"Our late father loved history very much and dealt with it intensively, but he hated documenting his personal history. That's why he never wrote a book or even an article about the "Volunteer Line" case, even though it is one of the most formative and exciting cases in the country's history. This was an affair that actually determined the direction the young state of Israel would take, when the parliamentary dictatorship that had prevailed until then would be elevated to a true democracy. This is the watershed of Israeli society and the judicial system, which only became independent and just following the Supreme Court's ruling in the Amos Ben-Gurion trial.
The article we compiled here is taken from things that our late father told less than two years ago. These are things that shed light, on the tip of the fork, on the gist of the great events of that time, which provide an instructive historical perspective.
Alikim Atesani in his youth.
did not write about the affair,
The Israeli left likes to describe the early days of the country as the golden age, as an idyll - paradise.
Not only was this not true, those who were exposed to the "volunteer line" affair understand that the current reality should be welcomed.
It is difficult to grasp the conditions under which the young state of Israel operated when from 1948 to 1951 680 thousand immigrants immigrated to Israel, when the settlement numbered 650 thousand people.
In two and a half years we more than doubled, as if today we were receiving 2.3 million immigrants per year.
This was not the rich state of Israel of today, but a country that had nothing, not even minimal infrastructure, a country that suffered losses amounting to a percentage of the population in the war of liberation.
I got to know the sad reality up close when I decided to live in Mebara.
I was a law student at the Hebrew University and we lived in Jerusalem.
That's how I moved to Talpiot and lived there for about a year.
I got a box from the dealership, which was a hell of heat in the summer and cold in the winter.
In the winter there were also a lot of floods, so much so that it was necessary to call the army to prevent children from drowning in the floods.
The immigrants did not all come from poverty.
People also came from the eastern countries who lived in a standard of life no less high than that in Israel.
Suddenly they are thrown into such conditions and it was very difficult for them.
The cover of the first booklet published by "Volunteer Line",
On the part of the veterans, after the war and the sacrifices, there was an expectation that the established state, for which so much was sacrificed, would be the inclusion of perfection.
But in practice it was a state of bureaucrats, controlled by the party, an Eastern European-style state - socialist, Marxist.
The entire economy was in the hands of a certain class - "the hegemony of the working class".
Everything was a complete political system that controls everything, down to the last cucumber.
From guarding in the settlements to learning Hebrew in the crossings
Ben-Gurion's motive for bringing such a blessed flood of immigrants is completely clear to me.
It was necessary to ensure that the door of the state would not be locked for the moment.
But the challenge was enormous.
I remember how the volunteer line started.
I was a member of Pai, S. Yizhar came to the branch and gave a speech about what was happening in the crossings. We didn't know what was going on there, until I went to the crossings I had no idea, but then I said to myself - "What are we doing?
Something must be done."
I began to convince people that we must mobilize and help, that "the state is you", there is no one to hide behind, the state officials cannot save.
We started to issue posters in this spirit and act.
For example, the Jerusalem corridor was all bald rocks.
You drove from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and everything around was empty. Then with these new immigrants they forested the mountains of Jerusalem. Then a coup broke out there, among the planters, because they didn't receive money for the place, but coupons. We - the line of volunteers - sent people to work there with them and found a solution Then we sent rank-and-file members to guard the living room and the communities of the Jerusalem Corridor, who were afraid to leave the house because of an Arab terrorist operating there.
We activated about 600 members of the ranks of volunteers who operated from the three major cities.
They dealt with transitions in teaching - Hebrew, arithmetic, general education, sports, handicrafts, singing and dancing, youth guidance.
We even taught how to cook and what things are in the country.
We also provided personal help in difficult cases.
For example, we had a Jew from Persia whom we helped to organize and fight.
After many years, a man came to me who said he was the son of that Jew and showed me a photograph that I was his godfather at the Talpiot crossing.
At the Talpiot crossing I met my wife for the first time - Tzip.
She taught at a workers' school near the crossing and wanted to see what conditions the children who come to class in the morning and sometimes fall asleep live in.
That's why she came to the bins of the transfer and there she met me.
We went to remote settlements to help and teach, and we got the trucks from the government.
And that's how this organization was built, which in its small dimensions was successful.
Our action gave a lot.
"The line" was actually built and managed by two people - Hanan Rapoport and me.
We dedicated ourselves to this matter, voluntarily of course.
Ben Gurion.
"He gave the signal for persecution", photo: Moshe Friedan
The war on corruption
Our work, which flourished, was suddenly interrupted by the government, when we touched David Ben-Gurion's son, as part of the war on corruption.
