Many new and independent nations have sprung up since the end of World War II, but of all these only the state of Israel has developed intelligence agencies that can equal those of the world's major powers -and that indeed are envied by them.
For the size of this young nation, both in territory and population, it has, pro rata, intelligence and security agencies as efficient as you will find any where in the world. The reason for this is not hard to figure out. Organized espionage was an honored and recognized profession among the ancient Israelites, as the Old Testament bears witness. The Book of Numbers (13: 17-18) states: "And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan . . . and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many." Only the Chinese have an older tradition of espionage.
But though this tradition existed, it was the dreadful experience of centuries of persecution which imbued in the Jewish people a talent for intelligence gathering. In this respect the Jews can be compared with the early Jesuits, who also played a part in the world of intelligence wherever they went to settle. Inevitably, perhaps, the Jews tended to serve Protestant rather than Catholic countries, for it took them centuries to forgive, if not forget, the tyrannical oppression of the Catholic Inquisition in Spain led by Torquemada, who declared in 1342 that the Black Death came to his country as a punishment to Spaniards for giving shelter to Jews. It was the Puritan supporters of Cromwell who encouraged the migration of Jews to England, and Cromwell's own chief of the Secret Service, John Thurloe, who first appreciated their value as Jews for Britain. In the nineteenth century in Germany, and to a lesser extent in czarist Russia, Jews were chiefly employed in the field of intelligence.
Persecution had fostered the tradition of espionage earlier still in Palestine itself. The Zealots, who fought so bravely in the last days of the Jewish state up to A.D. 70, were the forerunners of Haganah, an undergound intelligence and self-defense organization that operated among Palestinian Jews from 1930 on and out of which in due course the Israeli Secret Service was born. From then until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews were exploited, repressed, and persecuted by their conquerors. But this gave them the discipline, enterprise, and initiative, as well as the courage that have been such marked qualities in the modern Israeli intelligence agencies.
Inception
In many ways, of course, those agencies owe much to Poale Zion, a Polish Jewish defensive network that gathered information and provided protection for the Jewish settlers in Palestine in the 1880s, and the defense society known as Hashomer (The Watchman), which was formed in Palestine in 1909. This latter group formed the nucleus of the whole intelligence organization.
Once Israel achieved independence and statehood, its intelligence and security services were staffed largely by Jews from the various underground movements in Palestine. That experience was invaluable in many ways, not least in teaching them the need for "instant intelligence," because the new state was surrounded on all sides by potential enemies. First to be created was Shin Beth (the Security and Counterintelligence Service). David Ben-Gurion, the
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