By Anat Rosenberg
Seven years ago, author and journalist Matti Friedman published his award-winning true-life detective story, “The Aleppo Codex,” about how a precious ancient manuscript of the Hebrew Bible made its way from Aleppo, Syria, to Israel. Little did he know then that his research for that book would lead him to a man named Isaac Shoshan—one of the four men whose fascinating stories he tells in his new book, “Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.” Shoshan and his comrades (Gamliel Cohen, Havakuk Cohen, and Yakuba Cohen) were part of the Arab Section—spies trained during World War II by the British who were later recruited to work for Jewish militia leaders in pre-state Israel. Friedman pieces together the time these men spent gathering intelligence, planning sabotage and assassinations, as well as the personal sacrifices they made—all on behalf of the nascent Jewish state. He spoke with AMIT magazine about these unsung heroes and about what they can teach us about modern-day Israel.
AMIT: How did you decide to tell the story of the Arab Section and why now?
Matti Friedman: It started when I met Isaac Shoshan, one of the four characters. I was introduced to him by a character from my first book, “The Aleppo Codex.” In that book there’s an old Mossad guy, an old spy from Aleppo. He introduced me to his friend Isaac, who told me this story about 1948 and about the founding of the state that was just so radically different from anything I’d ever heard that it struck me as being something worth writing about.
At the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about the role in Israel and Israeli history of the Jews who came here from the Islamic world. We all have these very European stories that we tell about Israel, which is Herzl and the Holocaust and socialism and the kibbutz. That’s the Israeli story that most people know, and that’s the kind of official narrative of the country, but half of the Jews in Israel don’t have very much to do with that story. They come from the Islamic world, mostly from the Arab world, and their presence in the country is not a footnote.
I was looking for a story that would illustrate that, and I realized that Isaac’s story and the story of a few of his comrades makes that point, that it’s kind of a creation story, an Israeli creation story, the main characters of which are Jews from the Arab world. There are no main characters in this story who are Ashkenazim. And it’s a story about how this looked through the eyes of people who came from a different place and saw it very differently, and hopefully it will allow the reader not just to get a new angle on 1948, but also to understand the present-day country in a different way.
AMIT: That seems to dovetail nicely with the reckoning happening in Israel in recent years about how Mizrahim were treated when they first got there and some of the injustices done to them—the fact that they were pushed to the periphery, literally and figuratively.
MF: People are grappling with that much more now, so in that way I think it’s a story whose time has come. I see the Jews who came here from the Islamic world as active in the Zionist story. They built the country. They were treated very poorly in many cases, but the Israel that we have in 2019 is a product of their efforts as much as it is a product of anyone else’s efforts, so I wanted a story in which they are actors.
The four spies at the center of the story, they’re kind of marginal in Israel at the time. They’re marginal in the Zionist movement. But these guys are fighters. They’re at the heart of the Zionist movement, which is the Palmach, and they’re playing an active role in creating the country. When they’re founding the country, Mizrahim are just a tiny percentage of the Jews here and no one really takes them seriously, but within a year or two after 1948, they’re maybe half of the country, maybe more. And the country that emerges is a very different country than the Zionist leadership had envisioned, largely because of their arrival.
AMIT: You do get a sense throughout the book that they have agency. But the heartbreaking part of their story is, they are the heroes, but at what cost?
MF: The events are so vast, and they’re being pushed from place to place, and they’re pushed out of their homes and they come to this new place, which they don’t really understand. And then these great events start taking place, and they’re caught up in the events, and they’re sent back in some other direction, and yes, it’s kind of lonely. There’s a helplessness in the story. We have these myths about spies or myths about soldiers, that one person makes a decision and changes history, but most of the time it doesn’t work like that.
AMIT: To some extent, your books [“The Aleppo Codex” and “Pumpkinflowers”] all seem to touch on the notion of creating or living up to a certain Israeli identity. What draws you to that concept?
