[A-List] The Intimate History of Collaboration: Arab Citizens and the State of Israel

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

Randolph Bourne said that war is the health of the state.  Not true.
The intelligence to make a vast network of collaborators out of
subjects, which obviates war, is the true health of the state. --
Yoshie

<http://www.merip.org/mero/interventions/di-capua_interv.html>
Interventions: A Middle East Report Online Feature

The Intimate History of Collaboration: Arab Citizens and the State of Israel

Yoav Di-Capua

May 2007

(Yoav Di-Capua is assistant professor of Middle East history at the
University of Texas-Austin.)

Sometime in the late 1990s, employees in the Israeli State Archive
unintentionally declassified an array of police documents. Many of the
files consisted of the unremarkable personal data of prostitutes,
petty thieves and black marketeers, but others dealt with a far more
sensitive matter: the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel during the
1950s and 1960s. Though these "Arab files" also contained records of
mundane criminal cases, most of the documents concerned the
politically explosive subject of Palestinian Arab collaboration with
the Jewish state. By means of the mistaken declassification, the
actions, methods and goals of multiple Israeli security agencies among
the Palestinian Arabs of Israel -- in short, the entire history of two
decades of espionage directed at a group of Israeli citizens -- lay
exposed. At the heart of these documents was detailed information
about individuals and families and the well-guarded secrets of what
they "gave" and what they "got" in return. Many retired collaborators
are still alive.

Hillel Cohen, than a graduate student at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, immediately recognized the potential of this material. It
was not long after he and other scholars first saw these files that
the archivists' error was discovered and the material was reclassified
and sealed, this time probably for good. Yet, in many respects, the
state's reaction came too late, for the files had opened a window for
an unprecedented reevaluation of Arab life in 1948-1967, the early
years of the state of Israel, lamented by many Israeli Jews as a
long-lost golden age of normalcy. It is a little-known fact in the
West, and a vague memory among Israeli Jews, that for almost all of
those years the Arab minority was under military rule.

Cohen is not a newcomer to the complex politics of collaboration. In
his previous book on mandatory Palestine, The Army of Shadows
(originally published in Hebrew, but now forthcoming in English from
the University of California Press), he examined how the
transformation of Zionist attitudes toward Palestine's Arabs from
utopian partnership to political militarism prioritized espionage cum
collaboration as a standard mode of inter-communal interaction. Now,
in the wake of his encounter with the volatile and accidentally
unsealed source material in the state archive, Cohen has published a
well-written and at times ironic follow-up account: Good Arabs:
Israeli Intelligence and the Arabs.

News of the publication traveled quickly in the Arab towns and
villages of Israel. Indeed, with extensive and dramatic coverage by
Arab media and bloggers, the book was something of a international
sensation. Even in distant Sweden, an Arabic-language outlet that
serves the Palestinian diaspora clamored: "Cohen publishes names of
dozens of collaborators."[1] As Israeli Arab writer Sayyid Qashu'
joked, Arab readers read the book from left to right, that is, they
rushed to the index first.[2] There they searched for their family
name, the name of their village and the names of relatives and
acquaintances. Many found references to relatives and began digging
into hitherto silenced family history.[3]

And so, almost overnight, the book became a bestseller. It is probably
the first time in the history of the Hebrew book that copies of one
have been loaded in pickup trucks headed for remote Arab villages to
bring the inhabitants news of their own history. Everybody knew about
collaboration, but after decades of silence, the written proof of it
was simply too tantalizing to resist. With reading came the need to
talk. In Nazareth, where collaboration was also associated with
volatile inter-religious sensitivities, community elders came together
to reflect on a painful, some would say inglorious, yet without
question revealing, chapter of the past. Incarcerated in an Israeli
prison cell, Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti flipped through the pages.
He was quick to communicate the lesson he drew to his fellow
Palestinians: Divided Arabs always pay dearly. "It is about time," he
argued, "for a united Palestinian front."[4] Barghouti was of course
referring to the negotiations between Hamas and Fatah, since
concluded, to form a consensual coalition government. Good Arabs,
then, held considerably more than antiquarian interest for Palestinian
Arabs inside and outside Israel, and for Israeli Jews.

