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Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948, by Hillel Cohen, translated by Haim Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2008. 352 pp. $29.95.
Hillel Cohen’s extraordinary new book sheds light on a neglected, painful area of both Palestinian and Israeli history. For political reasons, Palestinian and Israeli historians have largely ignored Palestinian collaboration during the British Mandate period. Because Palestinian historiography has been at the service of Palestinian nationalism, it has been keen to emphasize the making of the Palestinian nation and reluctant to confront the question of collaboration. For their part, most Israeli historians have ignored collaborators, perhaps, as Cohen suggests, because the argument against the right of return rested until recently on the notion that the entire Palestinian nation fought against the creation of Israel under the 1947 UN partition plan.
Cohen’s painstaking study is the first to demonstrate the diverse ways that Palestinians collaborated at different points during the Mandate, the multiplicity of their motives, and the impact of collaboration on Palestinian society. From the end of World War I until 1935, collaboration mostly took the form of land sales to Jews, providing information to the Zionist movement’s intelligence organs, and joining political organizations supported by the Zionists. Until 1935, economic advantage, whether through land sales or rewards for providing information, was a prime motivation. Other Palestinians, such as the leaders of certain Bedouin tribes, saw communal benefits to helping the Zionists. Still others felt compelled by friendship or humanism to collaborate.
Palestinian nationalism was forged by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the surge of Jewish immigration. As nationalism struggled to take root and displace or subordinate other allegiances—religious, family, regional—the Husseini family wrested control over the nascent movement and sought to de-legitimize opponents by branding them traitors. The Zionists, for their part, encouraged the creation of institutions and leaders to contest the Husseinis’ dominance. The Husseinis’ great rival, the Nashashibi family, was eager to press its own claims to leadership at least part in response to the threat to its own power and prestige that the Husseinis posed. As the dominant nationalist camp radicalized during the rebellion of 1936–39, its rhetoric became more extreme and its violence against collaborators and suspected collaborators more widespread.
This violence only led to greater collaboration, as those whose family members had been humiliated or murdered sought revenge, and the competing nationalist camp saw clearly that its only hope to achieve power was to come to an accommodation with the Zionists. There was also a pervasive sense that the Husseinis and their allies were engaging in the same behavior they condemned, which undermined their claim to acting in the national interest. All these motivations were also in evidence during World War II. The upsurge in national sentiment after the defeat of the Germans, upon whom the Palestinian leadership had pinned its hopes for liberating Palestine from the British and the Jews, also brought intensified violence against collaborators.
Perhaps Cohen’s boldest and most important move is to take seriously the claims of those collaborators who saw their actions as patriotic. No less than the elites who challenged the Husseinis’ dominance in order to make their own bid to leadership, the self-proclaimed patriots—whom the nationalist leaders branded traitors—believed that an accommodation with the Zionists was in the Palestinians’ interests: in their estimation, the Jews could not be defeated, and that rebellion, economic boycott of the Jews, and war, would shatter Palestinian society.
Zionist officials, especially in the intelligence community, early on learned how to exploit opportunities that those willing to help them afforded. By the late 1920s the Zionist leadership, realizing that armed conflict was inevitable, turned its efforts to using the fissures in Palestinian society—rural v. urban, elite v. mass, national leaders v. local leaders, Bedouin v. non-Bedouin, Christian and Druze v. Muslim—for the strategic goal of weakening Palestinian nationalism.
Cohen is evenhanded on this matter. He does not suggest that collaboration was conjured up by evil Zionist plotters. On the contrary, he shows quite clearly that the nationalist leaders exacerbated these divisions in Palestinian society with a mixture of venality, hypocrisy, and repression. (Cohen notes that Palestinians killed more of their fellows than they did Jews during the rebellion.) In essence, Cohen argues that the Palestinians were no match for the Jews because the latter had achieved national unity earlier and hence had more developed national institutions.
Cohen argues that collaboration was a contributing, rather than a decisive, factor in the Arab defeat in the War of Independence. The divisions within Palestinian society were exacerbated by collaboration, itself a joint project of the Zionists who abetted it, the Palestinian leadership whose actions motivated a large part of it, and the collaborators themselves who pursued their various—and not mutually exclusive—interests. It is worth noting that describing Palestinians’ actions in all their complexity sets this work apart from that of much of the Israeli “new historians,” who tend to slight the (albeit constrained) agency that Palestinians exercised.
In the book’s introduction, Cohen recounts that his interest in the topic was sparked by having been present as a boy at many discussions among Arab neighbors over who had helped the Zionists before the 1948 war. However, he relies almost entirely on contemporary documentary evidence, rather than oral histories. Although unstated, Cohen almost certainly took this decision because oral testimony presents thorny problems of interpretation. Not only is memory less reliable the farther in time from the events remembered, but such testimony would be bound to be influenced (or tainted) by the more recent political and ideological context, which has so heavily favored the dominant Palestinian nationalist discourse.
Yet Cohen would have done well to have discussed the advantages and limitations of the documents, both Israeli and Palestinian, on which his book rests. Of necessity, most of his sources were Israeli, although he does cite plenty of Arab documents. However, his offhand remark that much of the Israeli intelligence archives from the period remain (understandably) sealed gives pause. A more direct discussion of sources would have allayed any fear that the particular character of the documentation yielded a distorted account. Still, the book’s wealth of detail, nuanced analysis, and clear writing illuminate his argument that considering Palestinian collaboration at that time recasts our understanding of the creation of the Palestinian nation.
Except for a brief paragraph in the conclusion, Cohen refrains from addressing the question that many readers no doubt will want to ask: to what degree did collaboration carry over into the years beyond 1948? As Cohen shows in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Services and the Israeli Arabs, published in Hebrew (but not yet in English) in 2006, after Army of Shadows was published in Hebrew, collaboration was a key factor in Israel’s assertion of civic control over Arab Israelis between 1948 and 1967. As others have noted, the techniques created during the Mandate and perfected between 1948 and 1967 were adapted to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israelis and Palestinians are still living with the consequences of this fateful entanglement that Cohen so lucidly portrays.
Joel Streicker
Central American Resource Center (CARECEN)
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