This is the story of how the Israel Defense Forces attempted to mobilize its reservists in a drill in 1959 to test the call-up system on national radio, while needing to be sure that citizens didn’t misunderstand the exercise to mean that a war loomed, but neglecting to make that clear in the broadcast, but then having enemies react by mobilizing because they figured Israel really was planning to attack (so did IDF soldiers and Israel’s population), but then red-faced political leaders and IDF brass admitting that this might’ve been a colossal screw-up and then having to prevent escalation into a real war…
Well, the incident came to be lampooned as “Night of the Ducks,” a play on one of the code words the military had selected for the faux mobilization.
Night of the Ducks? It might as well have been Israel’s hybrid sequel to the Marx Brothers’ 1930s comedies A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup, no doubt produced by Chelm Studios.
Wait, wait — there’s more. The episode even involved a Belgian royal, Queen Elisabeth the Queen Mother.
And here’s the kicker: This scenario occurred on April 1.
Rest assured that you, dear reader, are not being pranked this April Fools’ Day, when people like to play practical jokes. The crisis in Israel truly occurred on April 1, 1959.
That Wednesday night, Israel Radio informed listeners that soldiers in three units — codenamed “Water Ducks,” “Expression of Importance” and “Band of Artists” — should report the next day to reserve duty. It was meant to test the military’s responsiveness. Problem was that the IDF didn’t clue anyone in that the call-up was merely a drill.
Hearing the announcement, Israelis sensibly figured that a security crisis brewed, perhaps even that war was imminent. So did Arab countries monitoring the radio. In response, for example, Syrian reserve units were called up and Jordan raised its alert level.
Israel’s leaders were left in the dark and fell for it, too. Knesset deliberations on the budget were interrupted as parliamentarians headed for radios to learn what was happening. Rumors spread. One minister announced that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who also served as Defense Minister, was incommunicado.
The mistake was corrected on the radio later that night, and calm was restored. The Foreign Ministry alerted other governments to the blunder and reassured them that Israel wasn’t on war footing. Even Belgium’s former queen and the mother of its then-king, Elisabeth Wittelsbach, during a week-long visit in Israel, had to be persuaded that the country remained safe enough to stay in. (In 1965, two months before her death at age 89, Elisabeth was awarded Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations designation for intervening with Nazi officials to release several hundred Belgian Jews during the Shoah.)
In fact, in the chaotic moments following the radio announcement, Ben-Gurion sought to reach IDF Chief of Staff Haim Laskov. He telephoned the concert hall where Laskov was attending an event honoring the Queen Mother. An employee there, figuring himself to be the butt of an April Fools’ prank, hung up when the caller identified himself as the Prime Minister. Ben-Gurion called back, and again was hung up on. And yet again. Finally, Ben-Gurion prevailed upon the man to summon Laskov — pronto.
It wasn’t Israel’s finest hour. Ben-Gurion set up a commission of inquiry. “The failure was not in the call-up but in the broadcasting,” he said. The flub came about, he explained, because, while the call-up drill was planned, its timing hadn’t been decided — and the broadcast occurred without the Defense Minister (himself) or Laskov having approved it.
The fall-out was severe. Two top IDF major-generals, Chief of Reserves Meir Zorea and Chief of Military Intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi, lost their jobs. A no-confidence motion was brought in the Knesset; the government easily defeated it and remained in power.
With the passage of 65 years, the episode can be shrugged off as an amusing anecdote, even a footnote.
Indeed, Yoav Gelber, a retired professor of Israeli military history who at the time was a 16-year-old student at a military boarding school in Haifa, chuckled about the incident during a telephone conversation this week.
But the backstory he related was no laughing matter. It was a story he learned of years later directly from Laskov, who Gelber said was “a good friend” of his.
In short: There was never meant to be a call-up. The duck hunting was all a decoy.
In those days, Gelber explained, Egypt flew surveillance planes into Israel at night, certain that doing so carried little risk: By the time the Israeli Air Force responded, the Egyptians would have photographed the areas they desired and departed. So the IAF’s commander in chief, Ezer Weizmann (later to become Israel’s president), set up an ambush. Announcing the IDF’s mobilization would draw Egypt’s surveillance planes. IAF planes by then would be aloft, ready to shoot down the Egyptian planes.
For some reason, Egypt didn’t bite and its planes stayed away.
That night, Gelber recalled, military commanders at his school ordered students to report to the armory to take weapons. Gelber went to sleep alongside a Czech rifle. When he woke up, things had returned to normal.
Gelber said that at the time, he was cognizant of the date, so he first suspected that the call-up order was a gag. He then decided it was real because, he reasoned, “it was at night, and April Fools’ jokes you generally do in the morning.”
The incident “wasn’t funny at all. It was very serious,” said Gelber.
Not that he resisted temptation decades later.
Gelber related a story from his days as a battalion commander in the reserves. This was in 1982, soon before the Lebanon War broke out. Gelber told his soldiers that because of the security situation, he was cancelling all vacations and leaves.
His men groaned.
“Everyone swallowed it. No one suspected,” Gelber said, giggling like a comedian struggling to restrain himself from revealing the punch line.
“Then I told them to look at the calendar. It was April 1.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
