Tom Hull: Hillel Cohen: Army of Shadows

The Nation (Mar. 24, 2008), Neve Gordon has a long review of Cohen's book. Gordon introduces the subject by drawing on examples of Israel's targeted assassination program which has to date killed over 400 Palestinians. The following quotes are from Gordon's review.

(p. 24):

Army of Shadows chronicles a tragic chapter in the people's history of Palestine, one that many Arab scholars have refrained from writing because it contradicts the dominant ethos of Palestinian national unity. Zionists have abstained from recording it as well because it undermines their claim that the Palestinians were able to unify and fight against the establishment of a Jewish state after the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947. Cohen reveals that many Palestinians signed pacts with the Zionists during the 1948 war and that some even fought with the Jews against the Arab armies.

Collaboration is a very thorny issue, primarily because of its corrosive blend of betrayal, exploitation and deceit, so it's not surprising that Army of Shadows created a stir when the Hebrew edition was published in 2004. Both liberal Jews and Palestinians found the book difficult to digest because each group found its side portrayed in unflattering terms. Many Jewish readers were upset by Cohen's revelation that the prestate Zionist intelligence agency, Shai, and the Jewish Agency's Arab bureau exploited almost every honest Jewish and Palestinian relationship to advance narrow Zionist interests. There were, Cohen notes, many Jews who desired only friendship or good business relations with Palestinians but were eventually identified by the Shai, which used them to collect information and enlist Palestinian collaborators. The Jewish Agency even helped establish and finance Neighborly Relations Committees, which initiated mutual visits and Jewish-Palestinian projects, ranging from pest control to the sending of joint petitions to the Mandatory government. The rationale for the creation of these committees was not only to enhance coexistence but also to recruit informers.

Ezra Danin, head of the Shai's Arab department from 1940 to 1948, identified twenty-five occupations and institutions in which Jews and Palestinians mixed company, among them trucking, shipping, train and telecommunications systems, journalism, Jewish-Arab municipalities, prisons and the offices of the British Administration. He proposed that the Jews in these walks of life enlist Arab collaborators, adding that "such activity should be similar to the way the Nazis worked in Denmark, Norway, and Holland -- touching on every area of life." Cohen explains that this approach was different from that of the British intelligence, which allowed only political and military organizations and subversive bodies to be targeted as pools for potential informers. This revelation, besides shedding light on some of the ruthless tactics employed by the intelligence agencies, helps explain why, from Zionism's very beginnings, it was almost impossible for many Jews to develop loyal relationships with indigenous Palestinians.

Army of Shadows also disturbed Palestinian readers because it reveals for the first time the extent of Palestinian collaboration with the Jews during the Mandate period and the ensuing 1948 war. Some Palestinians were opportunists who collaborated with the Zionists to make money or advance their careers -- these were primarily land brokers and people seeking administrative jobs. Others were mukhtars [village leaders] who wished to advance their regional or village interests or, in cases of internal competition, to solidify their leadership with the Zionists. Still others can be characterized as Palestinian patriots who simply disagreed with the dominant national leadership. Finally, there were those who had Jewish friends and did not view Zionist immigration as a catastrophe. The problem, though, as Cohen points out, is that regardless of the motivation, collaboration contributed to the fragmentation of Palestinian society at a time when its very fate was being determined.

(p. 26):

Cohen documents numerous cases of Palestinians refusing to attack Jews. This unwillingness to do battle pervaded the country. In December 1947, Cohen writes, "the inhabitants of Tulkarm refused to attack Jewish towns to their west, to the chagrin of the local Holy Jihad commander, Hasan Salameh. Sources in Ramallah reported at the same time that many were refusing to enlist, and reports from Beit Jibrin indicated that 'Abd al-Rahman al-'Azzi," the head of a very influential family, "was doing all he could to keep his region quiet. The villagers of the Bani-Hassan nahiya southwest of Jerusalem decided not to carry out military actions within their territory, and the people of al-Mahila refused to request from 'Abd al-Qader al-Husseini to attack the Jewish neighborhoods of Mekor Hayyim and Bayyit va-Gan." In these places as well as in many others, fear of the Jewish forces was the source of reluctance; and in still others it was friendship that had survived many years of national strife. "Palestinian Arab interest in fighting the Jews seems not to have been very high," Cohen concludes.

The review also discusses a second, still untranslated, book by Cohen called Aravim Tovim (Good Arabs), which carries the stories of Palestinian collaborators into the 1948-67 period. As Gordon points out, Israeli use of collaborators continues to the present day. Gordon concludes with an example (p. 28):

Today a request to exit the Gaza Strip to receive medical treatment, visit a dying relative or study in the West Bank or abroad is often contingent upon one's willingness to collaborate. In early January a number of patients were referred from Gaza -- where they could not receive medical treatment -- to Maqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, and received permits to leave the region. At the border, though, they were interrogated by Israeli security service officers, who demanded that they become collaborators. According to Hadas Ziv of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel, those patients who refused had their travel permits annulled and were sent back home. While these patients managed to resist the temptation to collaborate, despite their medical ills, others do not. The persistence of collaboration is a result of not only the historical processes Cohen eloquently describes but also the harsh conditions under which Palestinians currently live.

Every occupation has depended on collaborators, and every insurgency has found it necessary to dissuade collaboration, often with violence against their own people. William Polk's Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, has numerous examples. In the worst cases, the struggle between insurgents and collaborators reaches the proportions of a civil war -- Iraq is one such case. But even where the violence level is relatively mild, collaboration leads to an immense psychic rift within a people -- France under Nazi Germany and its Vichy client state is a good example where the resistance was never as strong as one liked to remember, in large part because the taint of collaboration never faded away.

One thing that Bush et al. certainly did not think of when they invaded Iraq was what would ultimately happen to the thousands of Iraqis they were able to recruit to try to secure the occupation. They really needn't have thought back any further than Vietnam. Tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of Vietnamese who had foolishly allied themselves with the US occupation sought refuge here after the war. Thus far the US has allowed no more than a few dozens of the millions of displaced Iraqis to immigrate here, but as the US presence ends, the moral pressure to provide sanctuary will only increase. Will our kneejerk nativists welcome those Iraqis with the flowers Bush expected awaited the Americans in Baghdad?

posted 2008-03-19