The Middle Eastern Jews Who Were Some of Israel’s Earliest Undercover Spies

On a summer night in 1949, two men approached the Jordanian soldiers at a military post in the Old City section of Jerusalem, a city then divided between Jewish and Arab sectors. Their names, they said, were Abdul and Yussef: Arab refugees from Palestine who wanted to catch a glimpse of their former homeland. The soldiers brought them to a fortified embankment from where they could look down onto the battered, rubble-strewn Jewish sector.

With its barbed wire and shell damage from the 1948-49 war still on mournful display, the sight was hardly impressive. Yet, to these two men, it was unutterably beautiful. For, although they were both Syrian-born and fluent in Arabic, “Abdul” and “Yussef” were the cover identities for Gamliel and Isaac; the two men were Jews.

The story they had told the soldiers was true, in a sense: during the chaos of the recent war, they’d made their way together from Haifa to Beirut, and now they were indeed longing to see the home they had left behind. Yet theirs had not been an involuntary exile; on the contrary, it had been intentional.