We arrived at it in a very simple way.
People we tried to convince to act with us said - why volunteer, everything is corrupt.
And we replied: you are not exempt from participating in this huge historical enterprise because someone refused, come and together we will fight against what is wrong.
This is how we established the anti-corruption division.
We turned to the public and asked them to send us complaints - about embezzlement of funds, capital-government relations, anything that is public corruption.
We will take it to the authorities and see what happens to us along the way.
Hanan Rapoport and I were members of Mapai, not in any way enemies of the regime. In the beginning we had quite a few successes - for example, we inaugurated the Bank of Israel and prepared something very festive at the King David Hotel, all the trappings of luxury. We shouted, "Is this how you start?
At times like this?". We received full support from the press, and the Bank of Israel decided to move the celebration to a more modest place.
At the same time we fought against the private use of a government vehicle.
Every car was a kind of treasure then, and the state had no money.
And here the officials went by car to the sea and family trips, including using government gasoline, even though this was forbidden to them.
We demanded that the vehicles have government markings, so that we could report private use - and so it was.
The government accepted our complaints and it worked.
But the entire press was in the hands of the parties, perhaps with the exception of "This World".
Since we had no newspaper, no television, and the radio was a branch of the Prime Minister's Office, we decided to publish brochures.
The first booklet was called: "On corruption, whom there are no judges".
It dealt with internal courts of each party, which also tried those accused of criminal offenses, if they were party members.
Added to this was an even more serious trend - when you went to court, even in a civil trial, and the state was on the other side, the state representative would say that the case was confidential, and the courts had to accept the state's position without knowing the material at all.
That is, there was no salvation from the courts.
At the same time, there was a layer close to the government that got rich from the difficult situation.
They say capital-rule today, but then the rule was absolute and the close associates received the capital from the government itself.
Did you say something against the method?
You are the enemy of the people, like us - the "volunteer line".
Judge Landoi, photo: L.A.M
The publication against Amos Ben-Gurion
Then came the great crisis.
An elderly Jew from Germany named Seidman came to me.
He said that he visited a factory called Belkenhammer in Germany, and one of the managers told him that a delegation from Israel had come to buy very large quantities of porcelain for the Jewish Agency.
The money was from a fund called IRSO, which held the money of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, which was recovered from the Nazis. The delegation also included businessmen close to the government - Sheika Yarkoni (Jaffe's husband) and Aryeh Piltz. People who received licenses from the government and easily got rich from the agreements and districts of the state. Here is the Israeli delegation She asked the Germans to write the receipt for the purchase for an amount 25% higher than the actual purchase amount. They paid the higher amount from the funds of the victims' fund, and they received the excess in cash and pocketed it. This is simple and very vile criminal theft. Let me remind you that this was in the early 1950s , so close to the Holocaust, and they had already done monkey business with the Germans, against the Jewish Agency and with the money of the murdered people. The man who contacted me had previously contacted the Israel Police. Open a case,
But they did nothing.
I contacted Attorney General Haim Cohen, who later became the Vice President of the Supreme Court. I brought him a lot of material, on all kinds of matters, but still nothing happened. It must be remembered that today the Attorney General controls the executive branch, without an Ombudsman it is impossible to move , but then he couldn't do anything.
We saw this, later, when we were exposed as part of the trial to classified documents in which Attorney General Haim Cohen ordered the opening of a criminal investigation against the agency's treasurer, David Behrel, who had committed serious offenses in foreign currency. Following this, a committee chaired by Ben-Gurion sat down and ordered all Behrel's files to be closed. And Chaim Cohen - who became known as a Supreme Court judge as a man of principles - obeyed.
Because the ombudsman did nothing about the IRSO case, I wrote the pamphlet "Danger lurks from within".
It was the second booklet we published, and it had maybe 100 stories of corruption, the biggest story in it is the story of IRSO.
I wrote the things with great care and told about a whole group that is close to the government.
Among them are Shalom Ligum and Shayka Yarkoni, who was the closest friend of Amos Ben-Gurion, who at the time served as deputy commissioner of the police. We wrote that following the complaint that was filed, the police sent an officer to Germany who collected evidence, received copies of invoices and discovered that the price paid was fictitious. He also discovered that a similar move had been made In other factories, in huge sums. We also wrote that when Shaika Yarkoni found out about the investigation, he contacted a high-ranking police officer, and the case was closed.
Elsewhere in the brochure we said that Amos Ben-Gurion made use of the villa of the capitalist Shalom Ligum, who made it available to him for free.
