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(opens in new window)Good Arabs
The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967
by Hillel Cohen (Author), Haim Watzman (Translator)
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Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Jan 2010
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780520269767
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 24 b/w photographs
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About the Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
Reviews
About the Book
Based on his reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, Hillel Cohen exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestinian collaboration with Israelis—and of the Arab resistance to it. Cohen's previous book, the highly acclaimed Army of Shadows,told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948, and now, in Good Arabs he focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller and has evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents Cohen viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day.
About the Author
Hillel Cohen is Research Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaborators with Zionism 1917-1948 (UC Press), The Present Absentees: Palestinian Refugees in Israel since 1948, and The Marketplace is Empty: The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem 1967-2007.
Table of Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Beginning a Beautiful Friendship: The Rise of the Collaborator Class
2. Communists vs. the Military Government,
Collaborators vs. the Communists
3. Boundary Breakers: Infiltrators, Smugglers, Spies
4. The Land
5. The Battle of the Narrative: Symbols, Pronouncements, Teachers
6. Minorities within a Minority: Dilemmas of Identity
7. Circles of Control, Circles of Resistance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Reviews
“Cohen paints a remarkably balanced and comprehensive picture of the complex relationship between Israel’s Arab citizens and the authorities. It is a fascinating tale, but his account of espionage, patronage, bribery, treachery, deception, smuggling, infiltration, intimidation, threats, double dealing – and often murder – does not make for pleasant reading.”— Jerusalem Post
“The true significance of Good Arabs has little to do with the colourful historical tales of Israeli security men and their Palestinian consorts. The book’s power derives from its resonance for the present day, and the way that it illuminates the attitude that Israel has taken – and still takes – toward the Palestinians, whether they are citizens of Israel or residents of territories under Israeli control.”— The National
“A fascinating study, detailed but never boring, with revelations about the past that help explain later developments between the State and Israeli Arabs.”— Jewish Book World
“Good Arabs achieves an unusual poignancy. . . . By heeding its lessons today, the Israeli leadership may be able to inch closer to a realistic and ethical framework for embracing minorities in the Jewish state.”— The Jerusalem Report
“Readers will be engaged and informed by his skillful narrative and analysis of a much-contended topic.”— The Historian
“This is a very important study, scholarly yet accessible to all levels of readers.”— Assoc Of Jewish Libraries Nwsltr
“Highly recommended.”— Choice
“This book sensitively and convincingly illuminates the complexity of life as an ‘Israeli Arab’ . . . [it] is a crucial contribution to the growing literature on this population’s experience.”— American Historical Review
“This book was, understandably, a best-seller in Israel.”— Magill's Literary Annual / Salem Press
“Cohen accomplishes his goal of portraying the tensions between the Israeli state and its Arab citizens on the local and personal levels. More than that, he takes the reader into an intricate world of espionage, bribery, and punishment. . . . One of the outstanding aspects of Cohen’s book is his ability to avoid blatant value judgments about his subjects.”— Middle East International
“Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life.”— Shofar
“Makes extensive use of the thousands of recently declassified Israeli government and police files to argue that Israel has attempted, from its earliest days, to control and co-opt the lives of its Palestinian citizens.”— Publishers Weekly
“Remarkable new book . . . . Cohen’s courage is beyond debate.”— The Jewish Journal
“This murky facet of Israel’s history is deftly described at length.”— Canadian Jewish News
“A comprehensive and original history of collaboration within the Palestinian community inside Israel.”— Review Of Middle East Stds
"A fascinating story. . . . With the publication of this book, we can abandon several accepted clichés."—Ha'aretz
"While many Israelis—Jews and Palestinians alike—already had a sense that these shadowplays were part of the state's history, Aravim Tovim (Good Arabs) supplies the evidence. Case after case is summoned to illustrate how collaboration permeated all aspects of Palestinian society."—The Nation
"The impressive achievement of this timely book is its equal and honest treatment of the explosive issues involved in spite of an often agonizing conflict of interests—and its articulation of the author's findings with empathy, boldness and fairness."—Jerusalem PostSee Less Reviews
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From the United States
AJL Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews
Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2011
Format: Hardcover
Hillel Cohen, an expert on the relations between Zionism and Israel with Palestinian Arabs, focuses in this study on the relations between the Israeli authorities and Israeli Arabs during the period from the creation of the state of Israel until the Six Day War (1948-1967). The study is based primarily on declassified top-secret documents of the Israeli police and prime minister's office; excluded are the classified files of the General Security Service and of the IDF. The book includes a bibliography, detailed notes, illustrations, and an index. Cohen starts with an examination of the rise of the collaborator class: how the authorities forced their will on individuals by economic and administrative means and how collaborators and their community benefited at times from their actions. Another important topic is the role of the Communist Party, which during this period was the main channel for national expression among Israeli Arabs, despite the authorities' attempts to create pro-government Arab parties. Cohen examines the Arabs' point of view regarding border infiltration, namely, the wish of refugees to return to their villages, work their fields, and unite with their families. As for the Druze mandatory military service, Cohen shows that it was not easily accepted by all Druze leaders and community members, contrary to the official Israeli public narrative. This is a very important study, scholarly yet accessible to all levels of readers. It is full of revelations on the past which can help understanding future developments between the state and its Arab citizens.
Rachel Simon
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The Elder
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent research, only slighty flawed
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2010
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Good Arabs is Hillel Cohen's followup to his earlier book, Army of Shadows. Army of Shadows detailed the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the 1948 war mostly from the viewpoint of early Zionist intelligence agencies. Good Arabs continues on this theme, looking at how the Israeli military and police establishments interacted with Israeli Arabs from 1948 to 1967.
