New Evidence Sheds Light on Two Decades of Collaboration

One measure of the vigor of the Israeli democracy can be seen in the candor and clear-sightedness of its scholars and other public intellectuals, ranging from journalist and historian Tom Segev (“1967”) to archaeologist Israel Finkelstein (“The Bible Unearthed”). To these examples we must now add Hillel Cohen and his remarkable new book, “Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967” (University of California Press, $27.50, translated by Haim Watzman).

Cohen is a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of several previous books on the troubled coexistence of Arabs and Jews in Israel, including “Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators with Zionism, 1917-1948” (University of California Press, 2008). His latest book, a best-seller in Israel, is based on top secret police files that were only recently declassified. Although his reading of the documentary evidence will surely be challenged by some of his fellow scholars, Cohen’s courage is beyond debate.

The fascinating and often troubling account begins with the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence and endowed the Jewish state with 156,000 Arab citizens, approximately 15 percent of the total population. To cope with the threat they posed to the Jewish homeland, Israeli security officials recruited a network of Arab collaborators and set them to work on what we might call the dark side of the Zionist dream. Indeed, the title of the book (“Aravim Tovim” or “Good Arabs”) is purely ironic, and the author digs deeply into the means and motives of both the Israeli authorities and the “good” Arabs.

Cohen makes it clear that the collaborationist enterprise was complex, subtle and effective. Some Arab leaders who had opposed Jewish nation building under British rule found it expedient (and profitable) to work with Israeli authorities; they saw themselves as “loyal and committed members of the Arab nation, acting in the best interests of their communities.” Other Arab collaborators were ordinary informers who passed information to the army and police about smugglers, infiltrators and activists in order to curry favor with the Jewish authorities. For example, the Israeli government sought to influence the election of village mayors and councilors “to ensure that ‘their’ Arabs received positions of power.” The blandishments available to collaborators included not only cash payments and cleansing of arrest records but also leases for abandoned Arab-owned land, licenses to own and carry firearms and even a “franchise” to engage in what the government defined as “legal smuggling.”

Although “Good Arabs” is an academic monograph, it is enlivened and enriched with character studies and colorful anecdotes. Cohen, for example, introduces us to a young man named Hasan Kamel ’Ubeid, who splattered paint on an Arab member of the Knesset when he visited the village where ’Ubeid lived during the 1950 election campaign. The Arab paint-thrower was rewarded for his efforts by the Israeli authorities with a rare and valuable permit to carry a pistol.

“A rifle or pistol not only served a man as self-protection (and self-confidence) but also gave him prestige,” Cohen explains. “The expression ‘Msadso hal-qad’ (His pistol is this big), accompanied by an open-armed gesture, served in some villages as an idiom to express not only how large a given man’s pistol was but also how important the pistol’s bearer was (at least in the eyes of the authorities).”

But Cohen also digs deeply into the strategic underpinnings of Israel’s policy toward its Arab citizens. “The state’s goal was to detach the Palestinian Arabs in Israel from the Palestinian Arab identity that was central for many of them and to create something new — the Israeli Arab,” Cohen explains. “Through its loyalists, the state sought to indoctrinate Arab schoolchildren with the Zionist narrative, to widen the fissures between and within religious communities (Muslims, Christians and Druze), to promote obedience to the authorities, and to challenge non-Israeli national identities (Palestinian or Pan-Arab).”

Cohen tells a second story in “Good Arabs,” a story of resistance rather than collaboration. “Just a few months after the Nakba, the catastrophe of the 1948 war, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including their political and religious leadership, left or were driven out of their country to become refugees, and immediately after the imposition of Israeli military rule, the Arabs who remained and became Israeli citizens organized large-scale, adamant protest activity that lasted for two decades,” Cohen writes. “They set in motion mass protest actions, created radical frameworks for debate and action, and offered an alternative to the Zionist narrative and to the model of submissive collaboration.”

“Good Arabs” ends on the eve of the Six-Day War, when the Arab population and its demographic threat to Israel both took a quantum leap. Looking back on the previous two decades, Cohen concludes that “Israel’s Arab population presented no real danger to Israel’s security.” But he also points out that the grandson of the paint-thrower who was once rewarded with a gun permit is now a Hezbollah activist who directs “armed Palestinian squads in the West Bank” and “special missions such as the kidnapping of the Israeli colonel Elhanan Tanenbam to Lebanon in October 2000.”

So Cohen’s scholarship cast a new light on the “facts on the ground” that are nowadays displayed in news bulletins and newspaper headlines about the Arab-Israeli conflict, all of which remind us that the quaint era when Israel could rely on aravim tovim is now long gone. l

Jonathan Kirsch, book editor of The Jewish Journal and author of 13 books, blogs at