Rethinking the First Republic

The first Israeli republic, that is the formative period of statehood
from 1948-1967, is up for reconsideration among Jewish Israelis. In
the collective memory, these were years of moral harmony in which a
small, just and cohesive society, as yet innocent of the burdens of
four decades of occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and
the Golan Heights, lived congenially with its liberal conscience. But
today, with the history of land, refugees, immigration, diplomacy and
war more or less settled, and with new archival sources opening up to
scholars, the focus of history writing has shifted to civic life.
Specifically, historians increasingly take interest in Israel's
treatment of its Palestinian Arab minority in those early years. Until
recently, this topic was marginal, and studies of it were devoid of
the "action" that usually characterizes narratives of the so-called
Arab-Israeli conflict. No one really wanted to study the history of
Israel's internal conflict, as no conflict was really visible. And so,
it is fair to say, the field was a historiographical no man's land,
inhabited by sleepy mid-career historians. That is, until now.

In 2006, in a truly remarkable dissertation, Shira Robinson brought
action to the field. Her history of the system of military rule under
which Israel placed its Arab citizens from 1948-1966 illustrated the
natural limitations of liberalism without democracy. Robinson posed a
serious question: Was the golden age, the ultimate psychic refuge of
"normal" liberal Israelis distressed by the post-1967 occupation, a
fiction?[5] Good Arabs takes a significant step forward in answering
this question for a Hebrew-reading audience. Cohen covers much of the
same territory covered by Robinson, albeit from a different and more
intimate perspective, and, like Robinson, he too brings action to this
seemingly slumberous arena.

Once the 1948 war officially ended, the Israeli bureaucracy was faced
with the overwhelming task of ruling effectively over dozens of
severely disrupted Arab villages and towns, where thousands of
displaced Palestinians had taken refuge. Since the state did not trust
its Arab citizens, it placed this entire population under a tight
military regime supervised by the Central Committee for Arab Affairs.
Established in 1954, the committee was comprised of representatives of
the police and the domestic intelligence agency Shabak, as well as the
prime minister's consultant for Arab affairs and the
commander-in-chief of military rule. In concert, these men presided
over three regional sub-committees (south, center and north), which
dealt with the daily business of governance.

As the vast literature on mandatory Palestine shows, the indigenous
Arab population, a conglomerate of peasants, townsfolk and nomads,
Druze, Christians and Muslims, Bedouins and Circassians, was
maladapted for unified political action. This was true before 1948,
and even more so afterwards. Taking note of the cleavages, the Israeli
authorities ventured to use them as instruments of rule. In order to
do so effectively, however, they needed a constant finger on the pulse
of Arab society, an up-close familiarity with the Arab population. In
each village, Israel needed to know who the dominant families and
individuals were, what alliances and rivalries they had and what their
material, social and political bases of support were. The only way to
achieve the gargantuan task of mapping communal vulnerability was to
establish vast networks of collaborators who duly reported on every
new development. At this time, the tactic of selecting individuals to
collaborate, as practiced during the British Mandate, was perfected as
a strategy of civil control. Cohen tells the story of this system from
its inception until December 1966, when, after almost two decades of
independence, Israel was confident enough to bring military rule to an
end.

The first republic was also a formative period for the Arabs, however,
for it was then that the conflicted self of the "Israeli Arab," the
"pessoptimist," as per the title of Emile Habibi's well-known novel,
came into being. A member of the Arab minority faced continuous
dilemmas, each of which was central to his or her very
self-definition: Do I owe allegiance to an enemy state of which I am a
citizen? Should I sell my land to Jews or wait to get compensation if
the state expropriates it? Should I turn in infiltrators to the
authorities? Who should I vote for? Will I teach my children the
recent history of the Palestinian people? Good Arabs makes the point
that the politics of collaboration significantly shaped the kind of
choices a normative Arab citizen would make. Put differently,
collaboration, and with it the fear, shame and guilt that were its
fellows, became part of who they were.

