The Sabra Spies

There had never been a case quite like it, and Israelis were understandably aghast. In a continuing police dragnet, 46 persons were arrested and interrogated; they faced charges of either spying for Syria's Deuxieme Bureau (G2) or knowing about the spy ring and not reporting it. The majority were Arabs, but four of those arrested were Jews. Most shocking of all, the leader of the ring and another prominent member were not only Jews but Sabras--native-born Israelis.

Except for a penchant for far-left politics, the ring's organizer, Ehud Adiv, 26, seemed almost the personification of the national ideal of a young Israeli. Dreamy-eyed and bushy-haired, Adiv had been born at Can Shmuel (Garden of Samuel), a kibbutz near the Mediterranean coast below Haifa. A paratroop sergeant in the Six-Day War, he had rescued wounded soldiers under fire during the battle for East Jerusalem.

Adiv, however, had grown up in a kibbutz composed of dedicated socialists, and for some reason had plunged deeper and deeper into radical politics. First, Adiv became a member of the Israel Socialist Union, generally called Matzpen (Compass) after its publication. The group is revolutionary socialist and condemns Jewish colonialists for seizing all of Palestine from the Arabs. Two years ago, Adiv formed the Revolutionary Communist Alliance-Red Front, which has world revolution as an ill-defined goal, and enrolled a dozen members. Among them were Dan Vered, 28, a fellow Sabra and a high school math teacher in the small town of Kfar Saba east of Tel Aviv; David Kupfer, 26, a sometime petty thief and burglar as well as a dedicated Communist; and Yeheskel Cohen, 30, an Iraqi-born hotel clerk who speaks six languages.

Last week all four faced life sentences for espionage. Under questioning, Adiv and Vered admitted visiting Damascus, flying there by way of Athens and Cairo on Israeli passports and special papers provided by an Arab contact. Adiv, according to police, told his Syrian hosts as much as he knew about Israeli military bases and weapons and about anti-fedayeen protective devices installed along the borders. He was taken to watch Palestinian guerrilla training and be instructed in sabotage himself. "I taught them much more than they could teach me," he told interrogators haughtily.

Adiv returned home with instructions to pass on further information on Israeli military operations. But Israel's intelligence agency--commonly called Shin Bet from its Hebrew initials--has infiltrated radical groups. And when Shin Bet learned that Adiv's organization was planning a move of some sort, it smashed the ring.

Announcement of the arrests created a furor in Israel. Angry neighbors scrawled "Spy" on Vered's front door and threatened to burn down Kupfer's house. Conservative Knesset Member Shmuel Tamir turned the incident against members of the coalition government who have been urging that Israel return some of the occupied territories in exchange for peace with the Arabs. Said Tamir: "Israeli youth hears daily from persons in high office that Jewish settlement [of occupied territories] is oppressive colonialism. Such preaching finally pushed young people into opposing the 'oppressors.' " Left-wing spokesmen retorted that Israeli youth had become disenchanted with a hard-line policy that leaves the Middle East suspended indefinitely between all-out war and real peace.

Israel has long had a radical movement, if a tiny one; probably no more than a thousand people belong at the present time. The biggest group, SIAH (a Hebrew acronym for New Israeli Left), is in favor of both Arab and Jewish states in what once was Palestine and is now Israel and the occupied territories. Matzpen, which has never had more than a hundred members, also believes in restoring Arab rights to at least part of Palestine. The spy arrests dramatized the existence of an element on the left that is opposed to the very existence of Israel. Editor Uri Avneri, who sits in the Knesset as leader of the radical reformist New Force Party, worries that more young Israelis might be drawn to this extreme view. "We are entering a dangerous period," he says, "partly because we have a Prime Minister who does not even recognize that there is a problem. She has lost all contact with young people."

Avneri's cut was unfair as well as unkind. The problem is larger than one aging (74) grandmother's inability to identify with youth. Without even realizing the fact, Israel in the course of 25 years has evolved from a pioneer state into an established society, and like establishments everywhere, it is subject to increasingly bold attacks by the disconnected and the disenchanted.

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