We also told that the younger Ben-Gurion was Yarkoni's partner in the Zipzif mining company called "Korim", and that they go out in a group for recreation.
It is important to note that I had people who leaked information to me and helped me.
One of them, who helped me all the time, was Yigal Alon, whom I admired.
I met with Alon many times, and he also read the pamphlet on which the trial revolved before publication.
The Attorney General, Haim Cohen, also went through it secretly before publication.
He made comments and I corrected.
I also gave him a copy to keep with him, lest the Shin Bet or someone else prevent the publication.
Judge Haim Cohen.
Passed in secret, photo: Brauner Teddy Ltd
the trial
We were very careful to be precise in the details, but despite this, following the publication, Amos Ben-Gurion filed a defamation lawsuit against us in the Tel Aviv District Court.
From here, a legal procedure was conducted as usual in any people's republic, in any dictatorship.
Set up a panel of three judges headed by Judge Zeev Zeltner.
Why three, what is this - a murder trial?
The very composition was corruption ordered from above, to inflate the affair and give us a "public execution".
To show everyone that whoever keeps a hand on the leader's son, that is his fate.
At the first session of the court, the top of the IDF and the police sat in the front row, in uniform, to illustrate the importance to the judges. Ben-Gurion's attorney, Micha Caspi, told the court: "Here the regime and the police are defending themselves."
We had no money for legal defense, so we published an ad in the newspaper, asking lawyers to volunteer and defend us.
13 volunteered, including Shlomo Tosia-Cohen who was previously a district judge, and other well-known lawyers, including Shmuel Tamir.
These were very expensive lawyers, but we informed them that the work was voluntary, and we chose three of them.
Among them is the star - Shmuel Tamir.
Tamir was known to be an enemy of Ben-Gurion, so I demanded a commitment from him, at the first meeting, that he would not touch David Ben-Gurion, because I am his follower.
Tamir made a commitment and kept it, even though Ben-Gurion worked against us with all his might.
Despite everything, to this day I think that without Ben-Gurion the state would not have been established, also because of his evil.
"Danger lurks within."
the cover of the second booklet,
Attorney Tamir claimed: "The police are trying to murder me"
It is difficult to understand today in which country we lived then, how we were persecuted by the government and its bodies to the point of endangering our lives.
During the trial of Amos Ben-Gurion, the brakes of our lawyer's new car, Shmuel Tamir, were deliberately sabotaged, and he was almost killed on the way down from Haifa.
Tamir sent a letter to the President of the Supreme Court, Moshe Zamora, in which he warned that the police intended to kill him.
He also let the government understand that he had deposited sensitive information in a secret place, to be retrieved if something happened to it.
The Shin Bet also acted against us with all their might. Many documents disappeared from our house, and only after decades did someone find them near the bins, next to the Shin Bet headquarters, which was just evacuated from Tel Aviv.
We took a look and found out that these are the documents that were stolen from us, including my wife's personal diary.
As soon as Ben-Gurion stood behind his son's lawsuit, he gave the signal to pursue us.
Among other things, we were persecuted in the media as enemies of the people, even though before the corruption scandals they supported us from wall to wall.
Among other things, the government incited Natan Alterman to write against us in his weekly column.
They caused Gael Musinson to put on a play against us on the "stage" - "Throw him to the dogs".
Shabtai Tevat published horrible publications in "Haaretz" that were later severely criticized by the Supreme Court.
Since "Olam Haza" was the only newspaper that supported us, the government published a special newspaper called "Rimon", which received materials from the Shin Bet, in order to compete with the sensationalism. They slandered us personally to such an extent that your breath stops, unbelievable things. And who was the supplier of the material from the Shin Bet? As for the "grenade" system?
Shimon Peres.
To demonstrate their modus operandi, I will tell about a police officer from Tel Aviv named Zeev Steinberg, with whom we had no connection.
Because the Shin Bet stole documents from our homes, they found the name Steinberg in my lieutenant's diary. It had nothing to do with officer Steinberg, but the police concluded that it was their officer who was leaking to us. They began to chase him, he was fired, plotted against him and filed a report against him Accusation of fabric allegations. Only then did he contact us with information, and among other things asked Shmuel Tamir to defend him. He was acquitted, of course, when the judge wrote extremely serious things about the police. That's how it went, they had no restraints.
The brakes were damaged.
Tamir, photo: Sa'ar Ya'acov, LM
The false testimony of the police commissioner
The judges are the ones who will examine the case in the Chamber and they will decide if the claim of immunity is justified.
He established a new rule, which was later enshrined in law.
Thus, the superior returned the case to the district, and ordered the judges to review the case and check if there is justification for the cover.