Who Is a Collaborator?

Israel's network of collaborators was built over a relatively short
time span. In almost every village, neighborhood, clan, tribe and
family, someone, on some level, helped the Israeli state consolidate
its rule over the Palestinian Arab population. But why did so many
people collaborate and what kind of collaboration was it?

Reasons for collaboration varied widely, but they boiled down to one
basic motive: the need to survive. Post-1948 Palestinian society was
in ruins, as people had lost their agricultural land and urban
property, and thus their social and economic networks of support. They
had also -- and this is an important aspect of the willingness to
collaborate -- lost their psychological grounding. Scores of desperate
and disoriented individuals, some of whom were physically weak and
malnourished, were ready for a deal. With this in mind, various
Israeli security agencies held out almost irresistible temptations:
assistance in finding day jobs, career placement as teachers and
bureaucrats, and a raft of licenses and permits for everything from
commerce, construction and taxi driving to the coveted right of
movement and travel between the Arab villages inside Israel. Other
benefits were the granting of Israeli identification cards to
"recommended" individuals, the prestigious right to bear arms,
positions of community leadership and the erasure from state records
of criminal charges -- both just and trumped-up. Last but not least
were the time-honored cash payment and the human element of fear.
These incentives attracted low-level informants who were commonly
known to Arabs as adhnab.

For high-profile collaborators ('umala'), people willing to put their
lives or reputations on the line, the list of benefits was even more
enticing. First there was the unofficial permission to smuggle goods
into Israel from neighboring countries. The Israel of the 1950s was
poor and often hungry, and the smuggling of meat, a rationed
commodity, was a rewarding business. Collaborators could easily move
entire herds of livestock across the border from Jordan or Lebanon.
Other frequently smuggled items were fabrics, drugs and weapons. Thus,
for instance, did an old acquaintance of Gen. Moshe Dayan from the
northern village of Rihaniyya acquire the franchise upon authorized
smuggling from Lebanon.

Another possible reward for powerful collaborators was the right to
cultivate, or lease to others, the deserted land of refugees in exile.
They could even choose a particular plot of land from the official
database of abandoned properties. Such rewards usually brought large
sums of money to the collaborator and thus translated into an
important source of local power, which, in turn, inflated the
collaborator's ability to influence public affairs. The more receptive
the authorities were to the needs of high-profile collaborators, the
firmer the collaborators' grip on and prestige within their
communities became -- and the more valuable the information they could
offer to Israel. With time, such collaborators also attained a measure
of leverage over the authorities, which they could use for the common
good. Truly, high-profile collaboration was a liaison dangereuse.

So elaborate were the emoluments of aiding military rule that, in the
hundreds of documents scrutinized by Cohen, Israeli authorities never
once complained of difficulty in drafting petty informants or bigger
collaborators. Even without state incentives, in light of the
atmosphere of collective insecurity in which nothing was kept private,
many dissenting Arabs simply volunteered for the job.

Fluid Borders

Since Israel's borders were practically wide open, infiltration of
Palestinian refugees, Arab spies and would-be terrorists became an
acute problem for the state. As Benny Morris has convincingly shown,
regardless of their real motivations, all infiltrators were treated as
potential terrorists deserving death.[6] Israeli intelligence used
collaborators extensively to detect and entrap border trespassers. The
collaborators' tasks ranged from leading infiltrators into Israeli
military ambushes to spying on smuggling networks and intercepting
Arab spies who used the same infiltration routes. Some collaborators
participated in Israeli espionage operations and even carried out
assassinations of elusive individuals. Still others led Israeli
commando units to their destinations during the retaliation campaign
of the 1950s. Besides the Israelis, the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian
security services also used Palestinians as secret agents. In one
surreal episode, Cohen wittily shows how one of these agents, Mahmoud
'Isa al-Battat, worked for all four security services at the same
time. On another occasion, a certain Faris Hamdan became the leader of
a smuggling franchise from neighboring Jordan. He was a wealthy
landowner and a political personality of sorts who, during the
mandatory period, supported the fervent nationalist Hajj Amin
al-Husayni, but after 1948 worked with Israel. Hamdan brought other
public figures on board the collaboration train and in 1951, joined
the Israeli Knesset as a member of the ruling Mapai Party.
Notwithstanding this distinguished official position, he continued to
traffic in contraband. Indeed, both borders and loyalties were fluid.