As with the earlier book, Good Arabs is filled with variants of the pejorative term "collaborate." It seems probable that Cohen, who wrote the word in Hebrew, agreed with this translation of the Hebrew word "'''''". However that Hebrew term has two translations: "collaborate" and "cooperate." When reading the book and mentally replacing the former with the latter, an entirely different impression is given.
To be sure, the Arabs living in Israel during those nineteen years did not have it easy. Most of them were under military rule and many of them saw their lands expropriated from them. Cohen looks at the phenomenon of Arabs who cooperated with the Israeli authorities and finds many reasons for their actions.
Some were opportunists; trying to ingratiate themselves with the strong horse. Some were realists, who felt that Israel wasn't going anywhere and the best strategy was to give the Jewish leaders what they wanted. Some wanted the perks that the Israelis would give to those who helped them - often guns and jobs. Some were, in fact, ideologically inclined to support Israel. Others played both sides of the fence, or, as in one case Cohen brings, played Israel, Egypt and Jordan against each other.
Based on voluminous declassified Israeli police material, much of which quoted the testimony of collaborators against Arabs who were deemed a threat to the state, Cohen attempts to reconstruct the psyche of the minority citizens of Israel during that time, concentrated mostly in the 1950s. Israeli authorities, often heavy-handedly, attempted to stop any "nationalist" discourse and replace the Palestinian Arab narrative with the Zionist narrative in Arab schools. Many Arabs resisted these attempts, others went along with it.
To his credit, Cohen does not try to generalize. He seems wedded to the Palestinian Arab narrative (it is jarring to see him use the word "Nakba" as if the term was in wide use in the 1950s) but he willingly brings anecdotes about the Arabs who genuinely wanted to work with the Jews.
He goes into details about the Communists, who attracted many Arabs in the Triangle and northern regions and who were nominally supportive of Israel's existence but very much against the idea of a Jewish state. The Israeli authorities were keenly interested in Communist sympathizers among the Arabs and used their carrot-and-stick approach to minimize their influence.
As in the last book, Cohen uses the word "nationalists" a bit too freely; most of his examples do not seem to support the type of Palestinian Arab nationalism that we have become familiar with since 1967, but rather pan-Arabism.
Most Palestinian Arabs, especially before the rise of the PLO, cared far less about nationalism than they did about taking care of their families in honor. This simple fact is supported by Cohen's anecdotes, but he doesn't quite seem to grasp it himself. For example, he looks at the difficulty that Israel had to instill a strong Zionist ethos into their thinking as a failure, when in fact it is just the other side of the same coin of the apathy of Arabs towards their own nationalists. After all, the older generation of the 1950s Arabs had already lived under Ottoman, British and Israeli rule; to them their families were a far more permanent part of their lives than their rulers. This is why they worked hard to re-unite their families who were separated by the war. Sometimes this was done by smuggling them in and breaking the law; sometimes by being exceptionally cooperative with the Israelis who let a not-insignificant number return, and sometimes it was a combination of the two - bringing them in illegally and then appealing to past cooperation with Israelis, especially in 1948, to allow their relatives to stay.
The rise of Nasser and the seeming strength of the United Arab Republic union of Egypt and Syria convinced many Israeli Arabs that Israel would soon be destroyed; these Arabs tended to think in terms of how they could optimize their situations given that scenario playing out. Others analyzed the same facts and concluded that Israel was the power they needed to cooperate more with. These pragmatic issues usually trumped the ideological, and it does not appear likely that anyone thought that an Arab Palestine that would result from the Arabs sweeping the Jews into the sea would be any more independent than the West Bank Jordanians were. (One interesting footnote mentions that the Arabs of the Triangle were very happy when they ended up in the Jewish state after 1948, because the Iraqi fighters who had occupied their towns had a nasty habit of rape.)
Cohen also goes into detail into the different attitudes of the Druze, the Ciracassians and the Bedouin to the state, especially in terms of becoming members of the IDF. He notes that Israeli policy was to divide these groups and treat them separately from the mostly Muslim Arabs, which could be a method to help minimize the amount of danger that a united minority group could bring. However, he mentions that Israelis themselves justified this policy by accurately noting that the only reason there was any unity among those groups to begin with was because of the British policy of playing the Jews against the other minorities.
One shortcoming of the book is that after many specific examples of cooperation/collaboration throughout the 1950s by Arabs under Israeli military rule, Cohen dismisses the 1960s with a single paragraph mentioning that Israel's military government power waned, Israel's Arab citizens won more freedoms and then the military government apparatus dismantled in late 1966. There are no details, no examples, no discussion of how this affected the cooperators and the Israelis, especially on the eve of the Six Day War. He mentions that a significant number of Israeli Arabs were actively offering to help Israel on the eve of the war, even after the military government was gone and they were much closer to being equal citizens of the state. The entire seven years should have gotten more detailed attention.
Good Arabs sheds much light on 1950s Israeli Arabs and it demolishes some myths. As with Cohen's previous book, it is an important addition to understanding recent history and it gives us some lessons for today.
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Movie Mogul
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing book
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2013
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
After reading Hillel Cohen's first book on the history of Israel when it was Palestine -under the British Mandate - I looked forward to his book on the early history of the State. Very disappointing- way too political in the sense that his own ideology - which was somewhat present in the first book -took over his mastery of history. He makes statements meant to be "the first time anyone knew this", but anyone familiar with Israeli history in the first years of the State can see through his poor scholarship and his slanting of all "facts' to fit his version of what went on. He managed to stay pretty unbiased in his first book - Army of Shadows- and I would recommend it.
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