{"id":1157,"date":"2019-04-05T12:55:39","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T09:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2019-04-05T12:55:54","modified_gmt":"2019-04-05T09:55:54","slug":"before-the-mossad-israel-had-the-arab-section-haaretz-review-april-1-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2019\/04\/05\/before-the-mossad-israel-had-the-arab-section-haaretz-review-april-1-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Before the Mossad, Israel Had the ‘Arab Section’ (Haaretz review, April 1, 2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Steven Silber<\/h4>\n

Haaretz<\/em> English edition, April 1, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Spies<\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
\n
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In his 2004 book \u201cThe Yom Kippur War,\u201d Abraham Rabinovich notes how an Egyptian cameraman, arriving to film captured Israeli soldiers near the Suez Canal, was surprised that some of the prisoners looked \u201clike himself … many of them \u2014 Sephardi Jews \u2014 had olive skin like his.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rabinovich uses one kind of nomenclature; many of these misfortunates were undoubtedly\u00a0Mizrahi Jews<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 descendants of Jews from the Middle East who, unlike the Sephardim, have no ancestors from Spain or Portugal.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

It\u2019s probably safe to assume that many people around the world who take an interest in Israel are similar to the Egyptian cameraman: They don\u2019t know that roughly half the country\u2019s Jews are Mizrahim, not the Ashkenazim with European roots who comprised around 90 percent of the Jewish population of British-run Palestine before Israel was established in 1948. The Mizrahim \u2014 beginning with the austere\u00a0ma\u2019abarot<\/em>\u00a0tent camps where so many of them were required to inaugurate their lives in 1950s Israel \u2014 got a slower start to life in the new Jewish state and are still underrepresented among the country\u2019s elites.<\/p>\n

Matti Friedman, the author of \u201cSpies of No Country,\u201d takes an interest in this community, lamenting that Mizrahi Jews have been \u201ccondescended to, and pushed to the fringes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedman\u2019s book \u2014 like this review \u2014 isn\u2019t the place to analyze the injustices; suffice it to say that \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d rights one wrong by telling the story of how a handful of Mizrahim \u2014 only one with a high school diploma \u2014 helped launch a precursor to the\u00a0Mossad<\/a>. They persevered even if their role in the nascent Israeli intelligence service, the so-called Arab Section, sidelined them to \u201cone of the only corners of the Zionist movement where their identity was valued,\u201d as Friedman puts it.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

He sets his story in the 20 months starting in January 1948, when the Arab side in the 1947-49 war was ascendant and \u201cnothing was inevitable, and no one knew anything yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Friedman focuses on four agents in the unit, also known as the\u00a0mista\u2019arvim<\/em>, or, as he frequently calls them, translating the term literally, Ones Who Become Like Arabs. They were between 20 and 25 years old in January 1948; three happened to be named Cohen, including Havakuk from Yemen and Yakuba from Jerusalem. But it\u2019s the Syrian Jews we get closest to. Aleppo-born Isaac Shoshan was in his late 80s and 90s when Friedman interviewed him, the only one of the four still alive. His conversations with the author form the backbone of the book. Also key is Damascus-born Gamliel Cohen, the one who finished high school. He wrote a history of the Arab Section in 2001 and a few years earlier provided oral testimony to the Yigal Allon Center, named after a founder of the pre-state Palmach strike force of which the Arab-speaking spies were officially a part.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\"Tapping
Tapping out a message between spies in Beirut and Arab Section headquarters near Tel Aviv during the War of Independence.\u00a0\u00a0Courtesy of the Palmach Museum<\/span><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And yes, the Toronto-born author\u2019s minimalist, riveting prose reads like a spy novel. He says he was \u201clooking less for the sweep of history than for its human heart.\u201d He found it, providing insight into the life of an agent\u2019s mind when, even six weeks into the war in early 1948, \u201cthe distance between alive and dead had already become negligible \u2014 the length of an incorrect verb, an inconsistent reply to a sharp question.\u201d They were undercover and could never forget that.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Friedman provides the taste of life on the ground on both the Jewish and Arab sides when there was \u201ca new and hazardous electricity on the street\u201d in a place like Haifa, where Gamliel Cohen set out for Beirut; Haifa was much less calm than the Lebanese capital, where the agents set up a spy station under the cover of a kiosk. Friedman\u2019s protagonists also witness chapters in the 20th century\u2019s propensity for population transfers, while the spy-world vignettes he recounts often prove hilarious when not tragic. (There will be no spoilers here, though capers include an assassination attempt on a Muslim preacher. Plus, back in Haifa, what do you do when you discover that the other side is disguising a truck as a British ambulance so it can be used to blow up a packed movie theater?)<\/p>\n

Modest start<\/strong><\/p>\n

Among the hilarity is the\u00a0balagan<\/em>\u00a0(mess) culture that people living in Israel today would recognize, Startup Nation notwithstanding. Gamliel Cohen, the agent setting up the Arab Section\u2019s operations in Beirut, first communicated with his handlers via letters to a Haifa P.O. box. He was code-named Cedar, \u201cin keeping with the Jews\u2019 occasional practice of using code names vulnerable to third graders of average intelligence,\u201d Friedman gibes.<\/p>\n