Hidden within the ordinary business of smuggling, however, lay the
great drama of border infiltration by Palestinians made refugees in
the 1948 war. Masterfully captured by Elias Khoury's novel Bab
al-Shams (translated into English as Gate of the Sun),[7] such
clandestine reverse flight posed a poignant moral dilemma for the Arab
citizens of Israel. Required by law, and squeezed by compatriots who
were informants, to report infiltrating family members and friends to
the authorities, they had to choose between communal loyalty and state
retaliation. Cohen shows how, despite such pressures, the local Arab
population practiced a "private right of return" by which it helped
refugee infiltrators to stay. In addition, on many occasions, a reward
for collaboration was the right to naturalize a returning refugee or a
family member. So, during the early 1950s, about 5 percent of 1948
Palestinian refugees managed to get back to their places of origin and
acquire legal status in Israel. As a result, the state registered an
increase of about 15 percent in the overall size of the Arab
population.

Some collaborators also helped Israel to encourage overseas emigration
of Arabs, leading to the departure of 3,000 Arab citizens by 1965. But
the popular practice of assisting infiltrators challenges two
established historiographical truths. First, with regard to Arab
historiography, it shows that the so-called lost generation of
Palestinians inside Israel was far from passive and submissive.
Second, it demonstrates the inaccuracy of a prevalent argument among
Israeli historians, summarized by Cohen as positing that "the Israeli
government never put its Arab citizens to severe test of loyalty." The
demand to surrender a family member is the highest possible test of
loyalty.

While infiltrators were protected, however, some Arabs forcefully
collaborated with Israel in fighting infiltration. The prime
motivation was fear that returning refugees would request their
property, which on many occasions was already in the hands of fellow
Arabs. Thus, the fear of losing one's (new) field or home to its
previous lawful owners provided enough of an incentive for informing.
For some large-scale collaborators, the motivation was purely
financial, for alongside returning refugees came bands of smugglers
and thieves who operated inside the collaborators' "jurisdiction."
This is why a figure like Sheikh Salih Khunayfis, a collaborating
Druze from Shafa 'Amr, demanded that Israel take decisive action
against infiltrators. Reprimanding his Israeli operators, Khunayfis
bluntly contended: "By any Middle Eastern or even international
standard…your military occupation does not resemble a proper military
occupation!"

Selling Land

While in the battle against infiltration the Israelis were not so
successful, their project of acquiring more Arab land with the help of
collaborators was thriving. As Cohen's Army of Shadows showed, since
the twilight of Ottoman rule, and especially amidst the
hyper-nationalism of the 1930s, selling land to Jews was considered
high treason. Despite this overt sanction, Kenneth Stein and others
have shown that all sorts of people were selling land: Christians,
Muslims, public leaders, commoners and even figures in the Palestinian
nationalist movement.[8] Though the result of selling land to Jews
became painfully clear during the 1947 debate over partition, land
continued to change hands even after 1948, through the 1950s and
1960s. The only new factor was that after 1948, with the power of
state law at hand, Israeli authorities could also expropriate land in
return for a fee. Thus, it was often more appealing to sell in
advance, possibly at a profit, than simply to lose land for modest
state compensation.

The samasira, a pejorative term for corrupt and unpatriotic middlemen,
were a particular brand of collaborators who specialized in real
estate. Besides persuading individuals to sell, they also purchased
land directly from Palestinian refugees in neighboring countries and
sold the plots to Jews at a profit. But as the 1950s drew to a close
and the Arab public appeared to be more organized in its resistance to
the transfer of land, Israel used collaborators to sabotage the
popular struggle against land expropriation. One famous episode was
the failed Arab struggle over the taking of land in the Shaghur (Beit
Netofa) valley, where a new Jewish city, Karmiel, was about to be
built.

