Army of Shadows : AZ IMC

Army of Shadows

This is a book I purchased because I was tempted by its cover photograph of a Jew visiting an Arab village in 1940, even as I was repelled by the word "collaboration" in its subtitle.

The Jew - the jacket description calls him a "settler" - wearing a Western suit, is sitting slightly higher than the Arab, who is traditionally dressed and wearing a keffiyeh. The Arab has his hand on the visitor's knee. He looks warily at the camera as his guest, whom we see in profile, speaks.

In Army of Shadows - Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tells the absorbing story of the Palestinian Arabs who sought accommodation with the Zionist movement. This book answers the question: Where are the Palestinian moderates?

RELATED
From an exchange with Hillel Cohen

For more than 90 years, Arab radicals have been at war not only with with Zionism, but simultaneously with any Arab voice - Christian, Muslim, Druse or Beduin - advocating moderation and coexistence with the Zionist enterprise. So, where are the moderates?

They are dead - hacked up with axes, riddled with bullets, slaughtered with knives and exploded by bombs. That's where the Arab moderates are. This book chronicles their story from the start of the British Mandate until the War of Independence.

I GET the impression that Hillel Cohen is sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight - he knows Arabic, has many Arab friends and a long-standing interest in the Arabs of Israel and the Arab "peace camp." Here he tells a poignant tale that is seldom presented in Palestinian history about the many, many, let's call them "moderate" Arabs who recognized that going to war with the Zionist enterprise would end in catastrophe for the Arab side - in a nakba. These Arabs were labeled "traitors" and "collaborators."

Cohen says that "as an Israeli Jew, I have no standing to determine who is a traitor to the Palestinian cause." Well, as an Israeli Jew and a Zionist reading this book, I think the evidence is overwhelming: Arab fanatics are the real traitors to the Palestinian cause; it is they who prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in 1948, and it is they who have been doing everything inhumanly possible to foil the creation of a Palestinian state ever since.

As Cohen tells it, there were two factions in Palestinian Arab society: the fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem; and the moderates, who included such notable families as the Nashashibis. The latter "believed that the Zionists could not be defeated and that the common good of Palestinian Arabs demanded coexistence with Jews."

The Zionists, yes, collaborated with the moderate Arabs in land purchases, business, trade, intelligence and sometimes also militarily. Cohen's research shows that the Jewish Agency and Hagana paid Arab informants, funded pro-Zionist Arab newspapers (though often insufficiently and erratically) and made an effort (often far too little) to support Arabs who were friends of the Jews. The Zionists correctly intuited that the Arabs of Palestine did not mostly define themselves as "Palestinians," but self-identified by their clan, locale - urban or rural - and as part of the greater Arab or Muslim collective.

The "collaborators," says Cohen, had various motives: sometimes personal gain, but just as often communal interest. Often they merely wanted to do the ethical or humane thing.

Yet the mufti insisted that Palestinian Arabs define their cause in religio-nationalist terms - insisting that only his brand of Palestinian identity was legitimate and that a moderate nationalism which acquiesced in any semblance of Jewish rights to the Land of Israel was treason.

THE REJECTIONISTS spearheaded a continuum of murderous riots, beginning in the 1920s. Even as they were killing Jews, they were also intimidating any Arab tainted by a Jewish link. Fanatics even opposed connecting Arab villages to the Zionists' electrical grid. They opposed establishing self-governing institutions for the Arabs of Palestine and participation in municipal elections. They advocated a boycott of Jewish products and vehemently opposed Jews and Arabs working for or with each other.

Then, as now, the hard-liners controlled the mosques, which they used to incite against the Jews and against Arabs who did business with Jews. Initially, their fatwas merely warned of beatings for disobedience. With time, they would command the murder of moderates. (Christian Arab clerics issued their own anti-Jewish rulings in their elusive quest to win acceptance as loyal Palestinians.)

Cohen reports that "in autumn 1929, for the first time, a Palestinian public figure was murdered for collaborating with the Zionists - Sheikh Musa Hadeib from the village of Duwaimah, head of the farmers' party of Mt. Hebron."

The incitement in the mosques and pro-mufti newspapers intensified and begot a brutality which became part of the fabric of Palestinian society. In 1928, Izz a-Din al-Kassam (among others) organized jihadist cells which attacked Jews, the British and Arab "collaborators."

"Any person who dares negotiate with [Chaim] Weizmann will meet a bitter end," the extremists warned.

In the period covered by the book, hundreds of Palestinian moderates - maybe 1,000 - were murdered. Countless others got the message: Moderation is treason punishable by death.

There was no appeasing the rejectionists. Not even the draconian White Paper, issued just four months before Hitler's invasion of Poland - a British policy turnabout which dealt a near-fatal blow to the Zionist enterprise - went far enough for the fanatics. No step save the complete eradication of the Zionist enterprise would be tolerated.

Yet here is the voice of one moderate speaking to the extremists, as unearthed by Cohen's research: "I am not a traitor... I am not a Zionist... Our national demands are equivalent, but our means differ. Your method will lead you to destruction and to expulsion. A man has a right to criticize, and criticism should not be obstructed... I cannot recognize Haj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has brought no benefit to the country."