| Notes |
Yehuda Koppel, was the commander of a special-operations unit of Haganah, the paramilitary army that created the state of Israel in 1948. Haganah, forming the core of the Israel Defense Forces, carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine later termed the Nakba.
Wexner’s new father-in-law had also played a foundational role in the birth of Israel’s military intelligence. According to the diary of Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, Koppel served in SHAI, Haganah’s intelligence arm and the predecessor to Israel’s central military intelligence directorate, AMAN. During the Nakba, his unit conducted “sabotage” operations involving vehicle hijackings and explosives. In the 1950s, soon after the Nakba, Koppel moved to New York to open an office for Israeli state-owned airline El Al, which became a front for Mossad and Shin Bet agents, according to the CIA and South African intelligence. |