Using the Network Politically

Unlike other straightforward colonial situations, the Arab minority in
Israel functioned within a nascent liberal democracy and, in theory,
could wield its electoral clout to alter the Israeli political
landscape. Addressing the paradoxical logic of liberalism without
democracy, Good Arabs shows how the various security services
manipulated the Arab political process in order to ensure the
electoral dominance of the Mapai party of the first Israeli prime
minister, David Ben-Gurion. In another instance, by writing newspaper
articles on behalf of collaborators, Israeli agents sought to
prejudice the fateful debate among the Druze over conscription into
the Israeli army.

With such state concerns in mind, the fate of the joint Jewish-Arab
Israeli Communist Party (Maki) is of particular interest. In one of
the most fascinating chapters in his book, Cohen exposes the full
story of the war against Maki and the role of collaborators in the
trenches of down-and-dirty provincial politics. During the 1950s, Maki
emerged as the only opposition force with a clear picture of Arab
realities on the ground and a plan for what could be done to
ameliorate the situation. At the time, Maki was the only political
force that spoke on behalf of (a tamed) local Arab patriotism. Its
scope of activity was impressive -- writing, lecturing, legal action,
parliamentary interpellation and actual field operations. It promoted
practical projects such as a united front against the selling of land
and fought for the right of internal refugees to return to their
villages. Maki was, in fact, one of the most impressive movements
merging theory and praxis anywhere in the annals of left-wing Israeli
activism.

The story of this ultimate outcast of Israeli politics is captured in
Ben-Gurion's stern dictum "beli Herut ve Maki"(without Herut and
Maki). Herut, considered by Ben-Gurion to be incorrigibly right-wing,
eventually became a core component of the Likud Party, under whose
banner Herut's leader Menachem Begin ascended to the office of prime
minister. Maki, by contrast, was debilitated, thanks partly to the
state's campaign against it during the 1950s. This story, along with
the adventures of the Maki leadership, is relatively well-known. Yet
Cohen's book (as well as Robinson's dissertation) provides fresh
evidence for the war against Maki as it was seen from the perspective
of ordinary Arab citizens in the streets and alleys of ordinary towns
and villages. With the help of collaborators, the various security
agencies obtained a detailed picture of Maki's network. In fact,
records show the unbelievable degree to which the party became
operationally transparent. With resort to emergency laws put in place
by the British mandate, the authorities intercepted many of Maki's
operations in advance. Threats, sabotage and violent attacks on
property and personnel were common as well.

In the higher echelons of collaborative politics, the state sponsored
public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as anti-communist
leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari,
founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades. Because
al-Najjada participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias,
but also because Hawari negotiated with Haganah to avoid fighting in
Jaffa, by the end of the war he became a refugee in Lebanon. Admiring
his charisma, Israeli intelligence decided to allow his return to
Israel in 1950 as an alternative anti-communist leader. The idea was
that Hawari would establish a new Arab popular party. Based on reports
of collaborators from within Maki, Cohen covers the fascinating
struggle between Hawari and the communist organization, which ended
with the former's defeat. When politics failed, Hawari became a judge
in the municipal circuit court in Nazareth.

Notwithstanding the collaborators' actions, Maki famously persevered:
Its credibility remained solid, and it continued to serve as a loyal
champion of Arab concerns. Today, when this largely forgotten party is
a shadow of its former self and Islamist politics reign supreme, even
Marwan Barghouti was amazed by Maki's persistence, dedication and
achievements, however incomplete.[9]

The Life of the Mind

What would be taught in Arab classrooms in Israel? Who would teach it
and how? Then, as now, these questions weighed heavily on the minds of
officials in the Ministry of Education. According to the documents
that Cohen reviewed, the officials singled out the domains of history,
memory and politics for close inspection. When dealing with these
tightly connected and "dangerous" topics, Arab educators were advised
by the military bureaucracy to stick to an exclusively Zionist
interpretation. In order to ensure that Arab education would be in the
hands of "responsible teachers," the ministry employed a special
Shabak representative whose job was to monitor, appoint and dismiss
Arab teachers and school principals. Indeed, many Arab teachers were
-- and still are -- informers, and others were appointed to their
positions because of their benign political profiles or their support
of state Zionism. One should add that, despite years of protests by
liberal education ministers like Yossi Sarid of Meretz, the Shabak
presence in the Ministry of Education was terminated only in January
2005.

