{"id":1152,"date":"2019-04-01T10:52:22","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T07:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2019-04-01T10:52:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T07:52:22","slug":"national-public-radio-review-march-7-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2019\/04\/01\/national-public-radio-review-march-7-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"National Public Radio review, March 7, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/em>‘Spies Of No Country’ Offers Nuanced Understanding Of Israel’s Complexity<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Lily Meyer<\/em><\/p>\n

My grandfather was too young to serve in World War II. He watched from Bridgeport, Conn. as Hitler, then Stalin, murdered unspeakable numbers of Jews, including most of his family.<\/p>\n

The helplessness and guilt he felt underpinned his lifelong Zionism. He believed, unshakably, that Jews needed a place of refuge. Stories like his are common, and easy to empathize with. I imagine that the Israeli Canadian writer Matti Friedman would empathize. Then he would say, without ceremony, that my grandfather’s version of Zionism is done.<\/p>\n

For half a decade, Friedman has been working hard, and publicly, to dispel easy narratives about Israel. He rose to attention \u2014 and controversy \u2014 through a pair of essays about media bias in coverage of Israel, and has remained on the beat ever since. His perspective is unusual: Israeli by choice, he clarifies his own bias in every piece but he writes to complicate, not to defend. In his third book,\u00a0Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel<\/em>, Friedman rejects the narrative of Israel as a country filled with Europeans and their descendants, motivated by memories and guilt like my grandfather’s. And he does it through a spy story.<\/p>\n

Spies of No Country\u00a0<\/em>focuses on a fledgling Israeli intelligence unit called the Arab Section, and on four of its spies. The Arab Section emerged at the tail end of British colonialism, at a moment when the Palestine was filling with Jews. The British had made hazy promises, but none clear enough to prevent the war that ensued. The Jews in Palestine formed an army, which in turn formed the Arab Section, a fledgling espionage operation easiest to understand as a version of the Soviets’ Directorate S. Where the USSR trained Russians to live in America, though, the Arab Section did something much murkier. It trained Middle Eastern Jews to embed themselves in the very countries they were from.<\/p>\n

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