Shadowplays (Page 3)

In the late 1990s, in the midst of writing Army of Shadows, Cohen stumbled on an array of documents in the Israeli State Archives that had been declassified by mistake. Whereas most of these files dealt with thieves, brothels and numerous petty crimes, some relayed sensitive information about the employment of Palestinian informers during the 1950s and '60s. Before the archivists' error was discovered and the material reclassified and sealed, Cohen managed to read and take extensive notes on thousands of files, which provided him with a unique glimpse into the clandestine techniques used to recruit and deploy Palestinian citizens as undercover agents within their own communities. Cohen revealed the guarded secrets of scores of Palestinian collaborators in the sequel to Army of Shadows, Aravim Tovim (Good Arabs), which was published in 2006 and stayed on Ha'aretz's bestseller list for thirteen weeks. Pickups filled to the brim delivered the paperback edition to Palestinian villages throughout Israel, where people waited impatiently to peruse the book. Many of them turned first to the index to see whether family members or acquaintances were implicated, making Aravim Tovim probably the only book written in Hebrew that is read backward--that is, from left to right.

Like Army of Shadows, Aravim Tovim, which covers the years 1948 to 1967, questions pervasive truths. In 1948, during what Israel calls the War of Independence and the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or "catastrophe," the vast majority of Palestinian leaders and intelligentsia either fled or were expelled from urban centers. The relatively small percentage of Palestinians who stayed put were unorganized rural dwellers who found themselves in a new state that did not want them. They were ultimately granted citizenship but were nonetheless considered a fifth column and forced to live under the Emergency Regulations, which restricted the movement of Palestinian citizens within the Jewish state until 1966. For years, it has been a widely held assumption that the first generation of Palestinian citizens of Israel was timid, afraid to challenge the Israeli government and demand basic rights. Such is the story told in Coffins on Our Shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel (2005), in which Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker distinguish the 1948 generation of Palestinians from their grandchildren, "the stand-tall generation," which Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker describe as being assertive, confident, determined and possessed with a sense of entitlement.

But is this really the case? The same mistakenly declassified archival files that Cohen used in Army of Shadows to open a window on Palestinian collaboration also reveal the existence of ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule. I vividly recall my friend Fareed Ghanem, a Palestinian Druse from Mghar, calling to tell me that he had just finished reading Aravim Tovim and that his father, Qassem, who was a schoolteacher in the early 1960s, figures in the book. Qassem Ghanem appears in a chapter about the governmental Committees for Arab Affairs, the major objective of which was to monitor and control the Palestinian minority within Israel. Cohen quotes an Israeli memo about Qassem Ghanem's hometown. Mghar, the memo states, had been "known in the past as outstanding in its loyalty to Israel, [but] recently nationalistic activities and incitement against the government have been exposed. At the center of these activities," the memo continues, "are a group of teachers who in broad daylight oppose the government.... The village notables and collaborators stand helpless in light of these activities and are certain that if the culpable teachers were harmed a bit it would do a great deal towards pacifying the spirits in the village and restoring the calm." Cohen goes on to suggest that the Regional Committee for Arab Affairs invoked the Emergency Laws in order to fire Qassem, together with two other teachers, from the education system.

This relatively minor incident, which takes up no more than seven lines in Cohen's book, conveys a sense of the vast covert world of informers and operators, backed by government offices, responsible for fragmenting the Palestinian minority and cultivating Palestinian Arab support for the Jewish state. While many Israelis--Jews and Palestinians alike--already had a sense that these shadowplays were part of the state's history, Aravim Tovim supplies the evidence. Case after case is summoned to illustrate how collaboration permeated all aspects of Palestinian society. The schools were a major arena for spying. Students squealed on teachers, teachers informed on colleagues and principals reported on their students. Other arenas where collaborators operated included mosques, where an imam might criticize the government; cafes, where friends might discuss recent political events; and even weddings, where Palestinian nationalist songs were at times sung. Big Brother's eyes and ears were always on the alert.

Cohen's riveting chapter about the Jewish-Arab Communist Party illustrates especially well how the mechanisms of control were put to use. During the first two decades of Israel's existence, the Communists were practically the only ones to fight for egalitarian treatment of the Palestinian minority. They also led the campaign against the expropriation of Palestinian land and fought for the right of refugees to return to their villages. Cohen shows how every dirty trick in the game was used to sabotage their efforts. Collaborators were tapped not only to listen and report but also to burn down Communist clubs and offices, to violently attack Communist leaders and to sway votes in municipal councils. Aravim Tovim proves for the first time that allegations voiced by the Communists fifty years ago about the dirty tricks of the government and its agents were true.

The intelligence agencies recognized that it would be easier to control individuals than to manage a politically conscious and organized public. Therefore, they instructed their subordinates to prevent the establishment of municipal councils, sports associations, neighborhood clubs and the like, while simultaneously using an array of methods to create friction and strife among different Palestinian families, neighborhoods and villages. The objective was to create endemic distrust among the indigenous inhabitants, to monitor public opinion and to identify Palestinians who could potentially act against the state. By frightening and silencing the population, the different government agencies hoped to fabricate the Israeli-Arab, a "new Arab" whose first and only loyalty was to the Jewish state.

By chronicling the deep penetration of Israeli collaborators into all pockets of Palestinian life, Aravim Tovim ends up--perhaps necessarily--producing a people's history of Palestinian resistance within Israel, since collaboration is, after all, firmly linked to the existence of resistance. First-generation Palestinians did not keep their heads low, and through their resistance they achieved a number of things. One was their ability to hide and defend thousands of Palestinian refugees who, after the 1948 war, infiltrated back into Israel. Despite clear government injunctions to surrender such "infiltrators" and the ongoing work of hundreds if not thousands of collaborators, about 20,000 refugees, who at the time made up approximately 15 percent of the Palestinian population in Israel, managed to settle down and ultimately received citizenship.

The second achievement involved the establishment of numerous Palestinian municipal councils, despite the Committees for Arab Affairs' stated policy of crushing all efforts to establish such councils. The third has to do with Palestinian collective memory. The Israeli Ministry of Education, together with the Israeli security services, tried to undermine Palestinian nationalism by attempting to prevent the development and dissemination of a national historical narrative. School curriculums were limited to a Zionist interpretation of events, while any form of Palestinian nationalistic expression was vigorously suppressed. Yet despite all the state's efforts, Cohen shows how ongoing grassroots defiance guaranteed that the national history of the people was not erased.

Considering the prominent place of resistance in Aravim Tovim, it's not surprising that those first-generation Palestinians who participated in such activities in the 1950s and '60s are not only proud to read the book but are also insisting that the "stand-tall generation" read it too. This is one reason the book made it to the bestseller list. Another reason has to do with the fact that many Palestinians read the book as a manual for understanding the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank. In this sense too, Aravim Tovim cannot be separated from Army of Shadows. Both books describe the methods and tactics used by Israel's security agencies to penetrate, fragment and control Palestinian society through the production of profound distrust. In turn, they provide the necessary background for understanding how Israel effectively exploits existing conditions in order to recruit collaborators.

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.

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