The heavy-handed involvement of security services in schools had
severe pedagogical implications, for the teacher was not a figure of
authority and leadership but a frightened, self-censoring character.
Direct pressure was constantly applied against teachers and
principals, demanding the suppression of any discussion or activity on
behalf of Arab civil and cultural rights. Yet, notwithstanding this
atmosphere and the unhealthy culture of doublespeak to which it gave
birth, even after a decade of such close control, pupils continued to
resist military rule. As for the creation of an intellectual
leadership, Arab access to higher education at the university level
was blocked in 1954. Even though this policy was later reversed,
prospective Arab students were sometimes asked to collaborate in
exchange for their schooling.

Beyond the classroom, informants regularly reported on "nationalist"
or anti-Zionist inclinations among their compatriots. Whether it was a
Palestinian nationalist song sung at weddings (Cohen pays great
attention to expressions of such sentiment at weddings), a public
hearing of a speech by Gamal Abdel Nasser, or a random comment at a
coffeeshop, intimate family gathering or funeral procession, the
authorities were immediately informed. With time, as the state meted
out concrete punishments to informed-upon Arabs, a culture of mutual
suspicion and self-censorship became more prevalent.

Close monitoring was also employed during official state celebrations
such as Independence Day. In each school and in many villages and
towns, the local leadership was expected to actively participate in
state ceremonies. Failure to show up was costly, as in the case of
Sheikh Sam'an of Kafr Yasif, who lost his desk job at the Ministry of
Health. Regardless of such policies, a minority, usually supported by
Maki, refused to succumb. In 1964, for instance, the annual
commemoration of the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre and the inauguration of
the new Jewish town of Karmiel took place on the same day. While Arab
MKs from Mapai attended the celebration of a Jewish town just built on
expropriated Arab land, Arab members of the opposition attended the
Kafr Qasim service.

Historiography, Reception and Beyond

The reception of Good Arabs in Israel is somewhat paradoxical.
Obviously, Cohen's findings are not so flattering to Israeli Jews, yet
his book is a bestseller and has garnered plenty of press attention.
With such a sizable audience, one would expect to see the shock waves
that Morris' work on Palestinian refugees generated in the late 1980s
or that Yehoshua Porath caused with his history of Palestinian Arab
nationalism in 1974. Of course, most reviewers were amazed by the
contents of the swiftly reclassified documents. To former high-ranking
intelligence official Reuven Merhav, Good Arabs was reminiscent of the
professional practices of the East German Stasi. He had no idea that
this was the quality of pre-1967 civic life.[10] To far-left public
intellectual Yitzhak Laor, the book was a refutation of the pre-1967
left-Zionist myth of Israeli normalcy.[11] Still, Good Arabs did not
trigger a soul-searching trend. One explanation for this strictly
rational reception is the state of mental tiredness and public apathy
in the wake of the second intifada, the failed summer war in Lebanon,
the ongoing investigations of the political elite's orgy of corruption
and, more generally, the ongoing crisis of public leadership. Nothing,
it seems, can shock Israeli civic consciousness these days.