The 41-year-old author reported from Jerusalem for The Associated Press between 2006 and 2011, but he\u2019s no hack; he\u2019s more of an Ian Fleming of James Bond-fame, who launched his writing career with Reuters in Stalin\u2019s Russia. Friedman\u2019s opus already includes the 2012 \u201cThe Aleppo Codex\u201d on how the most accurate still-existing text of the Hebrew Bible reached Israel, and the 2016 \u201cPumpkinflowers\u201d on his experiences serving in the Israeli army in southern Lebanon in the mid-\u201990s. Friedman\u2019s books and recent op-eds in The New York Times, where he\u2019s a contributing columnist, stress the neglect the Mizrahim have suffered, both in material terms and in the recounting of the Zionist saga.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Friedman is also known for the controversy he stirred in 2014 when he criticized AP\u2019s Jerusalem bureau and the Western media in general, railing in Tablet magazine about the press\u2019 \u201chostile obsession with Jews\u201d he says mars its Israel coverage.<\/p>\n

The title of the current book alludes to the fact that the four young protagonists were literally spies of no country \u2014 the State of Israel was not established until May 1948, four months after Gamliel Cohen arrived in Beirut. And it had been only six years since Isaac Shoshan had sneaked over the border after setting out from his native Aleppo, where he had existed \u201con the bottom rung of a community that had historically been defined as second class by Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that integration into the 90-percent Ashkenazi Jewish community was easy; the racism in the assimilation of the Arab-speaking spies into the Palmach, the most fabled unit of the Haganah, sometimes bordered on the comical. As Friedman describes it, their unit was originally called the Black Section; black is a derogatory Israeli term for Mizrahim. By dropping one letter in Hebrew \u2014\u00a0shachor<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0shachar<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the unit became the Dawn Section, but was usually called the Arab Section.<\/p>\n

From Gamliel Cohen\u2019s oral recollections, as related by Friedman, we learn how one kibbutz wouldn\u2019t let the Arab Section\u2019s men stay overnight, even though kibbutzim were where Palmach troops were normally housed. A few other kibbutzim told their young women to steer clear of the \u201cblacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the men in the Arab Section don\u2019t appear to have possessed the same racism about the people they spied against. Friedman notes how in his conversations with Isaac \u2014 the author uses first names in his work \u2014 the old man took the Arab world\u2019s \u201cpeople seriously, and their culture seriously, and their hostility seriously. Like Gamliel, he had no hatred or disdain for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Friedman adds, however, that Isaac had \u201cno illusions about the fate of the weak, which is why the Jews could never be weak again.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also includes Gamliel\u2019s comments on a political event he witnessed in the Palestinian city of Tul Karm as the war heated up; an activist incited a crowd to chant \u201cWe\u2019ll slaughter the Jews!\u201d \u2014 leading Gamliel to conclude that control was \u201cin the hands of extremists with whom you have no common language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Two
Two spies captured by the Egyptians during the War of Independence.\u00a0\u00a0Courtesy of the Palmach Museum<\/span><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Force has the final word<\/strong><\/p>\n

Friedman builds on this iron-wall theme in his own words: \u201cThe Jews who came to Israel from the Islamic world brought … the knowledge that nothing good befalls the weak. Many other Israelis might have seen this view as retrograde not too long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s an ongoing theme here, so one caveat about Friedman\u2019s book: Readers who think Israel could be doing more to arrive at a reconciliation with the Palestinians will be less enchanted by it. This approach is on more explicit display in a recent Friedman piece in The New York Times titled \u201cThere Is No \u2018Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,\u2019\u201d where the author contends that the real conflict is with a larger enemy, whether the Arab armies of yesteryear or Iran and its allies today.<\/p>\n

In this respect, \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d is reminiscent of a work I reviewed here earlier this decade \u2014 also by a 1990s immigrant who served in the Israeli army in Lebanon during wartime. In his 2011 book \u201cThe Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict,\u201d Jonathan Spyer provides what he considers the main lesson about the region: \u201cForce, and nothing else, has the final word.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matti Friedman appears to agree with Spyer on this point and its corollary: The hard-line view traditionally popular among Jews with roots in the Islamic world has spread to the wider society as these Jews have been assimilated into that society. As Friedman puts it, \u201cif the culture of Jews from Islamic lands was once marginal, it has now moved to the heart of the life of the country.\u201d Or, as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed a month ago, \u201cThe dominance of the political right in recent years comes far less from the settler movement, as foreign observers tend to think, than from the collective memory of Israelis who remember how vulnerable they were as a minority among Muslims and grasp what this part of the world does to the weak.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cSpies of No Country,\u201d Friedman notes how the heroes sent back reports on the outsize emigration by Maronite Christians, foreshadowing exits by Islamic-world minorities and \u201cleaving their home region a poorer place.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other side of the border, during one talk with Isaac, Friedman marvels at a scene at a shopping mall near Tel Aviv. \u201cThe children of the Jewish quarters of Tunis and Algiers were here in Ray-Bans and running shoes. The Jews of Mosul in northern Iraq were also here \u2014 not in Islamic State ditches with their neighbors the Yazidis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too much gloom and doom? Don\u2019t be put off. \u201cSpies of No Country\u201d tells a gripping story of praiseworthy obscure men.<\/p>\n

Steven Silber is an editor at Haaretz English Edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Steven Silber Haaretz English edition, April 1, 2019 In his 2004 book \u201cThe Yom Kippur War,\u201d Abraham Rabinovich notes how an Egyptian cameraman, arriving to film captured Israeli soldiers near the Suez Canal, was surprised that some of the prisoners looked \u201clike himself … many of them \u2014 Sephardi Jews \u2014 had olive skin like his.\u201d Rabinovich uses one …<\/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\/1157"}],"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=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}