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Reviewed by:
  • Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948
  • Joel Streicker
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 [End Page 196] 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 [End Page 197] 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...

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