Reception aside, both Army of Shadows and, even more, Good Arabs
contribute to two historiographical fields that are usually kept
mutually exclusive. Cohen takes the historiographic tradition of the
Israeli "new historians" one step forward. At home in Palestinian
society and equipped with the intimate view that collaborators
provided to their masters, Cohen reconstructs the lives and actions of
ordinary people in ordinary towns. Here his book faces a
methodological hurdle, as he is making deep assumptions about
Palestinian Arab villagers' consciousness and similarly complicated
topics based only upon official source material in Hebrew. Cohen also
heard the oral accounts of dozens of collaborators, and read the
Hebrew documents with these accounts in mind, yet chose not to use the
oral histories as primary sources in the book. As Cohen explains, "I
decided to use mainly intelligence documents because Jews and Arabs
alike attach more value to such sources. Jews are not interested in
the way Palestinians tell their narratives. They do, however,
religiously believe in the security establishment."[12] The
methodological choice is perilous as a matter of history writing, but
it is perhaps vindicated by the fact that neither Jewish nor Arab
readers have contested the credibility of his findings. For one rare
historiographical moment, the discussion is about the meaning of the
findings. And so, in contrast to historians like Benny Morris whose
Arab subject is a speechless "image," Cohen's Arab is a humanized
historical actor.

It goes without saying, therefore, that Palestinian historiography is
the second sphere to which Cohen contributes generously and
profoundly. The Palestinian library is rich in literature about the
losses of 1948 (al-nakba), the defeat of 1967 (al-naksa) and the
continuing plight of the refugees, but has quite systematically
avoided the painful topic of collaboration. One reason for this
avoidance is that collaboration is far from over. A second reason is
that, quite simply, too many individuals and institutions are
implicated. As the reception of his book in the Arab media shows,
Cohen's uncontested credibility among Arabs is also due to the fact
that, unlike many Arabic accounts, he takes Israelis seriously and
respectfully without resorting to populist vilification and cheap
political commentary. And so, like Robinson, Cohen makes the point
that Arab and Israeli Jewish experiences must be seen as mutually
constitutive rather than separable nationalist narratives.

If there is criticism to be made of Good Arabs, it is that its
exclusive focus on intelligence files caused it to neglect the
embryonic civil institutions within Israel that pass judgment on state
policies. One can cite Uri Avnery's outspoken political magazine
Ha-'Olam Ha-Zeh as one solid voice of opposition. After all, civic
mechanisms have done their share to bring about an end to military
rule (though not yet to collaboration).

Lastly, with the Army of Shadows and Good Arabs in mind, a third book
about the unending saga of collaboration from 1967 to the present, is
waiting to be written. The link is rather obvious. Methods that were
experimented with during the mandate period, and were perfected inside
Israel before 1967, culminated in the unprecedented system of
collaboration in the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. It is
more than likely, therefore, that in the trajectory of recent Jewish
history, never was so much owed by so few (Jews) to so many
(collaborators).

[1] As'ad Talhami, "Good Arabs by the Historian Cohen Contains Names
of Dozens of Collaborators," Arab News Agency, December 11, 2006.
http://www.ana-news.com/threads_show.php?table_n=articles&id=10206&mode=full.

[2] Hebrew, like Arabic, is written right to left, meaning that
indexes are printed at what for readers of Western languages would be
the front of the book, held in the left hand.

[3] Suhayl Kiwan, "'Athartu 'ala jaddi fi watha'iq al-mukhabarat" (I
Found My Grandfather in the Intelligence Records), Kull al-'Arab,
February 9, 2007.

[4] Al-Quds, January 16, 2007.

[5] Shira Robinson, "Occupied Citizens in a Liberal State:
Palestinians Under Military Rule and the Colonial Formation of Israeli
Society, 1948-1966" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of History,
Stanford University, 2006).

[6] Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration,
Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).

[7] Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006).

[8] Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

[9] Al-Quds, January 16, 2007.

[10] Reuven Merhav, "Ha-ah ha-gadol she-'einav 'atsumot" (The Big
Brother Whose Eyes are Closed), Yediot Aharonot, February 2, 2007.

[11] Yitzhak Laor, "'Ad she-ha-kol yihye shelanu" (Until Everything Is
Ours), Haaretz, February 9, 2007.

[12] Interview with Hillel Cohen, Jerusalem, January 3, 2007.

--
Yoshie