intelligence operative. During World War II he was instrumental in spreading British anti-Nazi propaganda in Arab countries.[1] In 1948, as head of the Jewish Agency's Arab Department, he directed the Arab-language broadcasts of the clandestine Haganah radio station.[1] That same year he negotiated with King Abdullah of Transjordan on behalf of the nascent Israeli government and corresponded with Arab League secretary-general Azzam Pasha and other Arab leaders.[1]

After the UN Security Council called for armistice negotiations on November 16, 1948, Sasson joined an Israeli delegation to King Abdullah's palace in Jordan, traveling disguised as an Arab for a meeting focused mainly on prisoners of war.[2] During that visit, Sasson noticed a Torah scroll from Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter in the palace and urged Abdullah to return it, warning that a Torah scroll kept from its proper place could bring "curse and disaster" on the household. After the meeting, the delegation found the scroll waiting in their car; Sasson's son later recalled that his father carried it home and covered its decorative bells with socks so they would not attract attention.[2]

One of the earliest documented episodes of his intelligence work dates to October 3, 1938, when Sasson sent a report marked "Top Secret" to Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department.[3] Identifying himself as head of the Agency's Arab Affairs Section, Sasson reported on a September 30 meeting in Damascus about Palestinian Arab demands and a forthcoming Cairo convention. He had arranged — through his contacts — for Nasib al-Bakri to invite Izzat Darwazzah to present at the gathering, and Sasson himself listened from an adjacent room, writing that "The undersigned sat in an adjacent room to where the deliberations were held and listened to the exchanges that were going back and forth."[3] The five-hour session, running from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m. at the home of Nasib al-Bakri — a Syrian parliamentarian and chairman of the National Bloc branch in Damascus — was attended by figures including Asif al-Solah, Faris al-Khuri, and Sheikh Muhammad Shuraki of Transjordan.[3]

After World War II, Sasson participated in most major Zionist and Israeli delegations negotiating Palestine's political future or Israel–Arab relations.[1] These included the 1946 talks in London, the 1947–48 discussions at the United Nations, the 1949 armistice talks with Arab governments in Rhodes, and the subsequent — ultimately unsuccessful — peace talks at Lausanne.[1] He also met Egyptian Prime Minister Ismail Sidky in September 1946, when, apart from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian leadership showed little interest in the Palestine issue. Sasson later described the atmosphere of that meeting in his 1978 book, On the Road to Peace: Letters and Conversations, writing: "It seemed to me as if I was sitting with one of my friends from the department, and we were consulting."[4]

Sasson's formal diplomatic career began in 1949, when he headed Israel's office in Paris, which maintained unpublicized contacts with Arab interlocutors.[1] He served as Israel's minister to Turkey from 1950 to 1952, then moved to Rome as minister and — from 1957 — as ambassador until 1960.[1]

In 1958, while serving as ambassador to Italy, Sasson attended Pope John XXIII's coronation as a special delegate of the State of Israel.[5] The Vatican later cited his attendance as evidence that the Holy See recognized Israel, despite the absence of normal diplomatic relations between the two states.[5]

From Rome, Sasson went to Berne as ambassador to Switzerland. He was serving in that post in 1961 when he was recalled to join the Israeli government as minister of posts.[1] His son Moshe Sasson later followed him into diplomacy with Jordan; a meeting Eliyahu arranged between his young son and King Abdullah helped open the way for those later contacts.[6]

After serving as minister of posts, Sasson became minister of police.[1] He opened an Israeli government discussion on June 18, 1967 — days after the Six-Day War — that revealed both the breadth of his strategic thinking and the degree to which it diverged from other ministers.[7]

On Egypt and Sinai, Sasson argued against conditioning Israeli withdrawal on a formal peace treaty and the end of the Arab boycott. His proposed framework instead rested on three demands: free navigation through the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal, demilitarization of Sinai, and separation of the Gaza Strip from Egypt, with Gaza coming under Israeli rule.[8] In an exchange with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, he said that if those three conditions were met he would return Sinai, and that he did not insist on peace as a precondition — describing the alternative as "an agreement without peace."[8]

On Syria, Sasson proposed deploying along the international border, demilitarizing the Golan Heights, and reaching an agreement on the Jordan River sources even without comprehensive peace.[7] He also rejected proposals to settle Palestinian refugees in countries such as Morocco and Algeria, arguing that Israel had not managed to settle even one refugee in an Arab country in the preceding nineteen years, and that involving states with no prior connection to the issue would widen the conflict and intensify hostility.[8] Most urgently, he pressed for a rapid agreement — even without Jordan's consent — to end Israeli control over the Arab population in the territories, saying Israel could not "maintain the situation of this conquest for two months."[7] The other ministers did not share his view that Israel should forgo demanding comprehensive peace.[7]

Sasson also authored a report titled "The Fate of the West Bank" concerning the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — in the war's immediate aftermath. In it he considered using the newly captured territory to address the Palestinian refugee problem while granting Palestinians autonomy in the urban population centers. He warned, however, that Palestinians would not be satisfied with autonomy and might eventually demand either an independent state or voting rights in Israel. He hoped for large-scale Jewish immigration to alter the demographic balance, but did not foresee such a wave unless the Soviet Union opened its gates. He further argued that making Israel binational would alienate world Jewry by ending its character as a Jewish state.

Throughout his career Sasson published widely in Hebrew- and Arabic-language newspapers in Israel, as well as political reminiscences that drew on his decades of direct engagement with Arab leaders.[1] He remained a firm believer that understanding between Israel and the Arabs was feasible and that hostility between Jews and Arabs was temporary.[1]

His 1978 book, On the Road to Peace: Letters and Conversations, collected material from his diplomatic correspondence and conversations, including his account of the 1946 meeting with Egyptian Prime Minister Ismail Sidky.[4] Sasson was considered a potential candidate for the Israeli presidency before illness prevented him from pursuing that path.[6] He died in 1978.

Several of Sasson's recorded assessments have attracted scrutiny. An INSS review of Israeli policy toward Lebanon's Maronites quotes him arguing that Middle Eastern minorities had to take the Sunni Muslim majority's views into account, and warning that the Maronites might not be able to honor commitments to Israel when these conflicted with the Sunni majority's position.[9] In the same context, Sasson described the Maronites as combining "the worst characteristics of the West with the negative characteristics of the people of the Middle East" — an assessment the INSS review presents as his attributed judgment rather than as a settled characterization.[9]

Sasson's 1967 post-war report warned that Palestinians would not be satisfied with autonomy and might seek independence or Israeli voting rights. The report also recorded his concern that ties between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians could pull Israel away from its "Western orientation" toward what he called "Arab backwardness," a politically charged formulation reflecting his own assessment.

Sources also give differing accounts of when he formally began serving as minister of police: the Encyclopaedia Judaica dates his service from 1966, while a ministerial-history table lists him as taking office on January 2, 1967.[1][10]