Lavon was born Pinhas Lubianiker in the small city of Kopychyntsi in the Galicia region of Austria-Hungary, now part of Ukraine.

However, he resigned from the cabinet after he was accused of authorizing an Israeli false flag operation in Egypt, which came to be known as the Lavon Affair.

[1] During his tenure, Lavon strained relations with the Chief of Staff of the IDF Moshe Dayan by holding important policy meetings without Dayan being present, directly contacting IDF officers without following the established chain of command and attempting to scuttle Israeli purchases of arms from France.

The culmination came when Operation Susannah (as the Lavon affair was officially called) was launched when Dayan was out of the country.

In his diaries, Israel's second prime minister, Moshe Sharett revealed that Lavon had proposed committing "atrocities" in the Gaza Strip, and spreading poisonous bacteria in the Israel-Syria Demilitarised Zone.