MF: I came here when I was 17 from Toronto, and I had a simple idea about the place, and in that simple idea the kibbutz movement loomed very large. I went to a kibbutz. That’s how I ended up in the country. But very quickly I found myself in a military outpost inside Lebanon, and I kind of became Israeli in Lebanon. The guys who were with me in the army, many of them were just completely different from what I had imagined. They were very non-ideological, and came from completely different backgrounds than I do, and I just realized that I was in a country that is much more complicated than I had understood.
What I’ve been doing since then, more or less, is trying to figure it out. So I went to university, and I studied Islamic studies. I became a journalist and started reporting. ‘The Aleppo Codex’ and my second book, ‘Pumpkinflowers,’ were my attempts to grapple with the complexities of the country. The real country. I’ve been here for 23 years, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly how this society works. But if I try to put my finger on the main thing that people outside don’t get, it’s the fact that this country is, in fact, a Middle Eastern country that tells a kind of Western story about itself. But Israel’s story in the 21st century really has very little to do with the Warsaw ghetto. It has a lot more to do with Aleppo and Baghdad, because half of the Jews here, half of the Israeli Jewish population, comes from Aleppo and Baghdad and similar places, and came here with a certain kind of Judaism and certain ideas and a certain way of life that really shaped this place. If you’re trying to understand this place through stories about the halutzim [pioneers], or if you’re trying to understand it through the two-state solution, or if you’re trying to see it through a Western lens, it’s not going to make any sense.
AMIT: Going back to the four spies, part of the book is also about how they perceive themselves and their identity and their ability to merge seamlessly from being Arabs to being Israelis or Jews. You discuss the idea of double identity in Jewish history, and how it’s been a blessing and a curse. From your conversations with at least some of them, did they see it that way?
MF: I think they did. The most eloquent of them is Gamliel, whom I never met because he died in 2001 or 2002, but I was working with some of these long oral recollections that he left. He was conflicted about it. He came to a kibbutz in the ‘40s and wanted to be a pioneer like everyone else and wasn’t really accepted by the kibbutznikim. His culture was different. He has one part where he says, ‘My music is Umm Kulthum and here there are only records of European symphonies.’ He didn’t want to be like an Arab. He’d had enough of that in Damascus. Now he wanted to be a new Jew, like the Zionist movement was picturing, and it wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped. Then, around the end of the Second World War, after he had been in the country for a fairly short time, the Arab Section picks him up because of the characteristics that he’s trying to escape. They need him to be like an Arab. They need him to be able to pass under an Arab identity so he can be sent back into the Arab world. And in that way it’s a blessing, because that ends up being his ticket into the Holy of Holies of this new society. That’s the irony of their story, which is that the thing they’re trying to escape ends up defining them and gaining them entrance into the Palmach, which is really the nerve center of the whole operation.
AMIT: People have compared your book to John le Carré novels, but for me it brought to mind ‘Fauda,’ both in terms of what they’re doing, and in terms of the psychological toll that their work has on them.
MF: The agents in ‘Fauda,’ they have a state. They have a strong country behind them. These guys didn’t have a country. There was no one coming to help them at first. The state that they were agents of was kind of a figment of their imagination in some ways at the beginning. And no one knew if the state was going to survive this war, so all of this effort could have been for nothing. Their mental angst must have been a few levels greater than that of the guys in ‘Fauda.’
AMIT: In the book, you write that the Palmach actually explains little about Israel today, but these guys’ story does. Could you elaborate?
MF: A lot of people are still approaching Israel with the old stories. The Palmach is a really good example of those great, old stories. The Palmach is a radical socialist organization of almost entirely Eastern European olim pioneers. It’s a kind of a new generation. They’re brash, and they’re confident, and they’re no longer on their knees in the diaspora, but they’re part of the rebirth of the Jewish nation and part of the global workers’ revolution. That was really the way they thought. It’s hard to remember, but they saw the State of Israel as part of the global proletarian revolution.