The judges were forced to review and release a package of documents, from which it turned out that everything we wrote was true, and of course Shaika Yarkoni is a suspect in the IRSV case. That is why they called Commissioner Sahar again to testify, only he claimed that in the previous testimony he was sick with a high fever and he did not know about what spoke
It is difficult to describe a lie sewn with coarser threads.
Later we demanded that Sahar be prosecuted for perjury, but the government sent him to be ambassador in Vienna.
Only Sahar himself demanded to stand trial to prove his innocence.
He was tried and convicted.
How sad that many years later, in 1968, Yigal Alon took advantage of the fact that he was temporarily Minister of Justice and granted him amnesty, because of economic interests between Sahar's Sakharov family and Alon's kibbutz movement.
He even summoned me to him and apologized to me that he had to do it due to interests.
the latter.
want to meet Alon,
Ten days in detention for not revealing sources
During the trial I was required to reveal the source of my information regarding the details concerning the police in our publication.
I refused, so the judges ordered to arrest me for contempt of court.
I spent ten days in Kishala under arrest and refused to reveal who gave me the material.
Every day they brought me to court and asked if I was revealing, and I am.
After ten days in detention, Ben-Gurion's lawyer withdrew the request to arrest me, because it became clear to them that the very arrest aroused great sympathy for us in the public, along with contempt for the government.
A word and its opposite - the judgments in the district and in the Supreme Court
The verdict of the Holm District People's Tribunal of a dictatorship.
Ben-Gurion won, and we were required to pay approximately 5,100 lira, a huge sum, which hundreds of people paid for us, in monthly installments.
It is impossible to explain the reasoning of the verdict, unless you understand that the judges were not judges and the trial was not a trial.
It was a foregone conclusion.
On this we filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, and the verdict given in April 1960 was written by Judge Landoy, later the President of the Supreme Court.
The supreme court ruled that what we published was true, and actually reversed the judgment of the district court.
They determined that the police commissioner lied on the witness stand. They determined that the starting point of the district judges was that Amos Ben-Gurion was telling the truth, a wrong and invalid assumption. In general, they determined unprecedented things against the judges who sat in my district.
Among other things, the supreme court intervened in the determination regarding the credibility of the witnesses, something that an appellate court usually does not do.
They determined that the police chiefs had evidence in their hands and tried to "use the sharp and dangerous weapon of hiding evidence in court, for the lost purpose of hiding the truth for the selfish purposes of the prosecution."
Yigal Allon.
Temporary Minister of Justice, photo: Moshe Milner, Attorney General
The question: Was it not in vain?
The "volunteer line" disbanded as a result of the trial.
We became the enemies of the people and were persecuted.
For many years I could not get a job as a lawyer from any public or government agency.
Among other things, from the largest companies in the economy that were, in fact, controlled by the government of Mapai and later the Labor Party. Years passed, I went to my doctor, we talked about the "volunteer line" and I said that nothing came of this struggle. He answered me this way: "We doctors are fighting In diseases, and even though we fight - in the end people die.
But if we stop healing, everyone will die, the human race will perish." He was right, of course, life sends waves and you can't stop doing what you need to do.
Alas if we did not act as we did, and among other things did not make the Supreme Court set the limits it set for the government in this trial.
The judicial system in Israel could have followed the path of the Tel Aviv district composition, a path of complete evil. The Supreme Court's ruling gave a kind of electric shock to the judicial system, which in my opinion is one of the best in the world.
In general, overall today is much better since then.
This is the difference between a Bolshevik state and a free and capitalist state.
Although it has a million flaws, still - it is a paradise next to a country where your whole life is in the hands of the officials.
Today you are at least free.
To rescue Prof. Leibovitz
Prof. Yeshayahu Leibovitz was a fairly senior member of the "volunteer ranks", like many others.
He was a razor-sharp brat, but in life with him he was a very nice man and we had a good relationship, even after our ideological paths diverged.
During the work of "Hashora" he wrote harsh things against one of the senior officials of the National Defense Fund, who was a big corrupt person. Among other things, he exposed the smuggling and criminal activity of that senior official. Leibovitz published the things under his name and not under "Volunteer's Row", because I did not agree to publish the The information we received, which was not sufficiently substantiated, the same executive sued Leibovitz, who was in great distress.
Here I came to his aid, we ran around and found a way to exert counter pressure on that person, with even more serious information that came to our hands.
This is how the case is closed, when this drama is going on during the trial of Amos Ben-Gurion.
Fortunately, I managed to get Leibovitz out of this mess.
were we wrong
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