{"id":1148,"date":"2019-04-01T10:44:30","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T07:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2019-04-01T10:44:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T07:44:30","slug":"forgotten-spies-finally-get-their-due-la-jewish-journal-review-march-13-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2019\/04\/01\/forgotten-spies-finally-get-their-due-la-jewish-journal-review-march-13-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten \u2018Spies\u2019 Finally Get Their Due (LA Jewish Journal review, March 13, 2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jonathan Kirsch<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Among them were three young men who were all named Cohen but who were not related to one another \u2014 Gamliel, Yakuba and Havakuk \u2014 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\u2019s \u201cSpies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel\u201d (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 \u201cthe Black Section,\u201d \u201cthe Dawn Section,\u201d \u201cthe Arab Section\u201d or, more bluntly, \u201cthe Ones Who Become Like Arabs.\u201d\u00a0…<\/span><\/p>\n

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As it happens, we learn more about what a real-life espionage agent actually does in \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d than in any mere thriller. To be sure, the members of the Arab Section trained in the use of firearms and explosives, and \u201cwhen they could round up a few bullets, they held target practice.\u201d But they also \u201cslipped in and out of Arab towns, practiced dialect, saw what fooled people and what didn\u2019t.\u201d Their tradecraft sometimes consisted only of \u201csitting at a cheap caf\u00e9 or smoking on the steps of the post office, looking around, asking a question of a passerby as casually as possible.\u201d …<\/p>\n

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At least one of the secret missions revealed in \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d 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. \u201cEvidence of Nazi fingerprints on the Arab side always drew special attention from the Jewish intelligence services,\u201d writes Friedman. \u201cIf later on [the attack] was remembered by the Arab Section as \u2018the jewel of our operations beyond the border,\u2019\u201d as Friedman reports, \u201cthe appraisal was less about the results than about seeing whether the Jews could pull\u00a0off something like this at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedman refuses to hype the heroes of his own book. \u201cTheir mission didn\u2019t culminate in a dramatic explosion that averted disaster, or in the solution of a devious puzzle,\u201d he writes. \u201cTheir importance to history lies instead in what they turned out to be \u2014 the embryo of one of the world\u2019s most formidable intelligence services.\u201d\u00a0…<\/p>\n

At the same time, Friedman\u2019s book is animated by his conviction that respect must be paid to these overlooked heroes. \u201cPeople trying to forge a Jewish state in the Middle East should have seen that Jews from the Middle East could be helpful,\u201d he argues. \u201cThe newcomers might have been invited to serve as equal partners in the creation of this new society, but they weren\u2019t. Instead they were condescended to, and pushed to the fringes; it was one of the state\u2019s worst errors, one for which we are still paying.\u201d 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 \u201cSpies of No Country.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Read the whole thing here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}