By Jonathan Kirsch
Israel is much admired, even among its enemies, for the valor and acuity of its storied secret service, Mossad. Before there was a Mossad, however, and even before there was a State of Israel, a few brave young men and women were already at work in conditions of the greatest danger to serve a Jewish state that was still in the making.
Among them were three young men who were all named Cohen but who were not related to one another — Gamliel, Yakuba and Havakuk — and a fourth man named Isaac Shoshan, whom author Matti Friedman befriended when Isaac was already a nonagenarian. Their exploits in advance of the War of Independence in 1948 are presented with the urgent episodic pacing of a spy novel in Friedman’s “Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). But the book is a work of history and biography, the untold tale of a unit of the Haganah known variously as “the Black Section,” “the Dawn Section,” “the Arab Section” or, more bluntly, “the Ones Who Become Like Arabs.” …
As it happens, we learn more about what a real-life espionage agent actually does in “Spies of No Country” than in any mere thriller. To be sure, the members of the Arab Section trained in the use of firearms and explosives, and “when they could round up a few bullets, they held target practice.” But they also “slipped in and out of Arab towns, practiced dialect, saw what fooled people and what didn’t.” Their tradecraft sometimes consisted only of “sitting at a cheap café or smoking on the steps of the post office, looking around, asking a question of a passerby as casually as possible.” …
At least one of the secret missions revealed in “Spies of No Country” is so exotic that it sounds like something out of the imagination of Ian Fleming. The armored yacht that had been built for Hitler during World War II ended up at anchor in the harbor of Beirut. To deny use of the vessel by Arab forces, the Arab Section was assigned the task of detonating a bomb under its hull. “Evidence of Nazi fingerprints on the Arab side always drew special attention from the Jewish intelligence services,” writes Friedman. “If later on [the attack] was remembered by the Arab Section as ‘the jewel of our operations beyond the border,’” as Friedman reports, “the appraisal was less about the results than about seeing whether the Jews could pull off something like this at all.”
Friedman refuses to hype the heroes of his own book. “Their mission didn’t culminate in a dramatic explosion that averted disaster, or in the solution of a devious puzzle,” he writes. “Their importance to history lies instead in what they turned out to be — the embryo of one of the world’s most formidable intelligence services.” …
At the same time, Friedman’s book is animated by his conviction that respect must be paid to these overlooked heroes. “People trying to forge a Jewish state in the Middle East should have seen that Jews from the Middle East could be helpful,” he argues. “The newcomers might have been invited to serve as equal partners in the creation of this new society, but they weren’t. Instead they were condescended to, and pushed to the fringes; it was one of the state’s worst errors, one for which we are still paying.” Thus does Friedman rectify a moral and historical wrong when he calls our attention to the four young men whom we come to know so well and admire so much in the pages of “Spies of No Country.”
(Read the whole thing here.)