The secret squad trained to rescue Morocco's Jews
Winter 1954. The reports coming out of French-ruled Morocco were making Israel’s security people lose sleep. There had already been two bloody pogroms in this North African country since the founding of the Jewish State in 1948, and while the French were officially Jewish protectors and permitted Jewish Agency activity and even a level of aliyah, if the country would declare independence and their French protectors pulled out, the Jews would likely find themselves in grave danger.
The Jewish communities were already living under hardship — businesses regularly paid “protection money” to local thugs, theft and arson of Jewish property was rampant, and mysterious disappearances of teenage girls were not unusual. About 70,000 Jews had already fled — many of them wealthy businessmen who escaped with nothing. And now, with independence on the horizon and the feared ascent of the radical Istiqlal party to power — the strings of which were being pulled by the Jew-hating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser — the Israelis knew they had to act fast for the 200,000 Jews still in Morocco.
This was a job for the long arm of the Mossad.
As it happened, the Moroccan Jewish communities themselves were frightened of the departure of the French, and many young people would be ready to help the Mossad in its secret underground initiatives to protect the local Jews and help them emigrate. It wouldn’t be easy though, or glorious. There would be arrests, torture, and death at the hands of the hostile Islamic elements that sought to ferret out and destroy Israel’s protective arm.
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