If you come at the state that we have now with stories about Europe and socialism and a utopian workers’ society, the country in 2019 doesn’t make any sense. The country does make sense, though, if you come at it from the direction of Alexandria. It’s a port city in Egypt, a cosmopolitan city with a big Jewish community. It had a very deep, tribal Judaism that’s not particularly stringent, but it’s very deep and natural. And if you come at it from that direction, then the country makes a lot of sense, because that feels a lot like Tel Aviv in 2019. Or if you come at the country from the direction of Aleppo, where Isaac is from, a metropolis in the Middle East with all kinds of people living there and a traditional kind of Judaism, which is very much the dominant kind of Judaism here, certainly socialism does not have a lot to do with it. If you come at this country from the lives of these spies, it actually makes a lot of sense.
AMIT: On the flip side, it was also interesting how Gamliel wrote in 1949 from Jordan that the refugees—today’s Palestinian refugees—were not going to move on and were not going to forget what they lost in the war.
MF: These guys were among the first people to understand what that meant, and they could understand it because they are Middle Eastern. They picked up immediately that (a) these people are not just going to move on and pretend it never happened, and (b) they understood, I think, that the Islamic world is not going to ever come to terms with the reversal of the hierarchy of the region. The hierarchy of this region is that Islam is the sovereign religion and that everyone else accepts the sovereignty of Islam. And if you are willing to live with that, then you can live as Jews did for many centuries here. Jews ruling a Muslim population, it just doesn’t compute in the traditional hierarchy of this region. I think these spies understood that that wasn’t going to go away.
AMIT: I would imagine that the fact that the spies knew that they weren’t ever going back to their homes in Arab countries probably colored their view to some extent as well.
MF: The Palmach thought that the population would be happy to be liberated from Arab feudalism and British imperialism, and these guys did not think that, because they’re from here and they understood that that’s not the way this part of the world works, that this is not a region that just sits back and lets you change things in that way.
AMIT: On a somewhat related note, most of your recent journalistic work, including your opinion pieces for the New York Times, has aimed to re-contextualize the perception of Israel. How hard is it to shift the conversation about Israel? Do you feel like you’re just preaching to the choir, or people will really take it in and say, ‘Oh, I haven’t thought about it in this way.’?
MF: It’s hard to know. I hope that there are still people reading with an open mind, and I know that there are some. It’s certainly true that people kind of have an opinion, and they’ll just consume information that’s consistent with those opinions. There are a lot of sane people out there, and they’re not well served by much of what they get in the media these days. It’s worthwhile to put out information that makes sane people feel better about being sane, and maybe helps them not be dragged into very extreme positions on the left or on the right. There’s not that many places doing that, and if those people are interested in a realistic take on the country and in actually grappling with the reality of the country, they can read my books or read my articles. My goal is to explain the country.
AMIT: How do you think the spies would feel about modern-day Israel?
MF: The only one I could really ask is Isaac, although I have stuff that Gamliel and Yakuba wrote at the end of their lives. I think that they thought the country was a miracle. They were kids, basically street kids in some ways—certainly that’s true of Isaac and Yakuba—from the fringes of a minority community inside the Islamic world, and they lived to see the birth of a sovereign Jewish state in which they were citizens and they were at the center of events. They had children who spoke Hebrew as their mother tongue, something that we take for granted now, but when you think about it, it’s sort of mind-blowing.
Isaac lives in Bat Yam, and he looks out his window and there’s a country, a Jewish country, that he helped to create. I spoke to him about it, and he said several times that he just feels incredibly blessed to have been given the opportunity to play a role in creating the state. And when you remember how hard it was for him and all the kind of crazy stuff he had to go through, it’s an amazing statement, but he meant it 100%. They have the perspective, which some of us don’t, of having been born without the State of Israel. They remember when it wasn’t there, and they remember what the state of the Jews was without this country.
Although I’m sure that they have a lot of criticism of it now, in Beirut in 1948, when they were 22 years old, had someone come to them and said, ‘Okay, listen, this is what Tel Aviv looks like in 2019; This is Jerusalem,’ I think that would have been beyond their wildest dreams.
Photo Credit: Courtesy the Palmach Archives
