David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, is presented through decisions that connect the pursuit of Nazi fugitives with the pressures of governing. He announces Adolf Eichmann’s capture to the Knesset, an announcement that reverberates among Nazi exiles in South America; later, amid a bitter domestic dispute over a missing child, a prime-ministerial order redirects Mossad from its pursuit of Josef Mengele. His brief appearances mark the reach, and the competing demands, of state authority.

Prime Minister and Public Reckoning

On 20 May 1960, Eichmann is flown from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv aboard an El Al plane. A few days later, Ben-Gurion announces the capture to the Knesset. The news makes the reach of Israeli action unmistakable to Nazi war criminals living in South America: they fear that they, too, may be abducted, brought to trial, or exposed to public judgment. The announcement thus serves not only to inform the Israeli parliament but also, in the book’s account, to signal a new phase in the hunt for Nazi criminals.

That public signal has consequences beyond Israel. Journalists travel to Buenos Aires to investigate, Nazi groups there begin to fracture, and the kidnapping humiliates Argentina while increasing pressure on West Germany to demonstrate its willingness to prosecute its criminals. Ben-Gurion’s announcement stands at the threshold of this wider response, even as the narrative shows that the pursuit will depend on many actors and institutions beyond the prime minister himself.

The Yossele Crisis

A separate domestic emergency interrupts the hunt for Mengele. Yossele, an eight-year-old boy, had been entrusted by his secular parents to his ultra-Orthodox maternal grandfather. The grandfather refused to return him, insisting that the child be raised according to the Torah; by the family’s next visit, Yossele had disappeared. When the grandfather was detained for refusing to cooperate with police, religious extremists took to the streets. Their protest turned the case into a confrontation between religious and secular citizens, with Ben-Gurion personally denounced as a Nazi.

The dispute threatened to cost Ben-Gurion his majority in the Knesset at the next election. The child’s recovery therefore became more than a police matter: it was also necessary to ease tensions threatening the country. Mossad was ordered to intervene, and its forty best investigators were assigned to the search. The account identifies this as a prime-ministerial order, placing Ben-Gurion at the center of the decision to give the domestic crisis priority over the ongoing pursuit of Mengele.

A Pursuit Interrupted

The reassignment became Operation Tiger. Its investigators used disguises and pursued leads across Europe, the United States, and South America. They eventually found Yossele in Brooklyn, living with an ultra-Orthodox family, and returned him to Israel. The operation lasted eight months and cost Mossad one million dollars. By then, however, Mengele had moved. The search for one fugitive had been suspended to resolve a crisis within Israel, and the delay had allowed the original target to escape the investigators’ immediate reach.

Narrative Significance

Ben-Gurion’s role is defined less by personal scenes than by the consequences of public and governmental authority. His announcement of Eichmann’s capture helps make the hunt for Nazi criminals newly visible, while the order to find Yossele shows how domestic political danger could redirect that same apparatus. The contrast complicates any account of the pursuit as a single-minded campaign: the state’s priorities could shift under pressure, and an operation’s success in one urgent case could carry a cost in another.