the Arab world ... to place in certain and serious danger a million Jews." Mahmud Bey Fawzi (Egypt) said: "Imposed partition was sure to result in bloodshed in Palestine and in the rest of the Arab world". After the foundation of Israel in 1948 After the foundation of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent 1948 Arab–Israeli War, in which Egypt participated, difficulties multiplied for Egyptian Jews, who then numbered 75,000. That year, bombings of Jewish areas killed 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200, while riots claimed many more lives. During the Arab-Israeli war, the Cicurel department store near Cairo's Opera Square was firebombed. The government helped with funds to rebuild it, but it was again burnt down in 1952, and eventually passed into Egyptian control. Amidst the violence, many Egyptian Jews emigrated abroad. By 1950, nearly 40% of Egypt's Jewish population had emigrated. About 14,000 of them went to Israel, and the rest to other countries. The 1954 Lavon Affair was an Israeli sabotage operation designed to discredit and overthrow the then Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and to end secret negotiations with Egypt being pursued by then Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharett, who did not know of the operation. Sharett did not learn the truth until after he had denounced the charges by the Egyptian government in a speech in the Knesset as a blood libel, which caused him to feel deep humiliation that he had lied to the world, and was one factor in Sharett's resignation as prime minister. The operation blew up Western targets (without causing any deaths), led to deeper distrust of Jews—key agents in the operation had been recruited from the Egyptian Jewish community—and led to sharply increased emigration of Jews from Egypt. In his summing up statement Fu’ad al-Digwi, the prosecutor at the trial of captured operatives, repeated the official government stance: "The Jews of Egypt are living among us and are sons of Egypt. Egypt makes no difference between its sons whether Muslims, Christians, or Jews. These defendants happen to be Jews who reside in Egypt, but we are trying them because they committed crimes against Egypt, although they are Egypt's sons." Two members of the ring, Dr. Moussa Marzouk and Shmuel Azzar, were sentenced to death. In 1953, a cousin of Marzouk, Kamal Massuda, was killed, and the authorities did not make arrests. Other members of the sabotage rings had families who